Newsweek: Rove at War (long commentary)

[UpInArms]

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8600327/site/newsweek/print/1/displaymode/1098/

July 25 issue - Karl Rove is a hunter. His favorite quarry in Texas is quail; in Washington, it's foes of George W. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rove was focused intently, with a touch of anger, on his prey. It was Monday, July 7, 2003, the day after Joe Wilson, a veteran diplomat, had launched a damaging public assault on a central administration rationale for the war in Iraq: that Saddam Hussein had been trying to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. In a New York Times op-ed piece and a companion appearance on "Meet the Press," Wilson said he had been dispatched to the African country in 2002 by the CIA, at the behest of Cheney, to check out the yellowcake claim—and had found it flimsy at best.

<snip>

In the World According to Karl Rove, you take the offensive, and stay there. You create a narrative that glosses over complex, mitigating facts to divide the world into friends and enemies, light and darkness, good and bad, Bush versus Saddam. You are loyal to a fault to your friends, merciless to your enemies. You keep your candidate's public rhetoric sunny and uplifting, finding others to do the attacking. You study the details, and learn more about your foes than they know about themselves. You use the jujitsu of media flow to flip the energy of your enemies against them. The Boss never discusses political mechanics in public. But in fact everything is political—and everyone is fair game.

<snip>

It's unlikely that any White House officials considered that they were doing anything illegal in going after Joe Wilson. Indeed, the line between national security and politics had long since been all but erased by the Bush administration. In the months after 9/11, the Republican National Committee, a part of Rove's empire, had sent out a fund-raising letter that showed the president aboard Air Force One in the hours after the attack. Democrats howled, but that was the Bush Rove was selling in the re-election campaign: commander in chief. Now Wilson was getting in the way of that glorious story, essentially accusing the administration of having blundered or lied the country into war.

<snip>

So would Richard Nixon, Rove's first political hero. For boys of a certain place and time—including the Salt Lake City of the 1950s and '60s—Nixon was a haunted hero, a permanently embattled, commie-fighting Republican who had no use for weak-kneed swells and who stood for decency and Main Street values. As a boy, Rove—like many another conservative kid of the baby boom—was initially drawn toward politics by Nixon, and by the apocalyptic, anti-communist message of the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover. WAKE UP, AMERICA! proclaimed a sign above Rove's boyhood bed.

...more...

[opihimoimoi]

1. The Attention Whore of the Decade.....the Power Whore complete

with Power Groupies....the poor guy has a syndrome of sorts....might be the Short one...

[bluestateboomer]

2. The waning days of the empire.........

It is very symptomatic of the demise of the United States Of America that people involved in the governing of the country are only interested in the politics of retaining power. Nowhere do we see these people attempt actions which might benefit people. It is always about maintaining their political advantage. I'm probably being naive in believing people who go into government should do so for the benefit of the people, but the naked power grabbing group we have in Washington can only lead us into the ash heap of history, Karl rove is their archetype.:puke: