Bad Brains

BuzzFlash is currently offering a book about Karl Rove as a premium. Why? The answer is simple: know your enemy. Rove may be evil, but he is an evil genius. Freedom loving Americans ignore him at their peril. Rove never graduated from a college, but he is a masterful three-dimensional chess player, albeit working for the forces of radical extremism. Rove runs circles around the Democratic leadership. He's a bear hunter who knows how to bait and trap with the best of them.

It's too bad he is the most powerful man in Washington, working on behalf of the forces of evil. Karl Rove would do Lucifer proud.

In a May 7th op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, this is what James Moore had to say about Rove:

Karl Rove led the nation to war to improve the political prospects of George W. Bush. I know how surreal that sounds. But I also know it is true.

As the president's chief political advisor, Rove is involved in every decision coming out of the Oval Office. In fact, he flat out makes some of them. He is co-president of the United States, just as he was co-candidate for that office and co-governor of Texas. His relationship with the president is the most profound and complex of all of the White House advisors. And his role creates questions not addressed by our Constitution.

Rove is probably the most powerful unelected person in American history.

The cause of the war in Iraq was not just about Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction or Al Qaeda links to Iraq. Those may have been the stated causes, but every good lie should have a germ of truth. No, this was mostly a product of Rove's usual prescience. He looked around and saw that the economy was anemic and people were complaining about the president's inability to find Osama bin Laden. In another corner, the neoconservatives in the Cabinet were itching to launch ships and planes to the Mideast and take control of Iraq. Rove converged the dynamics of the times. He convinced the president to connect Hussein to Bin Laden, even if the CIA could not.

This misdirection worked. A Pew survey taken during the war showed 61 percent of Americans believe that Hussein and Bin Laden were confederates in the 9/11 attacks.

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The title of your book is pretty provocative – "Bush's Brain". Where are we supposed to go with that concept?

JAMES MOORE: Well, originally I didn't intend for it to be pejorative. I wanted it to strictly speak to what Karl Rove's role was, and that was his nickname. It was one of three nicknames that he had from the press corps and from Governor Bush. Governor Bush called him Boy Genius. And the press corps -- when everybody referred to him in the thirty party -- we said: Oh, he's "Bush's Brain".

And it was meant as he's a brainy guy, a brainy fellow. But the title of the book is sort of two-fold; I wanted it to cut both ways. I wanted it to be a little pejorative, but I also wanted it to directly refer to Karl. The other nickname for Karl, which the President has, which is a sort of Texas colloquialism, is Turd Blossom, which means something wonderful that grows up out of a cowpie.

What exactly do you think Bush means by that?

MOORE: Well, I think what he means is that there's a lot of stuff he hates about Karl, and about having to be political, and the games that he has to play and indulge in in order to get where he wants. But the fact that Karl is very good at this is a positive, and it brings a benefit. It puts a bloom on a thorny old Bush.

In your book, certainly I think it's fair to say that there's a mixture of admiration for Rove's political skills and his smarts, his strategy. But you certainly provide factual evidence that his intelligence has been put to use for strategy over principle, for anything it takes to win. And you've got some very detailed examples of that: the bugging of his own office, the gutter tactics used in unseating Jim Hightower as Texas Agriculture Commissioner, and so forth.