LAT: Rove unmasked

[question everything]

JONATHAN CHAIT
Rove unmasked
Jonathan Chait

October 28, 2005

NOW THAT the Harriet E. Miers nomination has officially gone down in flames, it's time to admit what many of us have always known: Karl Rove really is George W. Bush's Svengali.

For years, conservatives have treated the notion that Rove is the mastermind behind Bush as some sort of loopy conspiracy theory concocted by Bush-hating liberals. Andrew Ferguson's take in the Weekly Standard last year is typical: " Democratic adversaries have obsessed over piecing together odd, paranoid caricatures of the man who's driving them nuts — Bush as the agent of Halliburton, Bush as the idiot son of robber baron privilege, Bush the religious crank, the right-wing ideologue, the draft dodger, the front man for Enron or Rove or the Saudi royals or J.R. Ewing."

(snip)

But in the case of Miers, Rove was out of the picture, distracted by his potential indictment in the Valerie Plame/CIA scandal. As the New York Times reported last week, "Some conservatives and Rove allies say Card kept Mr. Rove in the dark about the seriousness of Mr. Bush's intentions until very late in the process, thus sidestepping the advisor who would have been best able to anticipate dissent among Republicans." This is what scientists call "isolating the independent variable."

(snip)


So now the pretense that Rove was never pulling the strings behind the surface has been dropped for the more immediate imperative of saving his hide.

All of this suggests two things: First, if the Plame scandal takes Rove out of commission, Bush's second term might look awfully ugly. And second, maybe we Bush-haters weren't just a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theorists after all.


http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-chait28oct28,1,477464.column

[Neil Lisst]

1. Which makes Pardons and Medals of Freedom for all possible

Bush learned from Miers that Laura ain't no Karl.

He's ready to lose Cheney to keep Karl. You lose the Rook, but you protect the Queen, and live to fight another day.

Libby is the stopper for Rove, and Cheney is the stopper for Bush. Both Libby and Cheney will be sacrificed to keep Jr. in good stead. He'll pardon both and sadly take Cheney's resignation.

Cheney will go back to Halliburton and continue running foreign policy from there.

[The_Casual_Observer]

2. "Bush's second term might look awfully ugly."

The first one wasn't all that brisk either. The author misses the point about rove. rove knows how to move public opinion against an opponent using lies and dirty tricks.
Beyond that he appears to have no talent for anything else.

[question everything]

3. Did not miss it

but ended up on the "curring floor" - copyrights rule, you know..

Here it is:

There is a consistent pattern to Rove-driven decisions. He has an unerring sense of what the conservative base demands and what deviations it will tolerate. Rove may lose a battle every so often, but that happens only when Democrats have a chance to stop him (i.e., Social Security privatization). He always holds the Republican Party together. The result is sometimes a substantive disaster — no, make that usually a substantive disaster — but as a political formula, it works.