-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: September 3, 2007 11:58:20 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: The Post-Rove Presidency: Bush Implodes, "Not with a Bang"
Andrew Stephen, New Statesman, 23 August 2007
http://www.newstatesman.com/200708230011
<snip>
... Though Bush was Rove's best-known political trophy, he had also
virtually single-handedly turned Texas from the stolidly Democratic
state of LBJ into a strongly Republican one. I have catalogued in
these pages before some of the smear tactics Rove used while doing
that, such as starting a whispering campaign in 1994 that Ann
Richards -- Bush's Democratic rival that year and the then popular
incumbent Texas governor, since deceased -- was a closet lesbian.
But Rove's ultimate dream, which he came perilously close to
realising in the 21st century, was to pull off what he had done to
Texas with the entire country: to create a durable Republican base,
centred on the so-called "Christian right" he set about mobilising,
despite being an avowed agnostic himself.
Feuding and vicious warfare have flared in Rove's inner circle.
Matthew Dowd, Rove's former protégé-in-chief, is no longer on
speaking terms with him and says publicly what everybody else says
privately: that he has lost faith in Bush. Matthew Scully, special
assistant and senior speechwriter in the White House until 2004,
has just published an article excoriating the honesty of Michael
Gerson -- Bush's chief speechwriter until last year and a self-
proclaimed Christian often dubbed "the conscience of the White
House", who came up with many of Bush's pithiest scripted lines.
David Frum, yet another former White House speechwriter, whose
"axis of hatred" Gerson changed to Bush's infamous "axis of evil"
for his first post-9/11 State of the Union address, now says that
"polarisation is Karl Rove's speciality".
Catastrophic consequences
The conundrum, of course, is that it was precisely that dark art
which got Bush into the White House in the first place. The
poisonous divisiveness that gradually festered around him as a
result now allows the state department, to take just one example
reported in the Washington Post, to think nothing of simply
ignoring an order from the president. Bush is now a truly
rudderless president, with no realistic agenda left for the next
513 or so days, other than to tread water and hope for the best.
The Bush-Rove tragedy is that the two complemented each other and
combined to create a uniquely combustible mix that has had such
catastrophic consequences for America and the world. To Rove --a
college dropout-- Bush was a morally malleable blank slate with
everything he lacked: an exceedingly well-known, respected family
name and a wealthy political background that had enabled him to
start life in the privileged Wasp enclaves of Connecticut and end
up in Texas via Yale and Harvard. Perfect for the White House in,
say, 2001?
For Bush, Rove represented proven cunning viciousness and, yes, a
brain -- one that was crammed with political and demographic facts
and figures. Besides his enthusiasm for peculiarly nasty dirty
tricks, Rove's genius was to invent wedge issues which did not
actually concern the overwhelming majority of Americans, but which
he managed to push to the forefront of political debate. Rove may
have been an agnostic himself, but he could certainly work up the
electoral bloc that he invented and called "the Christian right"
into lathers of rage over, say, gay marriage.
We now know that Rove was chairing meetings of the shadowy and
secret White House Iraq Group plotting the invasion of Iraq as
early as 2002, and that he was already pushing the line that,
because of 9/11, the Bush administration was engaged in a messianic
struggle between good and evil.
He seized the opportunity to convince Bush that he was a president
placed on this planet by God to liberate mankind and bring
"democracy" to the un-American and thus politically pagan world.
For Bush, it was an intoxicating vision to fill the blank slate.
Bush has always been obsessed with how history will view him, and
all that now keeps him safely wrapped inside his bubble of self-
delusion is an almost Hegelian certainty that he is a providential
and necessary creation of our times whom history will not only
vindicate, but glorify -- even if it is long after our deaths.
Karl Rove's job after 31 August, once he is released into the big-
bucks world of the lecture, talk-show and publishing circuits, is
to spin the Bush-Rove legacy. He seems less optimistic than Bush,
telling TV viewers: "The president says to me, 'Don't worry about
it. History will get it right and we'll both be dead.'"
President George W Bush himself is about to break a record
previously held by Ronald Reagan: before the end of this month,
according to my calculations, he will have surpassed the old
Gipper's record of having taken 436 days' holiday while in office.
Indeed, this past week, Air Force One touched down at Waco airport
in Texas for the 66th time since Bush took office, so he could
relax at his 1,583-acre "ranch" (there's not so much as a hint of
any livestock to be seen or heard there) nearby.
1,500 miles away from the White House, in Texas, America's
president is furiously biking away while Iraq and Afghanistan burn.
Yet history will come to see him as the brave hero who did what he
knew was right -- even if it takes centuries to come round to that
conclusion.
Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL.com.
www.ctrl.org
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