I knew it!

Back in 2003, I was watching one of the Democratic debates with two friends, fellow Kucinich supporters. As we watched Kerry say absolutely nothing in the most awkward way possible, I said to them "I'll bet Dick and Karl are watching this and saying 'Kerry--he's the one we want to run against.'"

And on this blog in November 2005 I wrote "I have little doubt that John Kerry was Karl Rove's choice to be aWol's 'opponent'..."

Well, Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution quotes this passage from a recent LA Times article:

In the run-up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when it was not yet clear who Bush's opponent would be that November, Rove and his aides had begun to fear that their most dangerous foe would be then-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina...

But instead of attacking Edwards, Rove's team opened fire at Kerry.

Their thinking went like this, [Rove lieutenant Matthew] Dowd explained [after the election]: Democrats, in a knee-jerk reaction to GOP attacks, would rally around Kerry, whom Rove considered a comparatively weak opponent, and make him the party's nominee. Thus Bush would be spared from confronting Edwards, the candidate Republican strategists actually feared most...

"Whomever we attacked was going to be emboldened in Democratic primary voters' minds...So we started attacking John Kerry a lot in the end of January because we were very worried about John Edwards," Dowd said. "And we knew that if we focused on John Kerry, Democratic primary voters would sort of coalesce" around Kerry.

"It wasn't like we could tag [eliminate] somebody. Whomever we attacked was going to be helped," he said.

You just can't be too cynical these days. And I'll bet those attacks on Kerry were only a tiny part of Rove & Co.'s efforts to manipulate the Democratic (sic) primary process, which I suspect included the media manipulation of Howard Dean's image and who-knows-what shenanigans in those church basements that "earned" Kerry his victory in the Iowa caucuses.

BTW, the LA Times article focused on Rove's "parting shots" against Hillary Clinton, suggesting that Rove made those comments in the hope that Democrats would rally around Hillary to their eventual doom.

You can check back here as often as you like for defenses of Hillary--you won't find any.