So let me set the background, here. Crossroads GPS is a 501(c)(4) associated with American Crossroads (a 527 advocacy group which has Karl Rove advising it; this will be important later), and it put out this ad on Massachusetts Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren (who is running, of course, against Republican Senator Scott Brown). Said ad helpfully points out that Warren was up to her eyeballs assisting the 2008 TARP bailout – yes, the same bailout that she’s now trying to be a class warrior against:

Summation of the video: Elizabeth Warren talks a good game, but she was involved in TARP, in a supervisory role – so if people don’t like the way that TARP unfolded, blame her. The ad alludes to the way that Warren sucked up to the Chamber of Commerce in order to try to get support to be made the formal head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Moving away from the ad: Warren also tried that with the 2010 crop of freshmen House Republicans, with about the same amount of success. On the other hand, Warren did manage to put into place the man who would eventually succeed her as chief CFPB bureaucrat… one Raj Date, former executive at Capital One and Deutsche Bank. All in all, this is all pretty standard, somewhat interchangeable Washington insider (Democratic edition) stuff from Warren. Nothing special, alas.

Now, at this point somebody’s going to complain that Warren was critical of the TARP program when she was (honestly, not very effectively) overseeing it. To which the only necessary response is a shrug and the observation that Lefty radicals typically break down into two types: those who believe that the system is damaged, and needs repair; and those who believe that the system is broken, and needs replacement. Elizabeth Warren was fine when she was timidly taking the first position on TARP; but now that she’s brassily taking the second… well, it’s not Crossroads GPS’s fault that the woman voluntarily became part of the System and now wants to pretend that she wasn’t. Revolution isn’t a part-time business, Elizabeth.

Anyway, all of this apparently upset Ms. Warren in that special way that is reserved for academic lefties who suddenly discover that the real world actually scores your performance, not your intentions – so she lashed back out at Karl Rove. No, not because Karl Rove’s a standard, if somewhat dated, devil figure among the American academic left… well, not just because of that. It’s also because Elizabeth Warren apparently thinks that “Karl Rove was part of the inner circle when President Bush pushed for TARP bailouts.”

” Inner circle.” Oh, my. In point of fact, by the time that the financial crisis/TARP bailouts rolled around – which is to say, the late summer of 2008 – Karl Rove had been out of the Bush administration for over a year and was acting as a political commentator. In fact, I have been looking around for a couple of days, and I am not finding any real indication that Karl Rove was involved in the TARP bailout at all – or, at least, not involved from the inside. Which is of course not something that you can say about Warren.

Now, I get that Elizabeth Warren would very much like people to hear the word ‘TARP’ and not immediately associate it with her drawing a six figure salary off of… well, I’m sure that she did something while she was there, although I couldn’t begin to tell you what it was. And I’m equally sure that Warren would like the radicals sullenly buzzing around her cronies in the Democratic Establishment to become happy little worker bees for her campaign – and never mind that the woman’s annual salary lately easily puts her in 1% territory. So I understand the need to distance Elizabeth Warren v. 2011 from Elizabeth Warren v. 2008.

But… can we have a little basic accuracy, here? Not checking to see when Karl Rove resigned from the White House is not quite at Martha Coakley-levels of basic campaign idiocy, but you can see her house from there.

Moe Lane (crosspost)