Reply #25: I think it absolutely goes [View All]

[whometense]

to Cheney. Remember all that talk during the Bolton hearings about Cheney's visits to the CIA? I feel sure it all ties together. And maybe again this is about the use of raw power. They've gotten away with absolutely everything. Why not this? Who's to stop them? I think maybe they didn't figure in how extremely pissed off the CIA would be.

Very interesting post here: http://cunningrealist.blogspot.com/2005/07/puppetmaster-myth.html

It's about how weird it is that someone like Rove - a backroom political dirty trickster, basically, could end up with high level security clearance and running the policy shop.

I've seen tapes of Rove speaking several times, most recently when he derided "the motives of liberals." Maybe it's because I don't live in D.C. or work in politics---and if so, that's a good thing---but I just don't get it. By all accounts he's great at his "job." But he strikes me as an utter dolt: a boorish, brutish bumpkin. Some people are social climbers; he comes across to me as an intellectual climber, increasingly aspiring to play the role of a highbrow, erudite, ideological seer for which he is uniquely unsuited. His bailiwick is sitting in a campaign office in a sleepy, dusty west Texas town on a hot day in the middle of August---not perched a few feet away from the Oval Office trafficking in national secrets while our troops fight overseas. So when I hear the Rove-as-all-powerful puppetmaster platitudes---usually coming from a press that should be investigating, not fawning---it strikes me as utterly discordant.

Could the gap between the myth and the reality of Karl Rove account for the mess he finds himself in right now?