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Rahm Emanuel recently declared on "Face the Nation" that Rush Limbaugh is "the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party."

This is a useful stance for the Obama administration. As David Frum puts it: "With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence -- exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix" to the GOP.

But, in truth, Rush is just a massive shiny object that distracts our attention from the real intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party, Karl Rove.

At the same time Emanuel was on CBS anointing Limbaugh top dog, over on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" Rove was demonstrating why he is the real force and the real danger in the wounded-but-still-destructive GOP.

For starters, there is the fact that he was even on the show. "This Week" would never have Rush on as a panelist, but there was Rove, amiably chatting about the week's events with Stan Greenberg, Katrina vanden Heuvel and George Will.

Then there is Rove's decidedly anti-Limbaughian approach, whereby he calmly, lucidly, and shamelessly attempts to whitewash the past and rewrite history. A history he was front and center in making.

There he was, the picture of reasonableness, trying to eviscerate Obama's proposals to get us out of the economic mess -- without ever once acknowledging that he was one of the prime architects of the mess. (Don't forget that, according to Paul O'Neill, back in 2002, when Bush was having second thoughts about a fresh round of tax cuts for the wealthy -- wondering "Didn't we already give them a break?" -- Rove urged him to "stick to principle.")

Having Karl Rove on to pontificate about the economy is like having Bernie Madoff on to offer advice about investing.

What's next? Inviting Chris Brown on to tsk-tsk about the dangers of domestic violence? Nadya Suleman to lecture about the need for family planning? Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis to hold forth on corporate responsibility?

Rove has studied his Orwell and understands that "who controls the past, controls the future."

That's why we saw Rove lambasting Obama's budget deficit, conveniently skipping over the nearly $1.6 trillion added to the deficit by the administration he helped guide. Not one word about the role the massive tax cuts for the rich he championed played in creating the current economic crisis. Not a peep about the deregulation of Wall Street he held so dear.

Indeed, he tried to lay the Bush administration's fiscal legacy at the feet of "two wars, 9/11, and a recession handed to us by the previous administration."

Notice the chutzpah of sidestepping any accountability for the last eight years. And acting as if the Iraq war just happened -- and wasn't one of the prime goals of the man he was credited with being the brains of. In the Rovian universe, there is no such thing as cause and effect.

To set things right, we have to understand how they went so wrong. And that's hard to do when the truth is under assault, and the past brazenly revised.

During the panel discussion on "This Week," Stephanopoulos ran a clip package from CPAC that showed Limbaugh and others repeating tired claims about Obama and "socialism." Rove jumped at the opportunity, happy to brand this over-the-top rhetoric "red meat for the hardcore Republican conservatives," the better to separate himself from the snarling pack and allow his historical revisionism to work its black magic in the background.

Karl Rove is too smart to say he wants Obama to fail. But if Obama's recovery plan doesn't work -- and, if it doesn't, it'll be because it wasn't big and bold enough -- Rove and the gang have a highly polished narrative at the ready, one that succeeds at disconnecting what Obama had to do to stimulate to economy with what happened before he took office.

Big government failed, according to this narrative. Let's bring back tax cuts and deregulation.

Rove is like Topher Brink, the amoral programmer on Fox's "Dollhouse" whose job is to erase the memories from the minds of his charges -- and implant new ones.

Republicans have deservedly lost control of the government. And given the bankruptcy of their ideas for addressing the crisis we face, they realize their only chance to return to power is to try to change reality.

That's what makes Rove so dangerous -- his unbending commitment to derailing our understanding of how we've gotten to where we are.

Recent Political Commentary

Obama Economic Team's Flawed Cosmology:
Still Believing Universe Revolves around Banks
Arianna Huffington

A series of recent meetings with members of Barack Obama's economic team leading to a spirited back-and-forth that made me feel like I was back at Cambridge, debating the smartest kid in the class), left me with a pair of indelible impressions:

First, these are all good people, many of them brilliant, working incredibly hard with the best of intentions to solve the country's financial crisis.

Second, they are operating on the basis of an outdated cosmology that places banks at the center of the economic universe.

My Wish List
Andy Rooney

In an idle moment, trying to come up with an idea, Humorist & Commentator Andy Rooney decided to make a list of things he should do but has not.

I Would Rather Stay Home & Not Travel
Andy Rooney

Andy Rooney would like to mount a campaign once again to encourage people not to go anywhere as he was looking at all the ads in newspapers and magazines for places to go. Sometimes, travel is quite unpleasant.

I'm Hedging Today
Andy Rooney

Andy Rooney sees the phrase "hedge fund" in the newspaper every day now and does not really know what a "hedge fund" is. A hedge fund has something to do with money. He was surprised to find "hedge fund" in one of only six dictionaries, but then read the definition.

Greening My House
Arianna Huffington

Ever since I saw the Green light, thanks to my friend Laurie David, and traded in my gas-guzzling SUV, I've tried my best to up my eco-awareness.

On the Road to Buenos Aires
Even the United States can Manage Itself into Irrelevance
Chris Thomas

America has been the greatest of all nations for a long time. We have been great for so long that we believe it is part of the natural order of the universe for us to be who we are. But in reality, we managed our way to where we are now. We decided to create the Constitution. We decided to have an open culture. We decided to have free trade and open markets. The sum total of these decisions created this great human enterprise.

But we should not forget, especially at a crucial juncture like this, that with enough bad decisions and enough political incompetence, we can indeed manage ourselves into decline.

Even we can become Argentina.

Larry Summers: Brilliant Mind, Toxic Ideas
by Arianna Huffington

According to most commentators, the president's press conference went a long way toward taking the spotlight off the roiling anger over AIG, bonuses and Wall Street abuses -- and putting it back where the president wants it: on the imperative need to pass his budget.

But the best laid plans of our remarkable president may be laid to waste by a bank rescue plan that is the product of exhausted ideas put together by men far too beholden to Wall Street.

To understand why a man as brilliant and accomplished as Summers can be so wrong about what to do with the banks and Wall Street, it would be useful to turn to "The Innovator's Dilemma," by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen.

What if Jon Stewart, Instead of John King,
Interviewed Dick Cheney
Arianna Huffington

Jon Stewart's Jim Cramer interview was a pivotal moment -- not just for Stewart, Cramer and CNBC, but also for journalism. Stewart kept popping into my head as I watched John King interview Dick Cheney three days later.

King opened the interview by showing clips of President Obama saying that his administration had "inherited an economic crisis" and "inherited a big mess." He then asked Cheney: "Did you leave him a mess?"

"I don't think you can blame the Bush administration for the creation of those circumstances," responded Cheney. "It's a global financial problem. . . . So I think the notion that you can just sort of throw it off on the prior administration, that's interesting rhetoric but I don't think anybody really cares a lot about that."

Tim Geithner, CNBC &
The Second Coming of Known Unknowns
Arianna Huffington on Tim Geithner, Economic Crisis & Obama Budget

Besides being awash in toxic paper, credit default swaps, and collateralized debt obligations, we seem to be drowning in unknowns.

Only, I get the sense that there are fewer unknowns than we're being told. Instead, we're greeted with a wall of manufactured complexity by the people whose job it is to make known unknowns into known knowns.

The Rush and Rahm Show
Chris Thomas

This past week, while iconic American enterprises like GE and Berkshire came under substantial market pressure, our "Leadership" in Washington became preoccupied with talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Rahm Emmanuel (left), a brilliant partisan tactician, and Clinton retreads Paul Begala and James Carville formulated a plan to make Limbaugh the face of the GOP.

After all, its much more fun than wondering why the Credit Default Swap market is treating GE like Citibank or weather we can spend ourselves out of a recession that we got into by ... well ... spending too much. Rush is much more fun to listen to than Jeff Immelt anyway.

The Credit Card Crisis: The Next Economic Domino

Hot on the heels of the banking crisis, the employment crisis and the mortgage-foreclosure crisis, the country is on the verge of experiencing a credit-card crisis.

Time to Treat American Homeowners as Well as Wall Street Bankers
Arianna Huffington

"The banks are too big to fail" has been the mantra we've been hearing since September. But when you consider the millions of American homeowners facing foreclosure, aren't they also too big to be allowed to fail? So why hasn't the foreclosure crisis gotten the attention it deserves? A combination of perverse priorities and flawed thinking.

Bipartisanship vs What's Best for America:
President Obama Needs to Choose

The first question at President Obama's primetime press conference should have been: "Mr. President, what is your priority -- bipartisanship or what is best for America? And when the two are in conflict, which are you going to choose?

Although the answer should be obvious, the president's actions over the last couple of weeks have left many wondering.

America's Best Bet: Municipal Redemption Fund (MuRF)
Stopping Foreclosures & Protecting Investors

An original economic stimulus plan developed by a real estate agent in New Jersey that is currently in the hands of the House of Representatives and every Senator in Washington D.C. The Federal Government purchases NO interest in any private property and may take NO assignment of any lien under this plan. This plan is strictly a transparent "time-out" and "reset" of the national tax lien industry for the sake of stopping foreclosures while simultaneously protecting investors by shoring up the absolute bedrock of the capitalist economy which emanates directly from real property values and the taxes thereon.

Stimulus Package: If You Jump Halfway Across a Chasm, You Fall Into the Abyss
Arianna Huffington

Here's a thought: If we are going to spend $2 trillion trying to deal with the economic crisis, shouldn't we do it right? The price of getting it wrong is, after all, extremely high.

John Thain, Poster Child for Era of Irresponsibility
Arianna Huffington

There is plenty of debate about what President Obama's stimulus bill should look like -- as well there should be, given all that is at stake. But there is a growing consensus that the guiding principle in that debate should be Obama's call for a "new era of responsibility."

Helping fuel that consensus is the saga of the rise and fall of former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, the poster child for the Era of Irresponsibility. The condemnation of his behavior is completely bipartisan.

Barack Obama Sober Sermon on the Steps
Arianna Huffington

The new president and the throng that turned out to cheer him and hear him on Inauguration Day were on two very different missions.

The crowd had come to celebrate. Obama had come to deliver a sober sermon.

Inaugural Address By President Barack Hussein Obama
President Obama's Inauguration Speech in text & video

President Barack Obama gives his inaugural address after taking the oath of office in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2009. The presidential inauguration is a tradition dating back to George Washington's 1789 inauguration. President Obama's Inauguration Speech in full in text & video.

Laissez-Faire Capitalism Should Be as Dead as Soviet Communism
Arianna Huffington

The collapse of Communism as a political system sounded the death knell for Marxism as an ideology. But while laissez-faire capitalism has been a monumental failure in practice, and soundly defeated at the polls, the ideology is still alive and kicking.

Does the Madoff Debacle Finally End the 'Who Could have Known' Era?
Arianna Huffington

An ambitious and risky undertaking carried out with hubris, and featuring the weeding out of anyone who raises alarms, little-to-no transparency, an oversight system in which no central authority is accountable, and the deliberate manufacturing of ambiguity and complexity so that when it all falls to pieces, the excuse who could have known can be used

Rewarding Those Who Got It Right
Arianna Huffington

Among its myriad failings, the Bush administration has repeatedly gotten it wrong when it comes to getting it right.

Over the last eight years, there has consistently been no penalty for those who have gotten things -- even the most important things -- wrong, and no reward for those who have gotten things right.

Call it Bush Darwinism: Survival of the Unfittest.

The Economic Meltdown Will Be Blogged
Politics Arianna Huffington

Losing your job -- or even fearing that you might -- can make you feel powerless. But at the same time you are looking for work -- or learning a new skill -- you can take up blogging. It doesn't require anyone's permission, there is no application process. You just need blogging software (some of the best is free) and the will to express yourself.

(Arianna Huffington's e-mail address is arianna@huffingtonpost.com.)

(c) 2009 Arianna Huffington. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.