The Boston Globe has a short overview of the career of Karl Rove that is quite telling. What we learn is Rove has always been up to his pudgy ass in dirty tricks – and he always, always, always gets away with it.
Rove’s record has been consistent. Over 35 years, he has been a master of dirty tricks, divisiveness, innuendo, manipulation, character assassination, and roiling partisanship.
He started early. In 1970, when he was 19 and active as a college Republican — though he didn’t graduate from college — Rove pretended to volunteer for a Democratic candidate in Illinois, stole some campaign stationery, and used it to disrupt a campaign event. Later, in Texas, he gave testimony in court that was embarrassing to an opponent of one of Rove’s clients, even though it was not true…
Rove made his name by smearing a whole roster of Texas Democrats, from Jim Hightower to former Gov. Ann Richards. He made the big time for George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential primaries when he spread rumors about Bush opponent John McCain around South Carolina that were carefully designed to push Red state buttons – that McCain was gay, had a black child and/or a Vietnamese child. Horrors!
You have to wonder why no one of McCain’s team retaliated by spreading the truth about George W. Bush around South Carolina – that he was a drunk, cocaine user, had paid for a girlfriend’s abortion – and one that would have surely gotten attention among the values voters: When asked by a reporter what he and his father, then-President George H.W. Bush talked about in private, the young swain George Jr. answered: “Pussy.”
Maybe to values voters, none of those things are “worse” than being gay or having an inter-racial child.
Today Karl Rove is the poster child for political hubris. The Globe profile ends by suggesting he may find his destiny when the special prosecutor in the CIA Leak investigation issues his indictments.
We can only hope.
Didn’t I read somewhere that he’s also been sighted cruising gay bars?