Karl Rove: ‘Bush’s Brain’ an evil genius

Karl Rove served his master well but was an unmitigated disaster for America.

He was a divider, not a uniter. A polarizer. His compassionate conservatism was a fraud, a ploy to get Bush elected in 2000. His dirty tricks were monumental.

Rove counseled nonexistent fears and terrorism because he knew they were winning gambits. He portrayed Democrats as disloyal cravens who coddled terrorists even though he knew it was untrue. He advised Bush to run on the war on terror.

Rove was the consummate political marketer. His product was Bush, the worst president the nation ever endured--shallow, vapid, intellectually challenged. Bush made the decisions but Rove fed him the lines. Rove was amoral but could not have cared less. As the book “Bush’s Brain” phrases it: Rove’s standard is “politics not morality.”

He was on a permanent campaign. Everything was politicized, serving the Bush agenda instead of the needs of most Americans. Under Rove, politics even overruled science.

Anyone left in America still starry-eyed about government and politics should glance at the career of Rove in general and in particular the 2003 book by James Moore and Wayne Slater, “Bush’s Brain,” a devastating account of Rove as political Machiavelli.

Rove, former political adviser to Bush, exemplified the reality of politics: money, appearance over substance and unethical campaigning. He was in the words of columnist Bob Herbert a sleaze-meister, a master of skullduggery. The éminence grise, the power behind the Bush throne, the co-president.

Rove’s character assassination was breathtaking. It began in Texas in 1994 when the Bush whispering campaign falsely portrayed Gov. Ann Richards as filling boards and commissions with lesbians and that she herself was one.

The gay card and same-sex marriage were potent at the polls. As Bill Moyers says: “Using church pews as precincts, Rove turned religion into a weapon of political combat, a battering ram aimed at the devil’s minions, especially at gay people.” The irony: Rove himself is at least an agnostic if not an atheist.

During the Bush campaign for president in 2000 it was whispered that rival John McCain had a black child, that his wife had a drug problem and that McCain had mental woes from his days as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Rove was the svengali behind such negative campaigning.

Trade with Cuba was not as important as capturing Florida’s electoral vote. Again with Rove politics triumphed over the national good.

Rove leaked the identify of Valerie Plame as a covert CIA agent--against the law--as a petty reprisal for her whistleblowing husband’s article declaring the yellowcake story about Iraq bogus.

He directed federal funds to political appointees in direct violation of the Hatch Act bar to politicking on taxpayers’ dollars. Rove directed the nefarious scheme to fire federal prosecutors who followed the law rather than Bush policies.

Rove was nasty and ruthless. He learned from Lee Atwater, Bush I adviser, that smearing Gov. Michael Dukakis with the Willie Horton gross exaggeration paid off at the polls. He directed the outrageous smear of Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia as a stooge of terrorism. Cleland: a triple amputee and decorated Vietnam veteran.

Rove took the lead in stacking the federal courts with reactionaries and making the Supreme Court a bastion of reaction.

It was Rove who proclaimed that a vote for John Kerry in 2004 was a vote for Osama bin Laden. “Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said: we will defeat our enemies,” Rove declared. “Liberals saw what happened to us and said: we must understand our enemies.”

In other words, if you don’t want to get blown up, vote Republican. The Rovian intimidation is still working as you can see in the spineless Democratic-controlled Congress.

The fraudulence was obvious even to Republicans. But so what? It was a political winner.

Columnist Paul Krugman, interviewed for the media book, “Feet to the Fire,” tells of how a moderate senator incurred Rove’s wrath. Rove yelled at an associate during an infamous phone conversation: “We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one else has ever fucked him!”

The quotation says everything about Rove.

Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle essayist, deservedly pours invective on Rove: “The master orchestrator of what is increasingly recognized as the most disastrous, divisive, scandal-ridden, secretive, abusive, warmongering, hate-inspiring, homophobic, morally debilitating neo-conservative administration in modern American history.”