LAT: Rove unmasked [View All]

[question everything]

JONATHAN CHAIT
Rove unmasked
Jonathan Chait

October 28, 2005

NOW THAT the Harriet E. Miers nomination has officially gone down in flames, it's time to admit what many of us have always known: Karl Rove really is George W. Bush's Svengali.

For years, conservatives have treated the notion that Rove is the mastermind behind Bush as some sort of loopy conspiracy theory concocted by Bush-hating liberals. Andrew Ferguson's take in the Weekly Standard last year is typical: " Democratic adversaries have obsessed over piecing together odd, paranoid caricatures of the man who's driving them nuts — Bush as the agent of Halliburton, Bush as the idiot son of robber baron privilege, Bush the religious crank, the right-wing ideologue, the draft dodger, the front man for Enron or Rove or the Saudi royals or J.R. Ewing."

(snip)

But in the case of Miers, Rove was out of the picture, distracted by his potential indictment in the Valerie Plame/CIA scandal. As the New York Times reported last week, "Some conservatives and Rove allies say Card kept Mr. Rove in the dark about the seriousness of Mr. Bush's intentions until very late in the process, thus sidestepping the advisor who would have been best able to anticipate dissent among Republicans." This is what scientists call "isolating the independent variable."

(snip)


So now the pretense that Rove was never pulling the strings behind the surface has been dropped for the more immediate imperative of saving his hide.

All of this suggests two things: First, if the Plame scandal takes Rove out of commission, Bush's second term might look awfully ugly. And second, maybe we Bush-haters weren't just a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theorists after all.


http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-chait28oct28,1,477464.column