Hallelujah!

One down, Marcy!

Vicious little troll that he was.

Probably just getting ready to position himself with a new candidate for the next election though, little bastard.

Sorry to see he will walk out a free man, and not in handcuffs as he deserves. The question in my mind is why is he leaving - is he a rat leaving a sinking ship, or is he off to cause problems elsewhere?

i have long considered k-rove to be evil incarnate, so i am overjoyed at this news. i'm hopeful that he has run his course and that even if he does hook up with some new sucker, no one will pay him any mind. of course, i am also known to be a wee bit naive. : )

The newscaster this morning ended the story saying "he's going to be hard to replace." Really? Give me a bran muffin and a cup of coffee and I could replace him in about 20 minutes.

omg, that is too funny!

I wish it actually meant something but as someone suggested, he's just going to go off to work his evil someplace else :(.

think of it this way: it's like excising a cancerous tumor. you hope they got it all but you live with the realizaiton that it could recur. so i'm going to rejoice in the moment without forgetting that yeah, the bastard will probably resurface eventually. : )

He needs to go to work for the Romney campaign now. I do NOT want that guy to stand a chance. (He used to be our Gov. and he left a shattered school system in his wake.)

romney is like a caricature of a presidential candidate. i can imagine him being played by a 1970s era lyle waggoner--do you remember him from the carol burnett show? ha!

Having once worked in the dark realm of politics, my perspective is different. I have always found that hating an opponent is a bad idea, as this clouds one's judgment and creates a weakness in oneself (intense irrational feelings) that one's rivals can exploit.

James Carville once put it this way: "Don't get mad. Don't get even. Just get elected, then get even."

James Carville, it should be said, was also a first-class son-of-a-bitch. Those are the kinds of personalities that business generates, on either side of the partisan fence.

The question is not whether or not Rove is an evil bastard - he obviously is. The question is whether the Democrats can find a smarter and yet more evil bastard to counter him... which they will have to do, since it seems clear to me that Rove is smart enough to reinvent himself in some other context.

So put away the champagne. I doubt this is the last you've heard of Mr. Rove.

dammit, people, quit bursting my bubble! ;-)

you're quite right, lyle, as usual. however i've always thought james carville has a smidge more humanity than rove. just a smidge. : )

i read an interesting piece over at the huffington post (http://www.huffing tonpost.com/bob-cesca/karl-rove-out-there-walki_b_60311.html) this morning in which the author calls rove a world-class ratfucker, which is an actual political term used to describe someone who deploys despicable dirty tricks in order to sabotage someone else's campaign, etc. fits him to a t. i wouldn't be surprised if in time the term "to rove" someone isn't coined to mean much the same thing.

I used to have a schpiel I used to give to young political apprentices:

"Ninety-nine per cent of the people in this business fit into one of five categories: Idiots, Weasels, Scum-bags, Lunatics and Assholes. You, my young friend, are just starting out, so you're an Idiot, but if you work hard and pay attention, one day you'll be an Asshole like me."

Assholes like Rove aren't the worst. The worst types are the Lunatics, because they're unpredictable and the Idiots, because they are arrogant. This applies no matter what side of an artificial partisan line they happen to sit.

Carville does indeed seem more human, but this proves only that he has a greater mastery of of some aspects of propaganda and rhetoric than Rove. All of those people are cut from the same cloth.

Sigh...

Let's all club together, buy an island, and set up our own utopia. With a beer moat to keep out the slugs.

now that's the most sensible idea i've heard in a long time. : )

From CNN.com today:

QUOTE

Jenna Bush, President and Laura Bush's daughter, is engaged, the White House said Thursday.

Jenna Bush and Henry Hager, pictured in 2005, got engaged Wednesday.

Jenna Bush, 25, is marrying Henry Hager, 28, a former White House aide who used to work with Karl Rove.

His father, John Hager, is the chairman of the Virginia Republican Party.

UNQUOTE

The evil continues... ;-)

oh my god, they're going to spawn . . . ahhhh!

Mentok, I disagree. Rove is a sociopath. He understand everything he does and he does it all for a reason. It is his complete disregard for the horrors that he causes, despite understanding absolutely and entirely what they are, that terrifies me. He is more than just a nutter.

matthew--i've been worried about you ever since your cheney post disappeared--did they come for you and demand you take it down? (i'm only half joking)

Sociopath is a pretty heavy word. I wouldn't be prepared to tag somebody with that unless I had encountered them in person. That epithet gets thrown around rather casually in politics.

I think it is much more likely that he falls into the much more dangerous class of True Believer. You can justify anything if you are convinced in your own mind that you are: ... doing God's will ...furthering the Revolution ...saving the world for Democracy and Freedom ...defending the Homeland .... Whatever your particular ideological poison happens to be.

Even this diagnosis I wouldn't want to tag on somebody without knowing them, but given some of the other behaviours and personalities of the Bush administration I would certainly think it credible.

All of this loops back to my original point. Be cautious about thinking your opponent is a monster, because once you do that you often rob yourself of the ability to outwit him.

i think you could say without a doubt that rove falls into the ultimate true believer category. you make a good point about not demonizing the opposition, too. gives them too much power. it's just very hard not to demonize evil people. : )

I agree - if you become too emotionally involved, you can't work effectively toward your goals. I'm a classic example of this. When the conversation turns to politics, my adrenaline starts pumping and I can't think straight, much less formulate a coherent argument. Tragic, really. Almost cartoon-like.

Wankel, you should never apologize for caring. Goodness knows the bigger sickness in modern democratic societies is apathy. The trick, of course, is to channel one's passion in positive ways rather than letting it come out as anger and hatred. But it takes a lot of discipline to manage such a trick and we poor humans so seldom manage it. Even after years of professional experience in that arena, I still experience that "adrenaline pumping" feeling you describe.

I hope my comments on this topic haven't become too tiresome, but I think its worth making one further observation: I can 100%, absolutely positively guarantee you that there are a ton of people within the Republican Party who hate Rove far, far more deeply and passionately than any Democrat can ever experience, and for better reasons. Guys he screwed over in college politics. People he screwed over in primaries. Ex-friends he burned on his way up the professional ladder. Those intra-party hatreds are always far deeper than the inter-party ones. Any formerly successful political hack will always have a legion of people he burned on the way up ready to pay him back on the way down. It will be interesting to see how a ... what was that phrase again ... "world-class rat fucker" like Rove handles that. My guess is still that he will survive and find some way to reinvent himself.

lyle, you have such a great perspective on these matters. i'm so glad that you share them with us. i can't help but think back to the days when i used to argue politics with a couple of my very best friends in college. they were die-hard republicans, total reagan fanatics, and we would argue politics and religion until the sun came up. but no matter how heated the discussion got, we always remained friends. we never let those political differences get in the way of all the other stuff we loved about each other. i really miss that sometimes, coz these days it's much trickier to talk politics with people who disagree with you, for whatever reason. maybe because back then we were forming our positions and nowadays we're defending them. hmmm.

Even in professional politics, it's very common for people to have close inter-party friendships. We used to call it the "Sam and Ralph" phenomenon. Remember the old Bugs Bunny cartoon about the sheep-dog and the coyote who clock in to work, fight all day but are buddies outside of work. Many hacks succeed in sustaining those sorts of relationships.

Sadly, I think that's becoming less common. The True Believers of various stripes have soured things. The Christian Right and the Green-Enviro types, they're both the same. If you don't agree with them, you're the devil. No room for debate or compromise. That sort of attitude, to my mind, just pollutes the whole political sphere. But I'm repeating myself now ....