Good Bye Turd Blossom

Well we won't have W. Mitt Romney to kick around anymore but is it possible that this is the end for Karl Rove as well.  His Crossroads groups spent 300 million dollars of billionaires money and have little to show for it and they are not pleased.

Karl Rove is feeling the heat. The face of the historic $1 billion plan to unseat President Barack Obama and turn the Senate Republican, Rove now finds himself the leading scapegoat for its failure. And he’s scrambling to protect his status as a top GOP money man by convincing disappointed donors to his Crossroads groups that he did the best he could with their $300 million.

Not only did Obama beat Romney 332 to 206 EVs most of the Senate candidates he supported lost.  It looks like the "genius" has lost his Midas touch.

Richard Viguerie, a pioneering direct-mail consultant, called for Republicans to purge from their ranks Rove and Ed Gillespie — who helped found Crossroads and later moved over to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign — as well as Romney advisers Stuart Stevens and Neil Newhouse. “In any logical universe,” he argued, “no one would give a dime to their ineffective super PACs, such as American Crossroads.”
Rick Tyler, a former strategist for the pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC and a top adviser to Todd Akin’s Missouri Senate campaign, called Crossroads’ efforts “a colossal failure,” and asserted, “Rove has too much control over the purse strings.”

Of course Rove is afflicted with the same disease that infected the Romney campaign - he believed his own bull shit.
Karl knows he's in trouble which may account for his meltdown:

Political Prisoner Released

Remember this:

• Karl Rove had several of his political operatives placed in judicial positions - US Attorneys, Judges etc.
• They prosecuted Democrats on drummed up charges - made them political prisoners.
• One of the most obvious victims was Don Siegelman.

But we have the beginning of a happy ending:
Siegelman to be released from prison

MONTGOMERY -- A federal appellate court today ordered former Gov. Don Siegelman released from prison while he appeals his 2006 conviction, but denied co-defendant Richard Scrushy's request to be released.

[.....]

The judges wrote that Siegelman met both requirements for an appeal bond: He is not a flight risk and his appeal raises a substantial question of law or fact likely to result in reversal or an order for a new trial.

"After thorough review of this complex and protracted record, we conclude Siegelman has satisfied the criteria set out in the statute, and has specifically met his burden of showing that his appeal raises substantial questions of law or fact," the judges wrote.

For a truly happy ending Siegelman's conviction must be overturned and those who put him in jail tried and convicted.

This is the best they can do?

My major concern about Obama has been what the Rovian Swiftboaters would do to him after he became the nominee. He has actually been giving them some ammo himself like his comments on drug use. Well I guess this is apparently the first day that the Rovians have Obama in their sights.

Oh, my. Barack Obama may want to call his new Houston office and suggest some decorating ideas. Take a look at the flag flying in the office at the moment:

No, that's not a Texas state flag with a picture of Obama on it. It's the flag of the Castro-led Cuba regime, with Che Guevara's face superimposed on the side. A Fox report from Houston captured this image as it showed Obama supporters celebrating his momentum after Super Tuesday.

Does Obama know his Houston supporters honor a terrorist in his campaign office?

If this is the best they can do then maybe I didn't need to worry so much. The politburo diktat 2.0 gets it right.

Remember the “vast right wing conspiracy?” I think this is the “half vast” version.

Update for Fausta
Please go read John Cole and think about the hypocrisy.

Born again

John Cole has left the Republican party. He has strayed so far that he is now defending Hillary. This is what Karl Rove and George W. Bush have done to the Republican coalition. Some legacy!

The Trouble With Romney

I like to make fun of David Brooks - sometimes his columns are idiocy personified. Occasional he takes off his partisan dunce hat and his delusional rose colored glasses and gets it right. Today is one of those times as he talks about the snake oil salesman, Romney.

Road to Nowhere

Earnestly and methodically, he has appealed to each of the major constituency groups. For national security conservatives, he vowed to double the size of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. For social conservatives, he embraced a culture war against the faithless. For immigration skeptics, he swung so far right he earned the endorsement of Tom Tancredo.

He has spent roughly $80 million, including an estimated $17 million of his own money, hiring consultants, blanketing the airwaves and building an organization that is unmatched on the Republican side.

And he has turned himself into the party’s fusion candidate. Some of his rivals are stronger among social conservatives. Others are stronger among security conservatives, but no candidate has a foot in all camps the way Romney does. No candidate offends so few, or is the acceptable choice of so many.

And that is why Romney is at the fulcrum of the Republican race. He’s looking strong in Iowa and is the only candidate who can afford to lose an important state and still win the nomination.

And yet as any true conservative can tell you, the sort of rational planning Mitt Romney embodies never works. The world is too complicated and human reason too limited. The PowerPoint mentality always fails to anticipate something. It always yields unintended consequences.

And what Romney failed to anticipate is this: In turning himself into an old-fashioned, orthodox Republican, he has made himself unelectable in the fall. When you look inside his numbers, you see tremendous weaknesses.

Brooks sees something that many of us have seen but that most Republicans have refused to acknowledge - the end of a coalition.

But his biggest problem is a failure of imagination. Market research is a snapshot of the past. With his data-set mentality, Romney has chosen to model himself on a version of Republicanism that is receding into memory. As Walter Mondale was the last gasp of the fading New Deal coalition, Romney has turned himself into the last gasp of the Reagan coalition.

That coalition had its day, but it is shrinking now. The Republican Party is more unpopular than at any point in the past 40 years. Democrats have a 50 to 36 party identification advantage, the widest in a generation. The general public prefers Democratic approaches on health care, corruption, the economy and Iraq by double-digit margins. Republicans’ losses have come across the board, but the G.O.P. has been hemorrhaging support among independent voters. Surveys from the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post, Kaiser Foundation and Harvard University show that independents are moving away from the G.O.P. on social issues, globalization and the roles of religion and government.

If any Republican candidate is going to win this year, he will have to offer a new brand of Republicanism. But Romney has tied himself to the old brand. He is unresponsive to the middle-class anxiety that Huckabee is tapping into. He has forsaken the trans-partisan candor that McCain represents. Romney, the cautious consultant, is pivoting to stress his corporate competence, and is rebranding himself as an Obama-esque change agent, but he will never make the sort of daring break that independent voters will demand if they are going to give the G.O.P. another look.

And the following observation is not the kind I have come to expect from Brooks.

The leaders of the Republican coalition know Romney will lose. But some would rather remain in control of a party that loses than lose control of a party that wins. Others haven’t yet suffered the agony of defeat, and so are not yet emotionally ready for the trauma of transformation. Others still simply don’t know which way to turn.

Brooks and other Republicans (and former Republicans) are beginning to realize the the politics of Karl Rove that were supposed to keep the "Reagan revolution" going forever in fact destroyed it. That will be the lasting legacy of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.

Update
We all know that the vast majority of politicians are phonies. That said Matt Yglesias makes what may be a vaild point about Romney.

...to give Romney the benefit of the doubt, one thing I can say about him is that there's some indication he might make an okay president. He ran a successful business. He managed the Olympics well. He took over a state that enjoyed a high standard of living and during his years of governor it continued to enjoy a high standard of living and he never tried to do anything crazy. He's taken a lot of repugnant stands in the campaign, but that's clearly because he's telling people what he thinks they want to hear. When he thoughts his constituents wanted to hear about gay equality and a women's right to choose he said that stuff, too. He's a giant phony. But also a technocrat with some record of competence -- basically a risk-averse guy who knows what he's doing and understands how to color between the lines. It's impossible to imagine him being a great president, but it's relatively easy to imagine him being an okay president.

The others in the field, not so much. Who knows what wars Rudy Giuliani or John McCain would start? And Mike Huckabee can't even fake knowing what he's talking about for fifteen minutes.

I'm not sure I'm entirely ready to buy that but he probably is the pick of the litter.

So why did Gonzo resign?

Sidney Blumenthal knows!

Once elected president, Bush immediately named Gonzales his White House counsel. To the extent that Gonzales was pliable he was useful. But his "remarkable journey," as he called it today in his resignation statement, was remarkable only for his unwavering subservience.

From the start, Rove and Gonzales were secret sharers. But one was "the Architect" and the other was "Fredo." With Rove's resignation, Gonzales lost the political and policy hand that had guided him all along. When the puppet master departed, the puppet collapsed in a heap.

Read the rest.

Karl Rove's Legacy

We here at MEJ have covered Mr Rove's departure in:

• Rove to Spend More Time With his Family


• What will Rove's mark be?


• Quick Hits


• And they called him a genius!

In addition Jazz discussed the sorry state of the Republican Party going into 2008 after the Rove years.
Karl Rove and the disaster he has left in his wake is also the subject of the Frank Rich commentary this morning.
He Got Out While the Getting Was Good

BACK in those heady days of late summer 2002, Andrew Card, then the president’s chief of staff, told The New York Times why the much-anticipated push for war in Iraq hadn’t yet arrived. “You don’t introduce new products in August,” he said, sounding like the mouthpiece for the Big Three automakers he once was. Sure enough, with an efficiency Detroit can only envy, the manufactured aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds rolled off the White House assembly line after Labor Day like clockwork.

Five summers later, we have the flip side of the Card corollary: You do recall defective products in August, whether you’re Mattel or the Bush administration. Karl Rove’s departure was both abrupt and fast. The ritualistic “for the sake of my family” rationale convinced no one, and the decision to leak the news in a friendly print interview (on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page) rather than announce it in a White House spotlight came off as furtive. Inquiring Rove haters wanted to know: Was he one step ahead of yet another major new scandal? Was a Congressional investigation at last about to draw blood?

Perhaps, but the Republican reaction to Mr. Rove’s departure is more revealing than the cries from his longtime critics. No G.O.P. presidential candidates paid tribute to Mr. Rove, and, except in the die-hard Bush bastions of Murdochland present (The Weekly Standard, Fox News) and future (The Journal), the conservative commentariat was often surprisingly harsh. It is this condemnation of Rove from his own ideological camp — not the Democrats’ familiar litany about his corruption, polarizing partisanship, dirty tricks, etc. — that the White House and Mr. Rove wanted to bury in the August dog days.

What the Rove critics on the right recognize is that it may be even more difficult for their political party to dig out of his wreckage than it will be for America. Their angry bill of grievances only sporadically overlaps that of the Democrats. One popular conservative blogger, Michelle Malkin, mocked Mr. Rove and his interviewer, Paul Gigot, for ignoring “the Harriet Miers debacle, the botching of the Dubai ports battle, or the undeniable stumbles in post-Iraq invasion policies,” not to mention “the spectacular disaster of the illegal alien shamnesty.” Ms. Malkin, an Asian-American in her 30s, comes from a far different place than the Gigot-Fred Barnes-William Kristol axis of Bush-era ideological lock step.

Those Bush dead-enders are in a serious state of denial. Just how much so could be found in the Journal interview when Mr. Rove extolled his party’s health by arguing, without contradiction from Mr. Gigot, that young people are more “pro-life” and “free-market” than their elders. Maybe he was talking about 12-year-olds. Back in the real world of potential voters, the latest New York Times-CBS News poll of Americans aged 17 to 29 found that their views on abortion were almost identical to the rest of the country’s. (Only 24 percent want abortion outlawed.)

That poll also found that the percentage of young people who identify as Republicans, whether free-marketers or not, is down to 25, from a high of 37 at the end of the Reagan era. Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster, found that self-identified G.O.P. voters are trending older rapidly, with the percentage over age 55 jumping from 28 to 41 percent in a decade.

Every poll and demographic accounting finds the Republican Party on the losing side of history, both politically and culturally. Not even a miraculous armistice in Iraq or vintage Democratic incompetence may be able to ride to the rescue. A survey conducted by The Journal itself (with NBC News) in June reported G.O.P. approval numbers lower than any in that poll’s two decades of existence. Such is the political legacy for a party to which Mr. Rove sold Mr. Bush as “a new kind of Republican,” an exemplar of “compassionate conservatism” and the avatar of a permanent Republican majority.

That sales pitch, as we long ago learned, was all about packaging, not substance. The hope was that No Child Left Behind and a 2000 G.O.P. convention stacked with break dancers and gospel singers would peel away some independent and black voters from the Democrats. The promise of immigration reform would spread Bush’s popularity among Hispanics. Another potential add-on to the Republican base was Muslims, a growing constituency that Mr. Rove’s pal Grover Norquist plotted to herd into the coalition.

The rest is history. Any prospect of a rapprochement between the G.O.P. and African-Americans died in the New Orleans Superdome. The tardy, botched immigration initiative unleashed a wave of xenophobia against Hispanics, the fastest-growing voting bloc in the country. The Muslim outreach project disappeared into the memory hole after 9/11.

Forced to pick a single symbolic episode to encapsulate the collapse of Rovian Republicanism, however, I would not choose any of those national watersheds, or even the implosion of the Iraq war, but the George Allen “macaca” moment. Its first anniversary fell, fittingly enough, on the same day last weekend that Mitt Romney bought his victory at the desultory, poorly attended G.O.P. straw poll in Iowa.

A century seems to have passed since Mr. Allen, the Virginia Republican running for re-election to the Senate, was anointed by Washington insiders as the inevitable heir to the Bush-Rove mantle: a former governor whose jus’-folks personality, the Bushian camouflage for hard-edged conservatism, would propel him to the White House. Mr. Allen’s senatorial campaign and presidential future melted down overnight after he insulted a Jim Webb campaign worker, the 20-year-old son of Indian immigrants, not just by calling him a monkey but by sarcastically welcoming him “to America” and “the real world of Virginia.”

This incident had resonance well beyond Virginia and Mr. Allen for several reasons. First, it crystallized the monochromatic whiteness at the dark heart of Rovian Republicanism. For all the minstrel antics at the 2000 convention, the record speaks for itself: there is not a single black Republican serving in either the House or Senate, and little representation of other minorities, either. Far from looking like America, the G.O.P. caucus, like the party’s presidential field, could pass for a Rotary Club, circa 1954. Meanwhile, a new census analysis released this month finds that nonwhites now make up a majority in nearly a third of the nation’s most populous counties, with Houston overtaking Los Angeles in black population and metropolitan Chicago surpassing Honolulu in Asian residents. Even small towns and rural America are exploding in Hispanic growth.

Second, the Allen slur was a compact distillation of the brute nastiness of the Bush-Rove years, all that ostentatious “compassion” notwithstanding. Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove are not xenophobes, but the record will show that their White House spoke up too late and said too little when some of its political allies descended into Mexican-bashing during the immigration brawl. Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove winked at anti-immigrant bigotry, much as they did at the homophobia they inflamed with their incessant election-year demagoguery about same-sex marriage.

Finally, the “macaca” incident was a media touchstone. It became a national phenomenon when the video landed on YouTube, the rollicking Web site whose reach now threatens mainstream news outlets. A year later, leading Republicans are still clueless and panicked about this new medium, which is why they, unlike their Democratic counterparts, pulled out of even a tightly controlled CNN-YouTube debate. It took smart young conservative bloggers like a former Republican National Committee operative, Patrick Ruffini, to shame them into reinstating the debate for November, lest the entire G.O.P. field look as pathetically out of touch as it is.

The rise of YouTube certifies the passing of Mr. Rove’s era, a cultural changing of the guard in the digital age. Mr. Rove made his name in direct-mail fund-raising and with fierce top-down message management. As the Internet erodes snail mail, so it upends direct mail. As YouTube threatens a politician’s ability to rigidly control a message, so it threatens the Rove ethos that led Mr. Bush to campaign at “town hall” meetings attended only by hand-picked supporters.

It’s no coincidence that this new culture is also threatening the Beltway journalistic establishment that celebrated Mr. Rove’s invincibility well past its expiration date (much as it did James Carville’s before him), extolling what Joshua Green, in his superb new Rove article in The Atlantic, calls the Cult of the Consultant. The YouTube video of Mr. Rove impersonating a rapper at one of those black-tie correspondents’ dinners makes the Washington press corps look even more antediluvian than he is.

Last weekend’s Iowa straw poll was a more somber but equally anachronistic spectacle. Again, it’s a young conservative commentator, Ryan Sager, writing in The New York Sun, who put it best: “The face of the Republican Party in Iowa is the face of a losing party, full of hatred toward immigrants, lust for government subsidies, and the demand that any Republican seeking the office of the presidency acknowledge that he’s little more than Jesus Christ’s running mate.”

That face, at once contemptuous and greedy and self-righteous, is Karl Rove’s face. Unless someone in his party rolls out a revolutionary new product, it is indelible enough to serve as the Republican brand for a generation.

While it will take the country years if not generations to recover from George W. Bush and may take just as long for the Republican Party to recover from Karl Rove.

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And they called him a genius!

Harold Meyerson takes a reality based look at Karl Rove making use of Josh Green's article in the Atlantic.
Rove's Blind Spot

Decades from now, historians will have trouble fathoming why Karl Rove's contemporaries hailed him as a genius. An expert practitioner of wedge politics, in the tradition of Lee Atwater? Sure. But architect of an enduring Republican majority? The great realigner? What were the pundits of 2002 and 2004 smoking?

Actually it's not all that difficult to see how anyone who could complete a sentence would look like a genius when standing next to George W. Bush but Rove is guilty of totally misreading the mood of the American people.

In fact, Rove exhibited astonishing blindness toward some of America's most basic political realities -- in particular, a pervasive economic insecurity that undercut the prospects of the Bush administration's program.

[....]

In the wake of Bush's 2004 reelection, Green reports, Rove, newly promoted by Bush to domestic policy czar, concluded that the time for this realignment had come. Green documents Rove's mistakes as he set out to undo the major social legislation of the mid-20th century:

He assumed congressional and public support for policies on which Bush had not campaigned; his relations with Republican members of Congress were abysmal; his incessant campaigning against the Democrats ensured that there would be no bipartisan support for programs that entailed considerable political risk.

But Rove's miscalculations were actually more fundamental than those that Green enumerates. At bottom, he and Bush overlooked the epochal growth of economic insecurity in America. They refused to see that the very economic changes they celebrated had made Americans understandably nervous and pessimistic to an unprecedented extent about the nation's long-term economic prospects. And so, as employers were abandoning their provision of retirement benefits to employees, Bush and Rove called for abandoning the government's commitment as well. At a time when ordinary Americans' incomes were stagnating, and when growing numbers of Americans understood that they were in some nebulous competition with millions of lower-paid workers in other lands that the government seemed powerless to mitigate, Bush and Rove proposed legalizing the undocumented immigrants who had flowed across the border.

Could there have been a more profound misreading of the American temper? As political and policy czar rolled into one, Rove should have understood that Americans craved the security of a controllable border and a predictable and decent income. Instead, Rove's wish was father to the thought: Realignment required dismantling Democratic programs. It required winning more Hispanic voters (never mind that on economic issues, Hispanic voters are resoundingly liberal). It required the Rove program. Damn the torpedoes.

Yes, it was probably not Iraq but the Social Security debacle that put an end to Karl Rove's dreams and the Bush administration. Meyerson doesn't mention it but I think the Terri Schiavo fiasco also played a big part. Rove's final act to destroy the Republican party was the immigration act. Suddenly Republicans found themselves on the wrong end of Rove's slime gun.

When a vast majority of the American people lost confidence in the administration because of Social Security and Terri Schiavo they started taking a closer look at the debacle in Mesopotamia and didn't like what they saw.

Karl Rove could only be seen as a genius when he was standing next to the faux cowboy moron he had created. History will see him for what he was.

Quick Hits

Many of the Republicans are beginning to realize what a disaster "Bush's Brain" was. A couple of my favorite examples.
John Cole:

Instead of forging a permanent coalition, he destroyed the party from within with internecine warfare, and his gutter politics now leave behind a bitter and broken GOP, with differing factions that at best distrust each other, at worst, despise each other (I am actively rooting for a rout of the GOP in the Presidential election in 2008, and voted for Democrats in 2006). Rove’s key to success, his willingness to viciously attack his opponents, was also the key to his and the Republican’s downfall. If he and this administration had stuck to waging their nasty wars against only Democrats and people external to the GOP, I doubt we would be having this conversation. But they couldn’t, because they had no real principles- just issues to win the next little political victory as they moved onward, damned whoever gets in their way. As such, there is no real party left. All the alleged principles are gone- there are no core “conservative beliefs” left- those were all picked off one by one for some short term political victory or another.

All that is left is a broken GOP, an ascendant Democratic party, and an empty suit of a President with no track record of accomplishment and a disastrous war to manage. “Mission Accomplished,” I guess.

Andrew Sullivan:

Rove is one of the worst political strategists in recent times. He took a chance to realign the country and to unite it in a war - and threw it away in a binge of hate-filled niche campaigning, polarization and short-term expediency. His divisive politics and elevation of corrupt mediocrities to every branch of government has turned an entire generation off the conservative label. And rightly so. It will take another generation to recover from the toxins he has injected, with the president's eager approval, into the political culture and into the conservative soul.

Over at Open Left Mike Lux takes on the DLC and does a damned good job - yes, they really are irrelevant.

Because they have never built a mass base for their style of centrism, their entire operation has, by its nature, relied almost entirely on corporate elites for its financial support. As a result, the DLC-style of centrism is a quintessentially big business-style of centrism. That's why their pollsters, principally Mark Penn, whose main clientele is also big business, are so determined to never find any evidence of populism among the electorate. In fact, many of their financial supporters are not Democrats at all.

And things are going just great in Iraq:
Dozens killed in multiple suicide attacks in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Suicide bombings in a northern Iraqi town Tuesday targeted a religious minority and left at least 120 people dead and 150 wounded, according to police officials, who said there were three bombings in three locations.

What will Rove's mark be?

Jazz covered Karl Rove's departure below but I thought I would add a few things. WSJ winger Paul Gigot has a commentary this morning, 'The Mark of Rove'. In it he explains that Rove still sees a rosy picture of the Bush administration.

"He will move back up in the polls," says Mr. Rove, who interrupts my reference to Mr. Bush's 30% approval rating by saying it's heading close to "40%," and "higher than Congress."

Looking ahead, he adds, "Iraq will be in a better place" as the surge continues. Come the autumn, too, "we'll see in the battle over FISA" -- the wiretapping of foreign terrorists -- "a fissure in the Democratic Party." Also in the fall, "the budget fight will have been fought to our advantage," helping the GOP restore, through a series of presidential vetoes, its brand name on spending restraint and taxes.

Of course this is the same guy who "knew" the Republicans would hold both the house and the senate in 2006.

While Rove has been the guy progressives loved to revile I wonder if it is the Republicans who will end up with the bad taste of Karl Rove's brand of politics in their mouths. His brand of politics was divide and conquer. Pander to the extremist base with just enough moderation and a heavy dose of fear to draw enough independents to win. It worked for two election cycles but broke down seriously in 2006 when the independents and even moderate Republicans deserted the party of hate and fear. Those who identify themselves as Republicans is now at the lowest level in decades and the Democrats have a double digit lead. In 2000 the two parties were about even. Rove talks about Hillary Clinton:

As for the Democrats, "They are likely to nominate a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate" by the name of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Holding the White House for a third term is always difficult given the pent-up desire for change, he says, but "I think we've got a very good chance to do so."

While Hillary may have some electability issues the "fatally flawed" flawed candidates are more likely to be the Bush clones on the Republican side. Rove's goal was a permanent Republican majority and what he may have created instead in a Republican minority for several election cycles. So who is going to end up reviling Karl Rove - the Democrats or the Republicans?

If the Republican party is going to make a comeback anytime soon it will have to de-Rove itself.

Update
As usual Joe Gandelamn has some great observations. This one stands out but go read the entire post.

(5) Winning and governing by being in a constant state of war against enemies who are painted as a danger to the country could only work if he and and the administration enjoyed widespread credibility. Rove and Bush found their credibility crumbled. It could not count on not just a solid base, but a base of the SAME SIZE.

Sorry Karl, that just won't work anymore

When the going gets tough what do you do? If you are Karl Rove and the Bush administration you try to scare the shit out of everybody. This was obviously leaked to ABC news by one of Rove's Orcs.
Al Qaeda Cell in the U.S. Or On Its Way, According to New Intel

Senior U.S. intelligence officials tell ABC News new intelligence suggests a small al Qaeda cell is on its way to the United States, or may already be here.

The White House has convened an urgent multi-agency meeting for Thursday afternoon to deal with the new threat.

Yes, it's so urgent they are going to wait two days to have this "emergency" meeting. Sorry Karl, this shit just doesn't fly anymore - you are so transparent. Bush's is giving Nixon a run for his money and the Republicans are bailing out on Iraq. You are going to have to do better than this. Is Bush going to give up his month long vacation in Crawford. OK, that was silly, he doesn't make any of the decisions anyway. We all know the real "decider" is Cheney.

Dead Fish, Gordon Smith and Dick Cheney

Over at The Left Coaster paradox give some national exposure to the story of how Karl Rove destroyed a salmon run and a fishing industry in order to get Gordon Smith re-elected in 2002. Oh, and he throws Cheney into the mix as well.

Update
I see Michelle Neumann has this covered over at BlueOregon as well.

Whose Damn Government Is It, Anyway?

In my life of 54 years I have vague, nearly formless memories of a time when Americans actually thought the Federal government was ours. I didn't say it actually was ours, just we thought so. I don't believe anybody who stopped to think believed there wasn't a real advantage to being wealthy and powerful, they just believed they had a part in it. Well, apparently BushCo didn't think their advantages were sufficient. Nope, wealth, power, media access, and the contest of ideas was nowhere near sufficient, they had to use the mechanisms of governance.

Think Progress noted in this article that the GSA head Lurita Doan has been recommended for firing by the Office of Special Counsel and they are beginning investigations of nearly 20 other agencies. The White House has admitted nearly 20 other agencies received the Power Point presentation by Karl Rove's office. The Hatch Act of 1939 prohibits partisan activities or electoral activities on federal property, it really is pretty darn clear, but Ken Mehlman had this to say in 2005,

"One of the things that can happen in Washington when you work in an agency is that you forget who sent you there. And it’s important to remind people that you’re George Bush people. … If there’s one empire I want built, it’s the George Bush empire." [One Party Country, p. 102]

Oddly enough the Constitution starts out "We the People..." not we the Party in office... Now you can do what you want with this proposition, but I'm here to tell you that we the people out number these plutocratic rats and they serve at OUR pleasure. You've got your mouth, pen/keyboard, your vote and maybe you're awake. You can help take this back, you can help make this work. We need to do it this way, understand we all have those things and some of us also have the reset button - the MAD - mutually assured destruction option reserved in the Second Amendment. The wake up, pay attention, take part option is vastly preferable. I don't even care what political party or none you belong to, this mess exists because we've tolerated it.

Ron's bio notes that I'm an active Democrat, I am that, I'm also not your poster-boy Democrat, I reserve the right to think for myself and disagree sometimes. I also work within the Party to try to get my view known and respected and even reflected - because I won't be kicked around quietly and I want a country that is good for its citizens. How about you?

Oh yeah, hello I'm the new contributor, nice to be here

Was She Acting On Her Own?

Does It Really Matter?

Colleagues Cite Partisan Focus by Justice Official

WASHINGTON, May 11 — Two years ago, Robin C. Ashton, a seasoned criminal prosecutor at the Department of Justice, learned from her boss that a promised promotion was no longer hers.

“You have a Monica problem,” Ms. Ashton was told, according to several Justice Department officials. Referring to Monica M. Goodling, a 31-year-old, relatively inexperienced lawyer who had only recently arrived in the office, the boss added, “She believes you’re a Democrat and doesn’t feel you can be trusted.”

Ms. Ashton’s ouster — she left the Executive Office for United States Attorneys for another Justice Department post two weeks later — was a critical early step in a plan that would later culminate in the ouster of nine United States attorneys last year.

Ms. Goodling would soon be quizzing applicants for civil service jobs at Justice Department headquarters with questions that several United States attorneys said were inappropriate, like who was their favorite president and Supreme Court justice. One department official said an applicant was even asked, “Have you ever cheated on your wife?”

Ms. Goodling also moved to block the hiring of prosecutors with résumés that suggested they might be Democrats, even though they were seeking posts that were supposed to be nonpartisan, two department officials said.

And she helped maintain lists of all the United States attorneys that graded their loyalty to the Bush administration, including work on past political campaigns, and noted if they were members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.

By the time Ms. Goodling resigned in April — after her role in the firing of the prosecutors became public and she had been promoted to the role of White House liaison — she and other senior department officials had revamped personnel practices affecting employees from the top of the agency to the bottom.

I suspect she was largely acting on her own when it came to the lower level employee decisions but was taking orders from the Rove White House when it came to the US Attorneys themselves.

So who and what is Monica Goodling? I think she is what Bob Altemeyer would call an authoritarian follower.

Authoritarian followers usually support the established authorities in their society, such as government officials and traditional religious leaders. Such people have historically been the "proper" authorities in life, the time-honored, entitled, customary leaders, and that means a lot to most authoritarians. Psychologically these followers have personalities featuring:
1) a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in their society;
2) high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and
3) a high level of conventionalism.
Because the submission occurs to traditional authority, I call these followers right-wing authoritarians.

This brings us to one of the most important facts about Monica. Sandy Levinson at Balkinization explains:

Still, the story walks on eggs with regard to one of the most important aspects of Ms. Goodling, her religious zeal. Lipton mentions that she graduated from Regent Law School, '99, and notes that that is Pat Robertson's law school. But there has still been no genuine examination of the extent to which Ms. Goodling used her remarkable clout within the Justice Department to focus on hiring not only conservative Republicans, but also persons who were equally opposed to what she no doubt believes is the sinful secularism of modern society.

Disciples of charismatic religious leaders like Pat Robertson are trained to not question authority - are by their very nature "authoritarian followers". This makes them very useful to secular authoritarians like Karl Rove. If Monica Goodling had any knowledge of Constitutional Law and theory, which is doubtful considering her educational background, it would be displaced by the wishes of the authoritarians she worked for. The story of Monica Goodling is not so much about the purge of US Attorneys as it is about the danger of the religious right in government.

Will she sing....

....or do a Sergeant Schultz?
Goodling Granted Immunity in DOJ Probe

A federal judge approved an immunity deal Friday allowing former Justice Department aide Monica Goodling to testify before Congress about the firing of eight federal prosecutors.


Goodling, who served as the department's White House liaison, has refused to discuss the firings without a guarantee that she will not be prosecuted. Congress agreed to the deal, Justice Department investigators reluctantly agreed not to not oppose it and U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan gave it final approval Friday.


"Monica Goodling may not refuse to testify," Hogan began his brief order, which said that Goodling could not be prosecuted for anything other than perjury in connection with her testimony.


Lawmakers want to question Goodling as part of an inquiry into whether the Justice Department played politics with the hiring and firing of department officials. What began as an inquiry into whether U.S. attorneys were fired for political reasons has grown to include the role of the White House in the firings and whether the Justice Department officials misled Congress about them.


Goodling's lawyer has said that, with an immunity seal, she would cooperate and testify honestly.

So will that "honest" testimony finger Rove or will Monica have a series of memory lapses?

Update
The commissar thinks she will sing.

So, will Ms. Goodling, who was in a position to know, spill the beans about Purge-gate, or will hearing be another I-dont-remember-fest? There are too many possible ways to read the tea leaves, but it seems to me likely that she made a deal with Congress, and will talk forthrightly. If so, it should be very enlightening.

Thanks Karl

Andrew Sullivan has read the latest PEW Report and observes that Karl Rove has created a permanent Republican minority.

It turns out that Karl Rove has gone a long way toward securing a permanent majority in American politics ... for liberals and Democrats. The collapse of a coherent, freedom-loving, reality-based conservatism is surely part of the reason.

Alberto Gonzales will eventually be thrown under the bus because of his incompetence in Prosecutor Purge debacle. It's becoming clear that Rove was up to his eyeballs in all of this and that his brand of politics has all but destroyed the Republican Party. Now why would they want to keep him around? Why not throw him under the bus with Gonzales? He has outlived his usefulness and in fact is now a political liability. The problem is they know what a vicious asshole he is and he does know where all the bodies are buried.

Constitutional Crisis?

I assume this isn't going to cut it.
White House Offers Interview With Rove

WASHINGTON Mar 20, 2007 (AP)— The White House offered Tuesday to make political strategist Karl Rove and former counsel Harriet Miers available for interviews but not testimony under oath before congressional committees investigating the firing of eight federal prosecutors.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, said he would still press for White House aides to testify under oath, saying that White House counsel Fred Fielding "indicated he didn't want to negotiate" whether Rove and others would have to appear in a full hearing. "That doesn't mean we're not going to try," Schumer said.

I would like to hear some stronger words from Schumer and the Democrats like NO, that's not enough. If it's no to under oath it's yes to subpoenas. Karl Rove will lie - make him lie under oath.


I really think the White House wants subpoenas and wants a Constitutional crisis. Their battered hubris needs a boost and that they have enough tyrant loving federalists on the Supreme Court to eventually win. Sadly they may be right.

We will see what Bush himself has to say at 5:45 PM (EST)

Update
Well it looks like I was right!
Bush warns Dems to take offer in firings

WASHINGTON - President Bush warned Democrats Tuesday to accept his offer to have top aides testify about the firings of federal prosecutors only privately and not under oath, or risk a constitutional showdown from which he would not back down.

Bush to Congress: You can talk to them off the record but don't expect them to tell the truth. If that's not enough; "bring it on". Leahy seems to be ready to do just that.

Democrats' response to his proposal was swift and firm. "Testimony should be on the record and under oath. That's the formula for true accountability," said Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Update II
As I mentioned above I think the courts will probably uphold executive privilege and John Cole agrees.

My second thought is that I am siding with Bush on the subpoena nonsense (despite my snarky post last night, which was actually more about the other administration misbehaviors/power grabs and how they were excused), and so will the courts. They will not allow aides to come forward and testify, and the courts will side with him. The Democrats will have to use the document dumps and other means to find out what really happened, and I am not willing to throw aside a necessary precedent that has served previous Presidents well.

I'm inclined to agree. There is a danger in castrating the office because of one really bad person who holds the office. That doesn't mean I don't think the Democrats should try - they should. While the President does have the authority to reject congressional demands it will only make things worse for the administration, convincing even more voters that the administration has something to hide. While the subpoena works it way through the court system the Democrats should continue to investigate using everything else at their disposal. Remember when it came to Nixon's tapes the Supreme Court made an exception to executive privilege because there was so much evidence that the Nixon administration was trying to conceal illegal activity.

Play Ball - or else

Today the New York Times has a shockingly good editorial on the prosecutor purge this morning:
Phony Fraud Charges

In its fumbling attempts to explain the purge of United States attorneys, the Bush administration has argued that the fired prosecutors were not aggressive enough about addressing voter fraud. It is a phony argument; there is no evidence that any of them ignored real instances of voter fraud. But more than that, it is a window on what may be a major reason for some of the firings.

In partisan Republican circles, the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people. By resisting pressure to crack down on “fraud,” the fired United States attorneys actually appear to have been standing up for the integrity of the election system.

And we have a good example right across the Columbia River from me.

John McKay, one of the fired attorneys, says he was pressured by Republicans to bring voter fraud charges after the 2004 Washington governor’s race, which a Democrat, Christine Gregoire, won after two recounts. Republicans were trying to overturn an election result they did not like, but Mr. McKay refused to go along. “There was no evidence,” he said, “and I am not going to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury.”

Later, when he interviewed with Harriet Miers, then the White House counsel, for a federal judgeship that he ultimately did not get, he says, he was asked to explain “criticism that I mishandled the 2004 governor’s election.”

There was never any question that George W. Bush had the right to fire the US Attorneys the only question was why they were fired. It looks increasingly like they were fired because the refused to let their offices become tools in Karl Rove's political tool box.

The United States attorney purge appears to have been prompted by an array of improper political motives. Carol Lam, the San Diego attorney, seems to have been fired to stop her from continuing an investigation that put Republican officials and campaign contributors at risk. These charges, like the accusation that Mr. McKay and other United States attorneys were insufficiently aggressive about voter fraud, are a way of saying, without actually saying, that they would not use their offices to help Republicans win elections. It does not justify their firing; it makes their firing a graver offense.

As Paul Krugman and others have mentioned the real story here may not be the attorneys who were fired but the ones who weren't. Did they willingly play political hardball with Karl Rove? A cloud hangs over their heads.