THE BIG STORY WILL BE "ROVE REPUDIATES BUSH" OR "BUSH REPUDIATES ROVE"

I don't think Karl Rove gets overly worked up about an editorial in the New York Times. He and his allies have worked hard to redefine them as something somehow outside of their mainstream. At one time, today's editorial The Rovian Era, would have had as much impact on him as any April Fool's joke. But this has gone beyond a laughing matter now. Karl may have to use his Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card after all.

Turn over a scandal in Washington these days and the chances are you'll find Karl Rove. His tracks are everywhere: whether it's helping to purge United States attorneys, coaching bureaucrats on how to spend taxpayers’ money to promote Republican candidates, hijacking the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for partisan politics, or helping to organize a hit on the character of one of the first people to publicly reveal the twisting of intelligence reports on Iraq.

His dream of creating a permanent Republican Party majority-- at any cost to democratic institutions and to the very fiber that binds our society-- has shattered. It was over 300 years ago that Louis XIV is said to have uttered "L'État, c'est moi." The sentiment brought his family and their retainers to an unfortunate end, although not in his lifetime.


If Bush fancied himself as a kind of divine right era king, Rove was surely his Cardinal Mazarin, his Metternich or his Bismarck. "Rove never had to submit to Senate confirmation hearings. Yet, from the very start, photographs of cabinet meetings showed him in the background, keeping an enforcer's eye on the proceedings. After his re-election in 2004, President Bush formally put Mr. Rove in charge of all domestic policy."

With Cheney running the foreign policy ship (into the ground), Rove "took a lead role in selecting federal judges and the hiring-- and firing-- of United States attorneys. Mr. Rove’s staff maneuvered to fire the prosecutor in Arkansas and replace him with a Rove protégé, and also seems to have been involved in the firing of a United States attorney in New Mexico who refused to file what he considered to be baseless charges of election fraud against Democrats." The outrageous scenario was repeated around the country, certainly in Seattle and San Diego.

And it was repeated in every area of government. Rove never imagined his partisan little slide show presented to GSA staffers-- responsible for the disbursement of billions of dollars in federal contracts-- would be shown publicly in a congressional hearing investigating serious criminal behavior-- his. Regime hacks like Scott Stanzel may say the presentation was not out of the ordinary but that doesn't make it remotely legal.

When Republican senators demanded more stringent language be included in the Hatch Act of 1934, this is almost precisely what they had in mind-- only they had Democrats in mind, not a Republican chancellor.

This sort of behavior should not be all that surprising. It was not that long ago that the Bush White House embraced the priorities of the Republican governor of Mississippi and virtually ignored the far greater needs of Louisiana's Democratic governor after Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. Rove retreated a bit from the public eye in the heat of the Lewis Libby trial, but after avoiding indictment, he seems to have regained his confidence. Take a look at YouTube to see his bizarre, humor-challenged gyrations as "MC Rove" at an annual media dinner in Washington the other night.

The investigation of the firings of the United States attorneys seems to be closing in on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who should have been fired weeks ago. But Congress should bring equal scrutiny to the more powerful Mr. Rove. If it does, especially by forcing him to testify in public, it will find that he has been at the vortex of many of the biggest issues they are now investigating.

Do you get the feeling Henry Waxman knows that and plans to get to the bottom of it? I do. And so does everyone else. I heard no less a right-wing eminence than Tony Blankley, when asked if "the wheels are coming off the Bush Administration," advocate that Bush do what Reagan did when he got in trouble (ContraGate) and turn to the Republican Insider Establishment he has so studiously ignored for 6 years. That's not going to happen-- at least not until after Rove is indicted.

Last night at Firedoglake, Pach took a far more analytic look at the latest twist in the chameleonlike career of political gun-for-hire Matthew Dowd than today's Times did when it announced that he had seen the light and was renouncing the man he says he had "fallen in love" with, George W. Bush. Jim Rutenberg's naive and pathetic whitewash should make the Times ashamed-- or maybe there are just an awful lot of men and women at the Times who totally grok where Dowd is coming from since its a place they've been comfortably inhabiting themselves for the last half dozen years.

And if they can still look in the mirror after reading Pach, maybe Cliff Schecter's Cry Me A River, Schmuck or When A Man Knows He Is To Be Hanged In A Fortnight, It Concentrates His Mind Wonderfully by Sisyphus Shrugged will help them reach into the dark recesses of their moldering souls for a little spring cleaning.