Rove Goes Home

If there is a more lame excuse than "leaving to spend more time with family", I do not know what it is.

So, did Cheney finally push him out? Could it be that he is leaving a few steps ahead of an indictment and that "Former White House Official Indicted" is a little more of a palatable headline to the Chimperor? Or maybe he wants to be first in line for a no-show job at the American War Criminals' Enterprise Institute?

Or maybe he is going to cut a deal and rat out others in the Administration.

Nobody knows but Old Turdblossom.

While Rove may or may not have been the political genius that the pundits in the press credit him with being, I would argue that he has been one of the most divisive figures in recent American history and, if this nation politically falls apart in the next few decades, much of the blame will rest with Rove. Rove (and the Bush Administration) never acted as though the job of the president was to lead all Americans, no, they ran the White House to serve the base of the Republican party at the expense of all other Americans.

Let's look at the record:

A good president would have used the events of 9/11 to unite the country; Rove used the events of 9/11 as a political tool in an attempt to drive the Democrats into political oblivion.

The Administration used the Iraq War as a tool to enrich its friends and supporters in the Defense contractors; it can be argued that the big winner in the Iraq War has been Halliburton, Blackwater, and their ilk.

The Administration used fears of Middle East control of energy to promote a three point energy program: Drill. Drill. Drill. Anything that could conceivably harm their friends in the extraction industries was fought: Pollution controls, conservation of national resources and climate change.

As a result of slavish adherence to the Rovian "satisfy the base" strategy, any potential conflict between what could be scientifically shown to be a benefit (or the promise of one) and what was a rigid evangelical conservative Christian view of the world was resolved in favor of the evangelicals. Bush will probably go down in history as the most scientifically ignorant world leader since Josef Stalin's belief in Marxist biology.

The Rove/Bush selection of government workers for ideological purity at the expense of competence hardly needs to be rehashed here. From the selection of idiot children to work in the Coalition Provisional Authority, having a high-school graduate review scientific papers for NASA and "Heckuvajob" Brownie to the active recruitment of attorneys for the Justice Department from one of the lowest ranked law schools in the nation, wherever competence could be sacrificed for ideology, it was. In this regard, Rove made sure that the Federal government operated as competently as the Soviet government once did.

Rove has also ensured that Congress is now relentlessly partisan, stocked with firebrands on both sides of the aisle who would rather draw blood from the other side than govern. (Though, to be fair, some of the blame for this can also be shouldered by Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay.)

And the end result is that the only Americans who think that Bush is anything other than a complete failure as a president are those in the Republican base, and even they are having rather belated second thoughts.

"Ideologically driven incompetence" in government is the Rove legacy. It will take a generation for America to dig itself out of the trench Rove dug for it. In the meantime, the rest of the world is not standing still. If, at the end of the 21st Century, the United States is as relevant in the world as Great Britain was at the end of the 20th Century, no small amount of the blame for that fall will be laid at the feet of Karl Rove.