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Rove

With Sharp Reader open, I've been watching blog headlines roll by all day with references to Karl Rove's rough week. People who've been around Texas politics for a while aren't surprised to hear that Karl Rove plays dirty – what's surprising is that it's taken this long for the national press to pick up on it and actually dig in. If they dig a little deeper, I suspect they'll find a trove of newsworthy stuff. Meanwhile I wanted to blog something about Rove that wasn't redundant with other bloggers' rants, so I hopped over to Wikipedia and saw that the Karl Rove page is disputed. There's quite a bit of discussion in the item's back room. I noticed they'd removed an allegation that Rove was responsible for the CBS/National Guard forged memo; I once mentioned Rove's possible (probable?) role in that affair to Wikipedia leader Jimmy Wales, who thought it was a conspiracy theory. To me, though, it seemed to fit his modus operandi. Consider these excerpts from a Guardian article:

The aggressive tactics won the 22-year-old Rove a walk-on role in the Watergate saga that was consuming the nation. A report was published in the Washington Post on August 10, 1973, titled "[Republican party] Probes Official as Teacher of Tricks", gave an account, based on tape recordings, of how Rove and a colleague had been touring the country giving young Republicans political combat training, in which they recalled their feats of derring-do, such as Rove's Chicago heist at the Dixon headquarters.

At the time, Rove claimed the tape had been doctored to exclude a warning to the audience not to try to emulate any of his past misdeeds. Others present simply remember a caution not to get caught. The publicity forced the intervention of the Republican National Committee and its chairman, a former Texas congressman clinging on to his political career: George Herbert Walker Bush. After considering the case, Bush Sr took action. He drove Edgeworth out of the party on suspicion of having leaked the tapes, and hired Rove, bringing him to Washington.

...

In its last days, the 1994 campaign also turned nasty. Texan voters began receiving calls from "pollsters" asking questions such as: "Would you be more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if you knew her staff is dominated by lesbians?" In the business, it is called "push-polling" and Shipley has no doubt who was behind it."Rove has used this kind of dirty tricks in every campaign he's ever run."

The article also suggests that "Bush's brain" is about as powerful as his boss... maybe more so? What would a Bush presidency have been without Rove?

Maybe we'll find out.

jon posted this at 2:34 PM
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Comments

Perhaps what is hard to digest is that Dan Rather, one of the big three news anchormen, would sacrifice his career by knowingly presenting false evidence to sabotage the growing national awareness of Bush's military record. Why should we believe that Rather would sacrifice his career?

1. It was Dan Rather who proclaimed on Letterman a few years earlier:

"George Bush is the President. He makes the decisions, and, you know, it�s just one American, wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where. And he�ll make the call."

2. Rather's career was already over. His position was similar to the hockey player who commits a flagrant penalty with 2 seconds left in the game. Darn, he's going to have to spend 2 seconds in the penalty box.

None of us like to admit to ourselves that we have been fooled. That's why conspirators like Rove have such a high probability of success.

Posted by: HeresTomWithTheWeather | July 15, 2005 11:05 AM

Bah! You could suggest that the leaves were falling because it was autumn, and wales would call it a conspiricy theory -- that is unless you bring bags of leaves from around the country to confirm your claims

Posted by: NickLewis | July 20, 2005 3:26 AM