Published on Thursday, October 1, 2009 by RebelReports

Bizarro World: Karl Rove Blasts Obama for 'Outsourcing Afghanistan'

Rove blasting anyone for outsourcing anything is like David Vitter lecturing the losers exiting a strip club about the evils of prostitution.

by Jeremy Scahill

Now this just simply could not be made up in that Frankenstein laboratory where the cuckoos on the right wing cook up their witches brew of batshit crazy allegations to levy against Barack Obama. There are scores upon scores of issues where Obama should be rightly taken to task for continuing Bush-era "war on terror" policies, preemptively immunizing torturers, refusing to fight for Single Payer health care, hiring a team of hawks and neoliberal crooks to manage foreign policy and the economy, among many many others. At the same time, there are racist astroturf loons that appear to have recently landed on earth from planet Fiction and are navigating their way through the country, speaking in tongues, led by snakeoil salesmen like Glenn Beck.

But the headline in today's Wall Street Journal Op-Ed by former senior White House advisor Karl Rove is in a category all its own: "Obama Can't Outsource Afghanistan." The article is ostensibly about how Obama is delegating decision making on everything from Afghanistan to the CIA/torture investigation to others:

Mr. Obama's hands-off approach to the war seems to fit his governing style. Over the past year, he outsourced writing the stimulus package to House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, washed his hands of Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to reinvestigate CIA interrogators, and hasn't offered a detailed health-care plan.

Um, excuse me Karl, how about outsourcing an entire war to politically connected war companies? Remember those eight years? While Rove may be using the term "outsource" in a general way, let's remember this fact: never, ever in US history have more government and military activities been outsourced to private corporations than they were the day Bush and Rove left 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Obama moved in. For Rove-or any Bush-era official-to have the audacity to blast anyone for outsourcing anything is like a bigger-scale version of Republican Senator David Vitter lecturing the losers exiting Scores "gentlemen's club" about the moral evils of prostitution.

The real article that should come below a headline "Obama Can't Outsource Afghanistan" would never be written by Rove. Such an article would denounce the actual scandal of Obama's continuation of the Bush-Cheney-Rove policy of radically outsourcing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to corporate criminals like Armor Group, DynCorp, Blackwater, KBR, Triple Canopy, Lockheed Martin and many, many others.

© 2009 Jeremy Scahill

Jeremy Scahill is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.