NOTHING COULD BE MORE APT THAN ROVE WORKING FOR McCAIN

Lucas updates Lukacs

I haven't read a biography of Karl Rove and I don't know when he made his particular pact with Satan. I do know he started working for the Utah Republican Party when he was still in college and that that was followed by stints working for Bob Bennett and then for Ralph Smith's unsuccessful re-election bid in Illinois. Like Cheney and the majority of the Bush Regime higher ups, he gamed and manipulated the system to avoid fighting in the Vietnam War. His first documented criminal activity involving political campaigns was in 1970 when he used false ID to sneak into the campaign office of Alan Dixon (D-IL) and steal campaign letterhead so he could forge and distribute fake flyers in order to disrupt a Dixon rally. After he was exposed, Rove excused this earliest known example of his criminal behavior in politics as "a youthful prank at the age of 19 and I regret it." Perhaps if he had been punished then he wouldn't have gone on to commit the serious crimes he has since.

After Rove dropped out of college he went to work for the Nixon campaign under future federal prisoner Donald Segretti, from whom he learned even more about lying, cheating and corrupting democracy. He also became close with another GOP practitioner of filthy campaign tactics, Lee Atwater. He was well on the way to a life of crime.

There were other chances to save Rove's soul as a young man but he was in the Republican Party where saving souls is a catch phrase you use to lure in sucker votes, not something anyone tackles seriously. Ironically, the one person who did take Rove's serial criminality seriously was a secular Republican, George H.W. Bush, this one's father. In 1973 Rove, then trying to steal an intra-party election-- for himself, as chairman of the College Republicans-- made the Washington Post for the first time. The article (August 10, 1973) was titled, "Republican Party Probes Official as Teacher of Tricks." Nixon had the FBI investigate Rove. After it was determined that Rove had indeed stolen the election and that he had no morals and would stoop to any level to win, Bush senior made sure he got the job and later promoted him into other jobs. (Eventually he fired him for leaking material during the Reagan-Bush 1980 presidential campaign.) One of his jobs for Bush had been to run errands and one led to a meeting with George II. Rove, who many gay Insiders will swear is a closet homosexual, fell head over heals in love (literally) with young Bush: "Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma-- you know, wow" (The Guardian, October 9, 2004- The Brains).

Rove married a wealthy Houston socialite in 1976 but she divorced him soon after, purportedly because he was more interested in men than in women. Eventually he managed to find another woman to marry him and even managed to father a child, all part of a life built on deception and self-loathing. Ironically, Rove helped Bush II win his Texas governorship by planting stories that Ann Richards' campaign was dominated by lesbians and "homosexual activists." Despite his own closeted homosexuality he has never shrunk from playing the gay card-- even when it was false-- against his opponents.

As time went on Rove bounced from campaign to campaign and was always involved in dirty tricks, more often than not crossing the line into criminal behavior. He has never been held accountable in any meaningful way and his descent into criminality has accelerated over time. In 1992 George H.W. Bush fired him from his presidential campaign for planting a negative story with Bob Novak about a close Bush friend and financier, Robert Mosbacher. It would not be the last time Rove used Novak to spread his poison.

I don't mean to go through every instance of Rove's criminal behavior; that would take up the whole day. I just want to bring up that on the same day the disgraced former advisor to the most hated president in history decided to offer some unsolicited "advice" to Barack Obama, the case that many hope will finally land him in prison may be breaking. Marcy at Emptywheel has the whole low down on Rove's troubles and how he (with the assistance of Newsweek writer Michael Isikoff) is attempting to worm out of them again.

Oh, and about the "advice" to Obama. It's just a thinly veiled typically vicious Rovian attack on Obama's strengths, part of his job as an advisor for... you guessed it, the Senate's most deceitful phony-baloney hypocrite, John W. McCain.


Driving to the airport the other day I was listening to the Thom Hartmann Show and heard an interview with Gov. Don Siegelman. I know what a criminal Rove is but this was actually astounding. Please listen: