On Rove & Why Everybody's Wrong

Karl Rove is a smart guy who has a gift for pissing everybody off. For a college dropout, he's incredibly knowledgeable about political history (he often rhapsodizes about the presidential election of 1896 and President McKinley's political strategist, Mark Hannah, for example.)

On the other hand, he pretends to be something that he's not, notably a conservative. Rove is a ward-heeler. An awfully bright one, but a ward-heeler nonetheless. His job was to get his guy elected, not to be an ideological mandarin. Of course, Karl would have you believe differently, hence the subtitle of his memoir, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight

To be fair, there much in the book besides its title to arouse furious hatred in almost every living person. He insists on relentlessly lying about history, despite the fact that he's not very good at it. That's what makes the audiobook of Courage and Consequence such a treasure; you can actually hear the man's utter and total lack of shame. It's a stunning, if highly informative look into the inner darkness of the human condition. His book is almost a modern equivalent of the Reichstag fire.

As a fiscal and foreign policy conservative, I was a pretty lonely guy attacking the Bush White House in 2004. There were several instances where I predicted America's current economic situation, based solely on Bush's spending. Remember, Barack Obama hadn't even been elected to the Senate then. My longtime readers will remember those tirades and some of the rather pointed responses I received from Republicans at the time.

Rove was as responsible as anyone when it came to things like Medicare Part D and doubling the budget of the Department of Education. No one was more committed to selling the wrongheaded 2003 tax cut than Karl. But the overwhelming majority of Republicans were waiting in line to kiss his ass as the res of them were fitting him for a cape. I was pretty vocal about these things in '04, and I became much more so in '05 and '06.

That's why I find the Tea Party vitriol toward Rove these days so incredibly hilarious.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, this effort comes as an increasing number of conservatives—from Rush to Palin to scores of activists and high-level veterans of the Reagan Revolution—view Rove as part of the GOP’s unfortunate recent past. Indeed, they are even beginning to conclude that the oft-repeated belief that Rove is the savior of the GOP may be one of the biggest political hoaxes in American political history. At best, the man President Bush called “Turdblossom” has had a decidedly mixed record on the national level—losing the popular vote in 2000; barely beating a liberal aristocrat from Massachusetts in 2004; and, with the aid of Gillespie, presiding over the loss of both houses of Congress in 2006, and the White House in 2008. Rove and his crew, one influential conservative put it later, “left a smoking hole where the Republican Party once stood.”

“We screwed up,” says party Chairman Michael Steele. Conservatives were “bamboozled,” says former Texas GOP Chairman Tom Pauken. “Betrayed” and “hijacked,” says veteran conservative activist Richard Viguerie. The administration was a conservative “impostor,” writes commentator Bruce Bartlett. Bush operatives “were afraid of ideas,” Newt Gingrich charges. “Tokyo Rove” was a recent entry on Michelle Malkin’s website.

All of those people are lying, stupid or both. And I'm sure that if you did a Google search on all of them in relation to Rove, you'd be surprised by what they were saying at the time about Bush and Rove. None of them - Gingrich in particular - are conservatives. They're frauds and electioneering assholes. Their disloyalty shocks even me, and I pride myself in knowing exactly how swinish most politicos and bloggers actually are.

Let's look at the facts for a second. The historical metrics of peace and prosperity dictated that Bush should have been destroyed by Al Gore in 2000. Bush won because of Gore's schizophrenic campaign and Bill Clinton's penis. Regardless of the popular vote, it was a remarkable defiance of history. Karl Rove had a lot to do with that.

That John Kerry was the worst candidate on earth is immaterial. By the summer of 2004, it was evident to anyone who was paying attention what a disaster the Bush presidency was turning out to be. 9/11 hadn't been avenged, Iraq had already gone south, and the administration was throwing away money like it was on fucking fire. From a historical perspective, Bush should have had his ass kicked by pretty much anyone. The fact that he only barely beat "a liberal aristocrat from Massachusetts" doesn't change the fact that he did beat him and it doesn't erase the memory of pituitary retards like Michael Steele, Richard Viguerie, Newt Gingrich and Michele Malkin celebrating the fact that he did.

Matt Latimer, a Bush-in-exile flack and a Daily Beast columnist goes even further into depraved dishonesty.

As an adviser and gadfly, Rove served a useful purpose. That changed after he was named deputy chief of staff in early 2005 and tried to assume absolute control of, well, practically everything. Once his portfolio was extended from political strategy to policy oversight to personnel, hundreds, if not thousands, of people in the administration in some way reported to him. The results were notorious: the botched Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court (when even conservatives abandoned the administration); the abrupt abandonment of Social Security reform (which was supposed to have been the centerpiece of Bush’s second term), and the failure to get a single major piece of conservative legislation through the Republican-led Congress.

It should be remembered that Latimer began his tenure in the administration by writing some of some of the silliest things that Donald Rumsfeld ever said about Iraq and left the Pentagon only after Rummy was thrown out on his ass.

More importantly, he ignores the slightly important fact that most disastrous decisions of the Bush administration were made in the first term, not the second. It was the combination of the tax cuts, the wars and the frivolous social spending that doomed Bush. Did Rove have a lot to do with all three? Yes, but they are all what got the President reelected when he shouldn't have been. Mr. Latimer makes it sound as though Bush turned over the keys to his deputy chief of staff in the second term, which is scary in and of itself and says much more about Bush than it does Rove.

No, what the the Tea Party "conservatives" have taken exception to is the fact that Rove is a political professional in an age where political professionals aren't all that popular.

This is about Christine O'Donnell, who the Tea Party loves in spite of the fact that she's truly crazy and more than a little stupid - or worse, because she's those things. Moronic bloggers like Malkin and Dan Riehl can be expected to fall head over heels in love with a cute girls with mental problems, but professionals who want to form a governing majority can't.

Rove was right when he said that the Tea Party threw away a perfectly good GOP Senate majority when it elected O'Donnell. All you need to do is look at the math, which neither Republicans or Tea Partiers are very good at.

If nothing else, at least Karl Rove was honest enough to make his criticisms of people like O'Donnell in real time, which his current critics weren't. No one that Latimer quotes in his repugnant little article -including Latimer himself - did that when Rove was running the show. They were the first ones on the Rove gravy train and the last ones off.

Six years ago, I thought it was almost impossible for humanity to produce a more tawdry, dishonest hack than Karl Rove. But the Tea Party continues to prove me wrong.

The real tragedy is that I know something that I think Rove does, too: When the Tea Party inevitably disintegrates, Karl Rove is going to be the only person left standing to pick up the pieces. And that, more than anything, is why Republicanism is fucking doomed.