The blog languishes, I know, but it is for the greater good. Book work is intense right now. Regular programming will resume at some point down the road when a first draft is complete or within sight.
In the meantime, a thought for the day: I share the belief of many of my media colleagues that it would be a fine thing indeed for Karl Rove to leave government service, given the now-public record of his dirty trickster-ing, compounded by a White House press office cavalcade of cover-up lies.
But I’m willing to bet that, in fact, Rove is around for the long haul. He’s President Bush’s friend and closest adviser — the man hailed in quasi-Biblical terms by his foremost beneficiary, after last November’s elections, as “The Architect” of right-wing triumph.
If Democrats controlled Congress, they could perhaps make trouble for a public official caught so flat-footedly and foolishly in the machinery of a legally dubious political revenge play. But they don’t. They have no leverage. And the record of the Bush White House is one of digging in heels in the face of moral culpability and ethical collapse.
Accountability is anathema to these men. No one in the Bush administration has seen fit to resign in the face of a torture scandal that has set back the war on Al-Qaeda more than any bloody battle; Donald Rumsfeld is still in charge of the military that his misbegotten strategies have begun to wreck. Alberto Gonzales, who in his service as White House counsel helped approve the legal opinions that made that torture scandal possible, was rewarded with a promotion to the Justice Department, and may well soon sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, where he can further protect American soldiers from the scourge of the Geneva Convention. Dick Cheney’s escalatingly comical pronouncements on how well the war in Iraq is going have begun to achieve a Lyndon Johnson-esque width of credibility gap, but he doesn’t appear fazed in the least.
President Bush explained the logic here to us all when he declared that his “accountability moment” came and went last November. Karl Rove’s tactical political genius ensured the moment would come out Bush’s way. Now there’s no accountability at all. Unless there is hard evidence of perjury in front of a grand jury, which I doubt Rove was dumb enough to commit, I don’t think The Architect is going anywhere. The White House is his house now.
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