Not surprisingly, you can’t trust Karl Rove to use quotations in an honest manner. Here’s a passage from his latest Wall Street Journal column:

On health care, Mr. Obama’s election ads decried “government-run health care” as “extreme,” saying it would lead to “higher costs.” Now he is promoting a plan that would result in a de facto government-run health-care system. Even the Washington Post questions it, saying, “It is difficult to imagine . . . benefits from a government-run system.”

Actually, the passage from the Post editorial in question, while sympathetic to Rove’s argument, was addressing a more specific point about whether a public option can produce benefits while competing fairly with private plans:

The argument for a public plan is that, without the need to extensively market itself or make a profit, it would do a better job of providing good health care at a reasonable cost, setting an important benchmark against which private insurers would be forced to compete. Even in a system where insurers are required to take all applicants, public plan advocates argue, incentives will remain for private plans to discourage the less healthy from signing up; a public plan is a necessary backstop. Moreover, if the playing field is level, public plan advocates argue, private insurers — and those who extol the virtues of a competitive marketplace — should have nothing to fear.

We disagree. It is difficult to imagine a truly level playing field that would simultaneously produce benefits from a government-run system. While prescription drugs are not a perfect comparison, the experience of competing plans in the Medicare prescription drug arena suggests that a government-run option is not essential to energize a competitive system that has turned out to cost less than expected.

Rove truncates the quote to support his desired conclusion. The irony is that the Post, like Rove, opposes a public plan option in health care reform. He doesn’t need to distort their point in order to support his argument, but he does it anyway. It’s just one of many distortions on health care and other issues in the short history of his WSJ column.