Wednesday, 15 August 2007

Rove creep

Karl Rove may be resigning as Bush's in-house Rasputin, but his dismal legacy permeates the political landscape like kudzu. Alexander Downer, one of an endless line of doughy-faced white men marching in John Howard's clown parade, defended a blowhard Treasury minister's mewling for Howard's job by invoking a passage from the Gospel of Rove:
I think the public are sick of this sort of stuff... you think the public would believe journalists over Peter Costello?
Downer understands that continued attacks upon the media by right-wing demagogues has weakened it to a point where he can stare into a TV camera and with a straight face question the integrity of three independent journalists versus one loose-lipped politician. Rove has preached the neutering of journalists by treating them as just another interest group. So what if it's undemocratic ... it wins elections.

That and more explains why The Miserable Failure calls the 60-year-old Rove a 'boy genius'.

Actually, it's closer to 'bloody genius':
Karl Rove’s resignation brought to mind a conversation I had a few weeks ago with an Administration official who genuinely wanted to hear my account of why the Iraq war has gone so badly. In a word, I said, "politics." At every turn, the White House has tried to use the war, and the larger war on terror, to consolidate power, to reward ideological and political loyalists, to win electoral advantage, to push the Democrats into a corner, to divide the country into patriots and defeatists. President Bush insisted on pursuing a highly partisan domestic agenda rather than unite the country around the war in the spirit of F.D.R. So many disastrous wartime decisions can be traced back to the original sin: policy mattered less than politics. The message in Washington was more real than anything happening in Iraq.
Politicians are like bald men longing for hair -- whatever works, they'll use. The Rove doctrine will be applied liberally in every election until another one comes along that works better, democracy be damned.

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