Numbers like Mark Nickolas discovered are why whenever I hear the term “liberal biased media” these days, I get another white hair. They prove the media’s not liberal, or ideological, or even sensible.

They are merely deliberately stupid, arrogantly untruthful, gluttonous, sycophantic greedheads who have the interests of a fight promoter and the morals of a gulag commandant.

For the numbers show that even compared to Karl Rove and parties with an ideological bias, the media is harsher in its estimate of Obama’s appeal and abilities: That the polls of Zogby and the like compile to show Obama 127 electoral votes ahead, Rove at 77 ahead, the Cook Political Report at 66 ahead – and all of these are far larger than the most preferenntial media outlet, CNN, which has Obama at only 32 ahead.

Most channels and print media figures hover around 28 by Nickolas’ discovery; the Washington Post even goes so far with poll gymnatics to put McCain ahead by 6 EV.

The media is, for the time, wrong. The professionals, after all, are getting far different numbers than the ones that illustrate the campaigns as a tooth-and-nail death match that could swing either way (so stay tuned!).

But the media tells people what’s true and what they should feel about it. People react accordingly. And so the question becomes how long before the self-fulfilling prophecy of a tight race is born out, and the media – as they did with Iraq – coaxes the public to embrace the disaster they’ve dreamt up.

Oil hit $144 a barrel today, making good on a threat reportedly issued by Osama bin Ladin back in the good old days. Back then, of course, it was some over-inflated bogeyman intended to represent the extremity of evil he was capable of.

Now, we call it, “the results of a short-sighted energy policy.”

”If bin Laden takes over and becomes king of Saudi Arabia, he’d turn off the tap,” said Roger Diwan, a managing director of the Petroleum Finance Company, a consulting firm in Washington. ”He said at one point that he wants oil to be $144 a barrel” — about six times what it sells for now.

Gasp. The horror. The article from October, 2001 went on to predict things would be stable, but one never knows what Middle East instability might lead to. Best not rock the boat!

…Most Western politicians and oil industry experts say they believe assurances from the Middle East that oil supplies will stay stable as the American-led attacks on terrorist groups continue. But in such a profoundly changed world, they concede, anything is possible. [Ed. Note: Emphasis mine.]

“Anything,” such as, I don’t know, an enormous war in the Middle East that cost more than Vietnam from ’65 to ’73 and a soaring debt devaluing the currency oil is valued in.

Do not be fooled, dear reader – your pump-side woes are not due to lack of supply! If we drill in ANWR, offshore and Dinosaur National Park, we’ll still only affect the oil market marginally and get a touch more crude out of the bargain. And the people selling your local Gas-O their petrol have plenty of crude. Supply is not the problem behind the prices.

The problem is two-fold. One part is explained easily enough: Nations with booming industrial growth – remember, all those jobs we shipped overseas? – like India and China are willing and able to out-buy us.

Second is also clear, but a bitter pill for many proud Americans to swallow: Yes, the corporations are screwing you on the price.

Soaring oil prices lifted Chevron Corp.’s annual profit to $18.7 billion in 2007, the fourth consecutive year that the San Ramon company made record amounts of money.

Exxon Mobil, the country’s largest oil company, reported on Friday that its 2007 profit hit $40.6 billion, a 3 percent increase from 2006, while sales passed $404 billion. No American business has ever scored a higher profit. [Ed. Note: Again, emphasis me.]

So does this mean Osama won? Did he use some strange ray to influence the oil companies to raise the prices, or secretly connive with the Chinese to take all the blue-collar jobs and use the money they generated to buy up American debt?

No, actually, that was America that did it to itself.

On the latter point, just about everybody in the political establishment this side of John Edwards beats the “free trade” drum. And on the former, I’m sorry, but you elect an oil man and his Vice-oil man, and you’ll get a government by and for oil men. It’s a simple matter of who you’re accountable to, and after spending his life surrounded by, supported by, loved by people in the oil and oil-related industry, I doubt the guy’s going to do other than pour money into their pockets.

I would love to be proved to the contrary, but nothing in our energy and fiscal policy I’ve found will do that.

So yet another of bin Ladin’s fiery doomsaying has befallen us thanks to our democratic will – or duping, depending on your outlook on the American on the whole. We chalk that up along with being bogged down in Afghanistan and unable to solve a single major foreign policy crisis – North Korea, Darfur, Iraq, Palestine – since 9/11.

Compared to Osama’s fatwas, Karl Rove and his charts just don’t even rate.

Karl Rove’s departure from the White House will likely have little effect on the policies of the Bush Administration, but its significance as a hallmark in the political soul of the nation is great. It gives us an occasion to reflect on what Rove and the adherents of his political strategies have contributed to how politics are conducted. And it lends itself to inspire us to wonder if the impact he made on that conduct is now rippling to an end.

Americans of any political stripe should hope so. This may sound like a profoundly partisan statement – a sneer at a man who has been a loyal streetfighter for the victory of the Conservative movement. In fact, as a political scientist, I tip my hat to Rove’s record of triumph. But as a citizen who believes in the virtue of both sides of America’s political discourse, I see Rove’s strategies as an insidious toxin in our political system – a chemical WMD that has reliably both won the field and poisoned it. For Rove’s victories were – like many of the policies they then allowed – pyrrhic victories. The reason for this is the principle objective of his strategy: relentless focus on wedge issues.

Wedge issues are issues that divide Americans into two distinct camps. It’s easiest to define what a wedge issue is by defining what it is not.

A “non-wedge” issue would be issues that most Americans differ on how to go about achieving success, but not whether such things should exist at all. The tax code is one issue; national defense is another. By contrast, wedge issues are the issues that divide sharply on whether they should exist or not, and usually have profound emotional associations: abortion, gay marriage, and “right to life” for instance. In all of Rove’s recent campaigns, from 1996 to 2006, he has always relied chiefly on negative statements about opponents coupled with pushing wedge issues into the media agenda.

In doing so, his wedge issues have chiseled away at the political bridge in American political dialogue and cut a Republican Party “base” that leaves many conservatives feeling like they’re in the dust. The advantage of defining a campaign with the emotionally-fierce wedge issues is that it riles up a zealous “base”. This base provides a dependable cadre of voters that will always mobilize in strong numbers for Republicans because of the side of the “wedge” they are on. Meanwhile, swing voters are influenced by the relentless negativity, usually to vote on the basis of a candidate’s sullied character, rather than on their opponent’s policy beneifts – or to not vote at all out of mutual disgust. Rove did not so much as get people to vote /for/ his candidate on issues like national defense as /against/ the other candidate.

The result? Apathy and disappointment among swing voters, and a base that is viciously active and powerfully organized around those wedge issues. As a result of the latter, Republicans – and, even, to the extent that vocal minorities influence the dialogue and thus the agenda – have to pander to the extreme on those wedge issues. That the wedge issues are not the “Reagan Republican” or “Goldwater Republican” priorities of the “western” Republican party, driven by a love of individualism and small government, but the priorities of the “southern” Republican, moralistic and dependent on government enforcement of values, leaves many Republicans stuck in the mud, and the “big tent” with them. Now issues that normally would not unite Republicans of the Goldwater stripe with those of Jerry Falwell’s – such as gays in the military and stem-cell research – embody the Republican base that all GOP candidates must cater to in order to win.

Just as this forces wedge issues to typify the Republican base, it vilifies it. Democrats who otherwise would and have met across the aisle on non-wedge issues are forced into positions of staunch opposition to their GOP counterparts. The result is a divided electorate – one that is increasingly suspicious of the other side even though cooperation is not only necessary, but entirely possible and comfortable. If the caustic, paranoid rhetoric in partisan political commentary that has risen since the mid-90s is not evidence of this enough, looking at the electoral results in Rove’s races shows that the victories he wins are always close calls, and always carried due to a staunch socially conservative base. In short, the wedges have driven us apart, demolishing consensus and leaving it with a feeling of angry void and impending collision.

This is not all Rove’s mantle to bear, but with his record of triumph and ruthlessness in achieving it, he has been its standard bearer. He has helped create an America that votes against, not for; mobilizes to react, not act; distrusts rather than hopes. To follow his example was to be successful; to attempt to resist it was to be seen as outdated or, at best, anomalous. Now that he is gone, will his adherents and their strategies leave with him?

No. Already Clinton and her campaign’s captain, Terry McAuliffe, have taken reflexive negativity to a blitzkrieg level. They mechanically follow Rove’s playbook, tossing the wry positive politics of the last milennium’s final decade out the window in favor of a cynical, manipulative means of sure success. What Rove matured from mere tactics into a full-fledged religion, candidates like Clinton, Edwards and Romney are waging holy war with.

Now America is faced with a dilemma that will not be solved with the departure of one man or the change of nameplates in the White House – it is a wear in the fabric of the nation’s soul. The aberration that was Rove’s strategy has become the rule. And if due censure is not stuck on those who fight and win by it, that rule may one day be synonymous with American politics.