Rove's Rage Doth Imperil Us All

by Michael Winship

Much as Al Capone finally was nailed not for murder and mayhem but income tax evasion, it would be whimsically ironic if Karl Rove, the power under the throne, finally took the fall for one of his less egregious sins: trash-talking.

Not likely, but ironic. And whimsical if it wasn't all so wasteful and tragic.

Rove has made trash-talking a trademark of Republican politics (And yes, Democrats do it, too, but Rove is the Michelangelo of mud -- witness last month's speech to the Conservative Party of New York State -- you know, the one in which he sneered, "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.").

Rove's modus operandi is neatly summed up by Newsweek's Howard Fineman in the magazine's cover story this week: "In the World According to Karl Rove, you take the offensive, and stay there. You create a narrative that glosses over complex, mitigating facts to divide the world into friends and enemies, light and darkness, good and bad, Bush versus Saddam.

"You are loyal to a fault to your friends, merciless to your enemies. You keep your candidate's public rhetoric sunny and uplifting, finding others to do the attacking. You study the details, and learn more about your foes than they know about themselves. You use the jujitsu of media flow to flip the energy of your enemies against them. The Boss never discusses political mechanics in public. But in fact everything is political -- and everyone is fair game."

These are patterns going back to Rove's days as a dirty trickster in the College Republicans and as a pioneer in the use of direct mail as the rapier of modern electioneering: "Direct mail remains the key to understanding Rove's approach to politics," Fineman writes. "Minutely targeted, upbeat when possible, apocalyptic as needed."

What's especially treacherous about this methodology is that Rove has taken it beyond the rock 'em, sock 'em realm of electoral politics and foisted it onto life and death issues, issues where a bipartisan exchange of views coupled with an ability to reason and negotiate is crucial to the nation's -- and even the world's -- future.

Monday's Los Angeles Times reported that a source familiar with the prosecutors investigating the outing of Joe Wilson's wife's as a CIA agent said that Rove's obsession with Wilson "was so strong that it prompted questions in the White House. When asked at one point why he was pursuing the diplomat so aggressively, Rove reportedly responded: 'He's a Democrat.'"

This reductionist, partisan instinct trivializes a war that's costing America and its allies precious lives and treasure, with a death toll rapidly approaching the total of all those killed on 9/11. Not to mention what may have been as many as 100,000 Iraqi deaths in the first year and a half of the fighting. Last week, the New York Times cited Iraqi Interior Ministry statistics that insurgents there kill an average of 800 police and civilians every month.

Ultimately, of course, what's important about the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame scandal, for all its complexities and foolishness, is not who said what to whom when or who lied about it, but the pattern of prevarication surrounding the entire Iraq conflict. The attempts to discredit Wilson's exposure of bogus uranium buys are a tiny part, but symptomatic, like the rash that signals a pox.

The damage wreaked by Rove's pit bull attack style reaches beyond the current free-for-all. Rewarded as the "architect" of President Bush's reelection with the post of deputy chief of staff in charge of domestic policy, his attempts to impose his heavy-handed campaign techniques on such issues as social security, health care, homeland security, immigration and judicial nominations have yielded decidedly mixed results, exponentially increasing the venom and general buttheadedness of the two parties.

Most grievously, Rove politicized the tragedy of 9/11, using the attacks to campaign fundraise and justify partisan vendettas against such men as John Kerry, Tom Daschle and former Georgia Senator Max Cleland.

Such scorched earth tactics and cynical opportunism pillage and coarsen America's soul. Will Karl Rove be forced to resign? More likely, he'll receive a medal.