Karen Hughs on the Daily Show

[Xenu]

Karen Hughs--ghostwriter of A Charge to Keep and longtime Bush strategist--was just on the Daily Show, and really bothered me to no end. Yes, she's nice. Yes, she doesn't seem like a bad person. But when you find your best quality to be creating soundbytes that boil complex issues down into two sentences (and you don't seem at all aware of how utterly horrible and destructive that is), and when you insist on continuing to attempt to portray W as a down-home, regular kinda guy...ehh. She isn't Karl Rove, I know, but she *does* hide behind a facade of amicability, when clearly she has the potential to be just as vicious.

She also continually "talks down" the complexities of various issues; clearly, she has that home-spun thing down to a science. It reminded me of the way O'Reilly kept positioning his "Who's Looking Out for You?" as a positive book, while Franken's was endlessly negative. Hughs goes to great lengths to say that her book isn't an "attack" book, or a "gossip" book, UNLIKE Mr. Clark's.

She also does the "well, I believe that Democrats are good people" shtick that comes off as totally insincere when you have an attack dog like Rove calling the campaign shots, but what do I know.

Lastly, the Iraq war is spun thusly: the rest of the world hates Bush for the war because Bush challenged the world to do a Very Hard Thing. Wondrous! The world resents our bravery! Our visionary nature! They're just fucking jealous. Stewart doesn't challenge her much throughout the interview (I'd have loved for him to refer to "Charge" as a previous book of hers), but THAT comment clearly irks him.

[Patrick M]

http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1804399

[Bennett Cerf]

Then I heard that [on the campaign bus, Bush communications director] Karen Hughes accused me of lying. And so I called Karen and asked her why she was saying this, and she had this almost Orwellian rap that she laid on me about how things she'd heard -- that I watched her hear -- she in fact had never heard, and she'd never heard Bush use profanity ever. It was insane.

I've obviously been lied to a lot by campaign operatives, but the striking thing about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness.

They get carried away, consultants do, in the heat of the campaign, they're really invested in this. A lot of times they really like the candidate. That's all conventional. But on some level, you think, there's a hint of recognition that there is reality -- even if they don't recognize reality exists -- there is an objective truth. With Karen you didn't get that sense at all. A lot of people like her. A lot of people I know like her. I'm not one of them.

- Tucker Carlson

[krabapple]

Karen Hughs--ghostwriter of A Charge to Keep and longtime Bush strategist--was just on the Daily Show, and really bothered me to no end. Yes, she's nice. Yes, she doesn't seem like a bad person. But when you find your best quality to be creating soundbytes that boil complex issues down into two sentences (and you don't seem at all aware of how utterly horrible and destructive that is), and when you insist on continuing to attempt to portray W as a down-home, regular kinda guy...ehh. She isn't Karl Rove, I know, but she *does* hide behind a facade of amicability, when clearly she has the potential to be just as vicious.

I expect that like Rove, Cheney, Condi et al, one day she will burst open and the slimy tentacled thing that lives within her will come flopping out.