By H. N. Burdett
That elegant phrasemaker, New York Governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith , coined this gem regarding hyperbolic political rhetoric: "No matter how you slice it, it's still baloney."
Smith's apt words came to mind while wading through Courage and Consequences, the memoir published this week of Karl Rove, the strategist credited with elevating George W. Bush to the governorship of Texas and then to the presidency of the United States. Rove's voluminous apologia is heavy on "consequences," but feather-light on "courage."
A disciple of Lee Atwater, who turned political campaign dirty tricks into an art form, Rove has grinded out the literary equivalent of taking a bullet for the boss. In fact, he seems ready and willing to take a whole barrage of rounds for the 43rd President of the United States who is a leading contender to be remembered as its very worst. Still, to portray this as "courage" would be a stretch.
On his deathbed 19 years ago this month, Atwater, suffering from aggressive brain cancer, proffered a belated but apparently heartfelt apology for his "harsh cruelty" toward Democratic nominee and former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential campaign. It was Dukakis to whom Atwater referred when he once vowed to "strip the bark off the little bastard" and "make Willie Horton his running mate" -- the latter a reference to a convicted murderer who committed rape while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison. But there's not much mea culpa in Rove's 600-plus page tome, large parts of which read like an overblown closing argument for George W. Bush's defense against the presumably inevitable long knives of future historians.
Rove does take the blame for the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, thus damaging the Bush 43 presidency. Even here, the author does not propound remorse for failing to discourage the president from invading Iraq before the weapons could be located. What Rove regrets is not having countered Democratic attacks when no WMD were located, "in a forceful and overwhelming way. We should have seen this for what it was: a poison-tipped dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush presidency."
That statement, in itself, is prima facie evidence against Rove for moral bankruptcy, particularly when he admits on these same pages that he doubted Congress would have supported preemptive war against Iraq without WMD.
"So, who was responsible for the failure to respond?" he asks. "I was. I should have stepped forward, rang the warning bell, or pressed for full-scale response. I didn't." Why? Well, you see, he had other priorities. "Preoccupied with the coming campaign and the pressure of the daily schedule in the West Wing, I did not see how damaging the assault was."
Surely Rove can be forgiven for the slight indiscretion of placing a political campaign above legitimate concerns about the justification for landing U.S. troops on foreign soil.
Rove writes: "The Bush administration itself would probably have sought other ways to constrain Saddam, bring about regime change and deal with Iraq's horrendous human rights violations. . ."
Really? So there were, after all, other ways of confronting Saddam without the investment of, as of the end of last month, a total of 4,379 American lives lost, another 31,693 wounded, to say nothing of the Associated Press estimate of more than 110,000 Iraqis killed.
And the beat goes on now that President Obama has chosen to own the war he inherited, albeit with a plan for limiting the
venue to Afghanistan.
There remain eerie echoes of the words of a young ex-Naval officer named John Kerry testiying in 1971 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against War: "How do you ask a man to be the last one to die for a mistake?"
Others may forsake Dubya and just as soon have us forget they had anything to do with his disastrous eight years in the White House, but not "Turd Blossom," as the former president affectionately dubbed Rove. For the man who has also been called "Bush's brain" and, when he pulled off one of his many grand coups -- like wiretapping his candidate's office in Texas and calling in the press to blame opponents -- W. substituted for the aforementioned less delicate down-home nickname, the sobriquet, "Boy Genius."
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Rove now acknowledges that the White House response was "too passive for too long," then segues seamlessly into faulting the interminable delay in providing rescue and relief efforts on Democratic leadership in Louisiana and New Orleans squabbling over who should take control and how to cooperate with the federal government.
In truth, there was plenty of blame to spread around in the aftermath of Katrina, but that Rove continues to find it necessary five years after the fact to bob, weave and deflect by pointing fingers at others -- a game he has more than mastered -- is indicative of a man who shudders at the daunting thought of being crushed by history's final judgment.
But Karl Rove does not want to leave us with the impression that he is the cold, calculating, bloodless monster portrayed in the liberal press. Such creatures are devoid of tears. Rove, however, confesses that he has cried. After receiving assurances that he would not be indicted in the CIA leak case in which Valerie Plame's identity was compromised, Rove confides that he cradled his telephone and wept. Most touching.
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