The Problem With Fredos

From Belgravia Disptch

Gregory Djenejian
"I often remind our fellow citizens that we live in the greatest country in the world and that I have lived the American dream. Even my worst days as attorney general have been better than my father's best days."
--from Alberto Gonzalez' resignation statement.
Even a determined Gonzalez-hater might find this statement somehow poignant, given his family's hardscrabble background. But what Mr. Gonzalez evidently fails to understand is that he has diminished our collective American dream, alas. He diminished it by dismissing the Geneva Conventions as "quaint", by allowing a horrific torture policy to take root, by his banana-republic like late night visits to John Ashcroft's hospital room, by ignoring Congressional subpoenas, by authorizing illegal wiretapping programs, by firing qualified United States attorneys in an apparent putsch, and on and on.
Still, I will confess to a measure of sympathy for the man. Much like Harriet Miers, he was so supremely underqualified for his position, so spectacularly beyond his depth, that he should never have been put in such a difficult position. Instead Bush's bovine obsessiveness with loyalty--basic competence be damned--has focused the brutal kleig-lights of international opprobrium on old friends like Harriet and Alberto. Like Brownie, say, they will become key examples in the history books of the rampant cronyism and incompetence of this Adminstration.
Their legacy thus sealed, one wonders, is Bush even cognizant of how he's effectively besmirched his friends by trying to elevate them to realms they should have never occupied to begin with? I suspect not, as the President's capacity for self-criticism appears somewhere between minute and non-existent. Instead, he's doubtless bitterly nursing his grudges, rankled that Senators like Arlen Specter and Pat Leahy and Chuck Schumer dared to challenge an Attorney General whose sycophancy to the President was so complete as to render the Department of Justice a totally discredited arm of Government, one where Administration lawyers dutifully genuflected before David Addington and John Yoo's youthful exuberances.
In the end, I suspect Gonzalez simply couldn't tolerate the punishing mortification anymore, the spectacle of his gross incompetence playing out so harshly on the national stage. And so he finally summoned up the courage to confront the President, that one time, if only to try and salvage whatever crumbs of dignity he had left, likely pleading with the Bush to set him loose. Put differently, his only act of rebellion came at the very end, not on the important issues of the day that so badly sullied our democracy and highest traditions, but because Gonzalez could no longer abide a crushing humiliation that had by then become total.
Ironically evincing a smigden of backbone only in a bid to persuade Bush to allow him to move off stage to spare himself further misery, this belated act of banal self-preservation sadly came far too late. By then our collective American dream had been badly tarnished. Still, if it is part of the price of him leaving, let us allow him to fancifully imagine he is still somehow living his. All told, it's a small price to pay as we begin to clear out the rot left in the wake of this baleful Administration.Posted by Gregory Djenejian; Belgravia Dispatch.

Senator Craig Tells America

"I was never Gay!"

From the AP Wire By Todd Dvorak BOISE, Idaho -- Under fire from leaders of his own party, Idaho Sen. Larry Craig on Tuesday the only thing he had done wrong was to plead guilty after a police complaint of lewd conduct in a men's room. He declared, "I am not gay. I never have been gay."
"I did nothing wrong at the Minneapolis airport," he said at a news conference with his wife, Suzanne, at his side.
Craig's defiant stance came as Senate Republican leaders in Washington called for an ethics committee review into his involvement in a police sting operation this summer in the airport men's room.
"In the meantime, the leadership is examining other aspects of the case to see if additional action is required," Sen. Mitch McConnell and other top GOP lawmakers said in a written statement.
A private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, also filed a complaint with the ethics committee seeking an investigation into whether Craig violated Senate rules by engaging in disorderly conduct.
Craig entered his plea several weeks after an undercover police officer in the airport arrested him and issued a complaint that said the three-term senator had engaged in actions "often used by persons communicating a desire to engage in sexual conduct."
Craig said he has hired a lawyer and will ask him to review the case.
The airport incident occurred June 11. Craig signed his plea papers on Aug. 1, and word of the events surfaced Monday. The senator issued a statement Monday night that said, "In hindsight, I should have pled not guilty."
He repeated that assertion at the Idaho news conference. "In June, I overreacted and made a poor decision," he said. "I chose to plead guilty to a lesser charge in hopes of making it go away."
Craig was at times defiant, at others apologetic on Tuesday.
"Please let me apologize to my family, friends and staff and fellow Idahoans for the cloud placed over Idaho," he said. "I did nothing wrong at the Minneapolis airport. I did nothing wrong, and I regret the decision to plead guilty and the sadness that decision has brought on my wife, on my family, friends, staff and fellow Idahoans."
The conservative three-term senator, who has represented Idaho in Congress for more than a quarter-century, is up for re-election next year. He said he would announce next month whether he would run again and suggested he still considers himself a politician with a future.
"Over the years, I have accomplished a lot for Idaho, and I hope Idahoans will allow me to continue to do that. There are still goals I would like to accomplish. And I believe I can still be an effective leader for our state," he said.
Craig, who has voted against gay marriage, finds his political future in doubt because of the case, which has drawn national attention.
Craig, 62, has faced rumors about his sexuality since the 1980s, but allegations that he had engaged in gay sex have never been substantiated. Craig has denied the assertions.
Trying to put his actions "in context," Craig lashed out at the Idaho Statesman, which published a lengthy article Tuesday on its investigation into the senator's actions.
The scandal had already taken a political toll. On Monday, Craig resigned from a prominent role with Republican Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. He had been one of Romney's top Senate supporters, serving as a liaison for the campaign since February.
Asked about Craig, Romney said, "He's disappointed the American people."
"Yeah, I think it reminds us of Mark Foley and Bill Clinton. I think it reminds us of the fact that people who are elected to public office continue to disappoint, and they somehow think that if they vote the right way on issues of significance or they can speak a good game, that we'll just forgive and forget," Romney said on CNBC's "Kudlow & Company."
Foley is a former Republican lawmaker who resigned nearly a year ago after being confronted with the computer messages he sent to male teenage pages who had worked on Capitol Hill. Clinton is the former president accused in congressional impeachment proceedings of lying about an affair with a White House intern.
According to a Hennepin County, Minn., court docket, Craig pleaded guilty to a disorderly conduct charge on Aug. 8, with the court dismissing a charge of gross misdemeanor interference to privacy.
The court docket said Craig paid $575 in fines and fees and was put on unsupervised probation for a year. A sentence of 10 days in the county workhouse was stayed.
According to the prosecutor's complaint, obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, airport police Sgt. Dave Karsnia, who was investigating allegations of sexual conduct in airport restrooms, went into a stall shortly after noon on June 11 and closed the door.
Minutes later, the officer said he saw Craig gazing into his stall through the crack between the door and the frame.
After a man in the adjacent stall left, Craig entered it and put his roller bag against the front of the stall door, "which Sgt. Karsnia's experience has indicated is used to attempt to conceal sexual conduct by blocking the view from the front of the stall," said the complaint, which was dated June 25.
The complaint said Craig then tapped his right foot several times and moved it closer to Karsnia's stall and then moved it to where it touched Karsnia's foot. Karsnia recognized that "as a signal often used by persons communicating a desire to engage in sexual conduct," the complaint said.
Craig then passed his left hand under the stall divider into Karsnia's stall with his palms up and guided it along the divider toward the front of the stall three times, the complaint said.
The officer then showed his police identification under the divider and pointed toward the exit "at which time the defendant exclaimed 'No!'" the complaint said.
The Aug. 8 police report says that Craig had handed the arresting officer a business card that identified him as a member of the Senate.
"What do you think about that?" Craig is alleged to have said, according to the report.
While Craig said he had made a mistake in not getting a lawyer before pleading guilty, a police report says he returned to where he was booked 11 days after his June 11 arrest - and more than a month before he entered a plea - and said he needed a "contact so his lawyer can speak to someone."
The officer at the booking station connected him with Karsnia who provided him with the name and phone number of the government attorney handling the case, police said.
Associated Press writers Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis, Matthew Daly in Washington and John Miller in Boise contributed to this story.

Katrina Whitewash: Michael Chertoff Remains Incriminated by the Smoking Gun Buried in Plain Sight Article by David Fiderer FROM Huffington Post
"President Bush will likely nominate Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to replace Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, senior administration officials told CNN Monday." August 27, 2007
Chairman Susan Collins moved to sideline an examination into the smoking gun that incriminated Michael Chertoff. She opened the hearings by directly asking - and answering - the critical question herself. Her answer was both clever and artful; what seemed straightforward and reasonable was in fact pure nonsense.

Six days later, Chertoff testified and gave substantially the same dishonest answer. The stunt worked. To this day, the most damning evidence against Michael Chertoff remains barely acknowledged and hiding in plain sight.
In her opening statement at the Senate hearings on February 10, 2006 Susan Collins, the Republican Senator from Maine, asked and answered the question:
"The day after the storm...Secretary Chertoff named Michael Brown as the lead federal official for the response effort. At the same time, the secretary declared Hurricane Katrina an Incident of National Significance, which is the designation that triggers the National Response Plan.
"The National Response Plan, in turn, is the comprehensive national road map that guides the federal response to catastrophes.
"The secretary's action led many to the question why the Incident of National Significance declaration had not been made earlier."
"But in reality, the declaration itself was meaningless because, by the plain terms of the National Response Plan, Hurricane Katrina had become an Incident of National Significance three days earlier when the President declared an emergency in Louisiana."
Collins' logic seemed simple enough: A Presidential Emergency Declaration = an Incident of National Significance = National Response Plan is triggered. Therefore, a declaration of an Incident of National Significance was a meaningless formality. Chertoff said the same thing when Joe Lieberman asked him why the declaration was made on Tuesday August 30, instead of Saturday August 27. The DHS Secretary testified, "In truth, I didn't need to do it. I was told I didn't need to do it -- but I just did it to formalize it."
But when you translate the bureaucratic jargon back into English, Collins' assertion means something different. In effect, she said that it didn't matter that the fire chief pulled the fire alarm three days late, because, under the law, it was obvious the alarm should have been pulled three days earlier.
Contrary to what Collins implied, the National Response Plan does not rely on emergency responders to construe the statutory implications of a presidential declaration. No plan for a large mobilization ever works that way. Emergency plans always rely on clear lines of communication, on an established chain of command, and on the dissemination of straightforward, unambiguous directions.
The National Response Plan, or NRP, is no different. It is easy to understand. It preempts any question about who is in charge and who has the power to give orders and deploy resources. Once President Bush declared an emergency on August 27, 2005, 45 hours before Katrina made landfall, Chertoff had the legal obligation to declare an Incident of National Significance. That declaration would have mobilized all federal agencies, all state and local officials and all major relief agencies who had prepared to follow the agreed-upon road map. Without that declaration, people wondered who was in charge. The road map, the power to direct all federal agencies, all state and local officials and all major relief agencies resided exclusively with Michael Chertoff. It never resided with Michael Brown, until Chertoff conferred such power upon him, at the point when the disorganization became irreparable.
During the critical three days when Chertoff rejected his legal duty to activate the Plan, people in New Orleans perished. They did not die because of bureaucratic inertia, "the fog of war" or a shortage of bus drivers; those were not contributing factors to a general breakdown. They were the foreseeable consequences of one man's deliberate refusal to follow his legal obligations. The smoking gun is the NRP and Chertoff's obvious refusal to follow it.
The litany of reports and hearings on Katrina all dutifully bypassed the primary and overriding reason why New Orleans suffered 1,000+ deaths two years ago. That reason is simple, singular and straightforward. But thanks to the obfuscations of Susan Collins and other Republicans, we still hear their mantra, "There's plenty of blame to go around."
Anyone can trace the response failures that occurred before and after the levies broke, and compare them to the way things were supposed to work under the NRP. Yet this simple cause-and-effect analysis is missing or buried in the government reports on the subject. (Chertoff's failure was not "A Failure of Initiative.") The evidence shows that Chertoff's crime against humanity was cold hearted and deliberate. He knew exactly what he was doing.
Even historian Douglas Brinkley pulled his punches in The Great Deluge. Brinkley lays out the facts that incriminate Chertoff, and draws the inevitable inference, yet fails to acknowledge the magnitude of the implications. Brinkley writes:
"Under rules instituted in January 2005, Homeland Secretary was in charge of all major disasters, whether from international terrorism, Mother Nature, or infrastructure collapse. Until Chertoff designated it "an incident of national significance," and appointed someone (presum¬ably the FEMA director in the case of hurricanes) as the "principal federal official," relief would be halting at best. Without that designation, Brown could not legally take charge, giving orders to local and state officials and overseeing deployment of National Guard and other U.S. military person¬nel. 'I am having a horrible time,' Brown admitted to Chertoff in a tele¬phone conversation on Monday. 'I can't get a unified command established.'
"A stronger personality than Michael Brown might have seized com¬mand anyway. But even Brown's GOP allies knew he was weak-kneed. The question that still haunts the events of Monday, August 29, was not, however, why Michael Brown needed post-Katrina direction and so much instruction from his boss. The important question was why Chertoff was so callous, both to Brown's specific relief needs and to the apocalyptic needs of the entire Gulf Coast region. Brown tried to maneuver around Chertoff, to appeal directly to President Bush, but it was hard to get through to the White House.
[...]
"Clearly Chertoff didn't just make a mistake during the first days of Katrina--he did virtually nothing at all, which was by far the greater sin. With the hurricane approaching Louisiana and Mississippi, Chertoff never even went to his office, staying at home for the crucial forty-eight hours before landfall. Most astonishing of all, as Katrina ravaged nearly 29,000 square miles of America on Monday, Chertoff didn't even speak to Brown until 8 p.m. When CNN, Fox News, ABC News, and the rest started reporting the horrific flooding in New Orleans due to the levee breaks, Chertoff scoffed, dismissing media reports of human suffering as melodrama. With a cavalier wave of the hand, according to the Washington Post, Chertoff downplayed the bleak reports as 'rumored or exaggerated.' Worse yet, Chertoff insisted that Brown and FEMA as a whole were do¬ing an "excellent" job. Evan Thomas of Newsweek was closer to the mark when in his seminal article 'How Bush Blew It,' he declared that FEMA was 'not up to the job.'"Chertoff 's inaction cost lives. FEMA had been brought into the gar¬gantuan Department of Homeland Security after 9/11; now it was clear somebody needed to pull it out again. It was a huge black eye for Home¬land Security. The Harvard prosecutor performed just as poorly as the Oklahoman--even worse. Brown, to his credit, kept trying to get the Bush administration's full attention. Chertoff had assumed his important cabi¬net position with big talk about keeping Americans safe from man-made and natural disasters. He was a principal engineer of the USA Patriot Act and wrote an article in the neoconservative publication The Weekly Standard full of bravado about fighting the war on terror 'beyond case-by-case.' He fancied himself an intellectual, but one who understood trench war¬fare. President Bush, in selecting Chertoff to replace Tom Ridge, said that 'Mike has shown a deep commitment to the cause of justice and unwa¬vering determination to protect the American people.' His determination to protect the American people did not seem to extend to those who lived in Gulf towns like Grand Isle, Louisiana; Ocean Springs, Mississippi; or Dauphin Island, Alabama. The one quality, in fact, not evident in Chertoff 's handling of Katrina was caring about what the storm inflicted. While fellow citizens were dying, screaming for help, clutching chunks of floating wood and palm fronds trying to stay alive, Chertoff, the one " i 've b e e n f e m a - e d " 271 American who could have helped the most, turned a casual, cold, indiffer¬ent eye to their plight.
"When Brown put through his 8 p.m. telephone calls on that Monday, Chertoff was at his home resting. Chertoff 's spokesman later claimed that the Homeland Security secretary "was hobbled by a lack of specific informa¬tion" regarding Katrina on Monday night. That clumsy contrivance pre¬sumed that Chertoff was discounting or ignoring the reports from Brown, who was then in the EOC in Baton Rouge, or those reports streaming in from the affected area that were all over various FEMA offices. Air Force aerial images of the swamped Gulf Coast were arriving with increasing fre¬quency at EOC, each showing an obliterated landscape, with water towers and refineries among the only recognizable landmarks in St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. As Homeland Security chief, Chertoff had the most effective communications network of any cabinet office at his disposal, in¬cluding the resources of the top brass in the Pentagon. He didn't use it. If nothing else, there were a growing number of images on television. But he seemed oblivious to Barbour's 'nuclear devastation' metaphor, and allowed the Great Deluge to run its course willy-nilly. 'What happened was Home¬land Security was geared toward terrorism,' Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti said. 'They knew that FEMA could cope with a hurricane. Okay. Maybe. But the Bush administration refused to come to grips with the flood. Wind damage was not water. They just didn't get that. In New Orleans, house after house, block after block, mile after mile was disappearing.' "
Right away, Chertoff started lying about his criminal neglect. Four times, for good measure, he referred to non-existent newspaper headlines that said "New Orleans Dodged the Bullet."
More to come later.

Some day, America will get over it!

Hollywood’s eternal closet Merv Griffin’s death is a sad reminder that many people still view coming out as an impossible act.
By KEVIN NAFF

THE OBITUARIES FOR entrepreneur and TV legend Merv Griffin in the mainstream media are predictably lacking certain details. Gay readers have learned from the recent deaths of Susan Sontag, Luther Vandross, Ismail Merchant and others not to expect too much in the way of honest reporting in the obit pages. Celebrities are doomed to an eternity in the closet when it comes to how the mainstream media cover gays, even in death.In all the fawning tributes to Griffin, praised by everyone from Nancy Reagan to Vanna White, the issue of his sexual orientation is addressed only via mentions of his 1970s-era wife and his “longtime companion” Eva Gabor, a rather unconvincing beard. Some obituaries include a reference to two lawsuits filed against Griffin — one for palimony by a former employee, Brent Plott, in 1991 and another by “Dance Fever” host Denny Terrio for sexual harassment the same year. Both were later dismissed. But Ray Richmond, a Hollywood Reporter writer, crashed the straight-washing party with a surprising and welcome article published Aug. 17.“Merv Griffin was gay,” Richmond began his piece. “Why should that be so uncomfortable to read? Why is it so difficult to write? Why are we still so jittery even about raising the issue in purportedly liberal-minded Hollywood in 2007? We can refer to it casually in conversation, but the mainstream media somehow remains trapped in the Dark Ages when it comes to labeling a person as gay.”Some of us have been asking these questions for a long time. It’s gratifying to see others on board, even if someone should have written the story before Griffin died. And despite the common perception in some circles that being gay is no longer a big deal, the roster of out gay celebrities and public figures remains startlingly short. As Richmond put it, “While it would seem everything has changed today, little actually has. You can count on the fingers of one hand, or at most two, the number of high-powered stars, executives and public figures who have come out. Those who don’t can’t really be faulted, as rarely do honesty and full disclosure prove a boon to one’s showbiz livelihood.”The problem with that rationale is that there are plenty of wealthy gay closeted stars, executives and public figures who could afford to never work again. Some of those folks need to find the courage to stand up to the Hollywood system that employs countless gays, while hypocritically insisting on their silence.GRIFFIN DIED AT 82 and so perhaps we ought to cut him some slack. After all, he came of age in an era when coming out in Hollywood meant career suicide. Of course, there are plenty of octogenarians who are proudly out — and who don’t have the benefit of hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank — so that slack should be short. But the extreme secrecy that Griffin lived by concerning his personal life is unfortunately not limited to stars born in the early 20th century. The unwritten rule that says all personal details of straight stars’ lives shall be fodder for People, Us Weekly, TMZ.com, etc., while those same sorts of details about gay stars shall remain hidden, persists today. That double standard is wrong and can be seen at work in the obituaries published this month about Griffin’s remarkable life. We can rest assured that as Jodie Foster promotes her upcoming film, “The Brave One,” due out next month, she will dodge any question about her personal life and interviewers will be made to agree in advance not to ask about such topics. THE GRIFFIN OBIT saga took a predictable turn when The Hollywood Reporter yanked Richmond’s piece from the web, presumably after advertiser complaints. After protests from bloggers and satellite radio host Michelangelo Signorile, the article reappeared, though in a less prominent spot. Meanwhile, Reuters, which syndicates content from the Hollywood Reporter, also pulled the story. Support for those cowardly moves came from unlikely places. Respected Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales denounced those who would out Griffin in death, citing anonymous angry web postings as evidence that only “fringe” people were disappointed by Griffin’s lack of honesty. “The Internet is rife with rantings from what sometimes sound like members of a lynch mob,” Shales wrote. “In this case, one might think that victims of persecution would feel a tad more reluctant to persecute someone else, especially a recently deceased man.” Shales’ assertion that writing honestly about a public figure’s sexual orientation amounts to “persecution” is wrong and insulting. He, and so many of his colleagues in the mainstream media, still don’t get it. Sexual orientation should be no more a private fact than your eye color. It’s not a private fact for straight folks, who wear wedding rings and walk hand-in-hand down the street. It’s even less private for straight celebrities, whose sexual antics, including videotaped bedroom romps, routinely make the news. Shales and other journalists should be concerned with reporting the truth, however uncomfortable it may be for some to accept. Keeping Griffin’s — and Foster’s — dirty little secret only reinforces the notion that homosexuality is something to hide. Those who would report the facts honestly, like Signorile, Richmond and even controversial blogger Perez Hilton, should be applauded for their efforts at breaking down Hollywood’s closet doors once and for all.
© 2007 The Washington Blade A Window Media Publication

The Brain has left the building

By Harry Mount NY TIMES

President Bush must be feeling awfully lonely in the White House this weekend. Things are bad enough for him – battered by the war in Iraq, rock bottom in the polls – without last week’s sudden departure of his friend of 34 years, his chief adviser and the man behind his rise to the presidency.
Karl Rove, the guru who crafted George W Bush’s two election victories and boasted the title The Senior Adviser to the President (note the definite article), had once envisaged a new America run on conservative ideals for a generation, based on a mighty coalition backed by the religious right.
Bush deferred utterly to Rove, hailing him as the Boy Wonder and the “architect” of his victories. In private he dubbed him Turd Blossom – after the Texan flower that grows out of horse dung. So instrumental was Rove to White House policy that observers called him “Bush’s Brain”.
When the two men parted last week on the White House lawn, it was like a lovers’ farewell. Bush, red-nosed, granite-faced, could barely control his emotions as he said: “Karl Rove is moving on down the road. And so I thank my friend. I’ll be on the road behind you here in a little bit.”
Rove – a well known blubber – was even more upset, choking back the tears as he said how wonderful it had been to help “a man of farsighted courage put America on a war footing and protect us against a brutal enemy in a dangerous conflict that will shape this new century”.
He has ostensibly left the Bush operation for that old reason: to spend more time with his family – his second wife and 18-year-old son in Texas. The real reason for his departure was that he has lost his magic touch and the Republicans have lost the knack for the one thing they were good at, thanks to Rove – winning elections.
Rove’s disputed involvement with the Valerie Plame affair – when the senior Republican official Scooter Libby was jailed for identifying a CIA spy – did not help matters either. It became clear that the Turd Blossom was no longer blooming.
When I met him, shortly before his departure, he bore no signs of the impending rupture. Over lunch he was very much at ease running the show. He variously jousted and joshed, basking in the glow that radiates from that massive brain and his all-powerful boss. An awestruck silence fell on the room as he bustled in, unassuming, ungrand, but all the grander for it.
In the flesh, this master image-sculptor does not cut much of a prepossessing figure. To start with, there’s a lot of flesh – Rove may be Bush’s Brain; he is certainly not Bush’s Body. The belt that holds up the trousers of his cheap suit bites deeply into the lower slopes of a large, overarching belly. One former colleague fondly recalled how Friday was ice-cream day, when Rove bought ice-cream for the whole office. He and his devoted secretary would snack all day on the constant supply of sweets that she kept on her desk.
Rove is distinctly ungroomed. His remaining strands of white hair float above his pate in a wild halo – the oddest comb-over I’ve ever seen – leaving a sort of hatmark where his hair furls away from the scalp. He admits that he is no pin-up. He says of his time at high school in Salt Lake City: “I was the complete nerd. I had the briefcase. I wore Hush Puppies when they were not cool. I was definitely uncool.”
And yet, unlike most political nerds, Rove has immense charm and presence, his cheerful, confident smile and button nose the little anchor to his big face. He relishes tricky questions. He opened each answer with a cutesy but engaging anecdote, swiftly followed by a volley of nerdish statistics to back up the Bush administration’s record.
Before making a point about wonky health issues, he said, in his down-home, Nevada, folksy accent: “Mah daddy died on Medicaid [the basic American health provider] and it shocked me. Now the average benefit is $11,890 a year. My mother-in-law gets exactly that. I wish she didn’t but . . .”
Yet like all top spin doctors Rove prefers to stay out of the spotlight himself. Over the years he has given precious few interviews and, in those that there are, more quotes appear about him from other people than from the man himself. He is artful at deflecting questions preferring to riff, say, about “how in the real West Wing the lighting is nowhere near as flattering, there are no glass walls and a lot less takes place in the hallway”. He is careful always to show his boss in a good light, saying that his friendship with Bush thrives on banter: “Ours is rather childish – and he gets the best of me every time.” Really?
I saw myself how Rove’s smile can turn with lightning speed to a snarl. At a lunch I attended with him and some other journalists, one of the hacks accused the Bush administration of not being conservative enough in its domestic policy.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Rove, his eyes roving round the room to meet ours, all bonhomie gone in an instant. “It’s so easy for journalists to look at any policy, decide it doesn’t fit in with their preexisting rules of what’s conservative or not, and then say we’re going soft. It doesn’t work like that.” The froideur was total. Then, snap, just like that, Rove turned back to his old genial self for the remainder of the lunch.
I wanted to know what the master of compassionate conservatism and wily election warrior reckon to our own Conservative challenger – did he think David Cameron had a chance of beating Gordon Brown?
“It’s going to be difficult,” Rove told me. “They haven’t got the religious backing the way we did.” So how did the Republicans change people’s minds about the party?
“It’s about being for something as opposed to against something. Conservatives find it very easy to be against something. We’re against slovenly behaviour. We’re against welfare rolls. We’re against people being on the dole. We’re against this bad thing and that bad thing. Instead, what we should do is find ways to herald things that are positive. We’re for ending dependency on government. We’re for helping people to achieve the best that they can be in life.”
Steve Hilton, Cameron’s ideas guru, could certainly learn a thing or two from Rove.
At the height of his powers, Rove assembled a bag of electoral tricks that make Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell look like relics from the Pathé news age. Rove was responsible for couture Republicanism, salami-slicing the conservative message and tossing choice morsels at particular groups.
The most fertile targets in 2004 were the Bible-Belt voters, courted with a strong Christian message wrapped up in pro-life, antigay marriage mood music.
His genius was for courting floating voters. Say you were pounding the rubber steps on the office gym StairMaster at eight in the morning. Rove was there to catch you. He and his team worked out that lots of voters, particularly upmarket ones, are not at home for the morning or early evening network news. So the Bush campaign pays for Republican advertising on closed-circuit gym channels at peak hours.
Rove’s sophistication took on board all the latest technological wheezes. The Republican news machine – the so-called “political shop” – used bloggers, lobby groups and radio hosts to push home the message. Google Earth satellite pictures were employed to get the quickest possible routes for on-street canvassing. Republicans took advantage of YouTube to target teenagers – recently they posted antidrug videos on the site.
However, while Rove was great at winning elections, he and his boss were not so good at getting things done. Iraq is the great spanner in the Bush works – fine in conception, inept in transaction. On the domestic front, where Rove had so many plans, things have also stalled. The attack on America on 9/11 meant that, whatever the Republicans wanted, they could get – Bush’s approval ratings soared.
Rove deftly used security issues to damn the Democrats. As he puts it: “Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.” Six years on and Iraq blots out most of Bush’s domestic record but, all the same, few of Rove’s ambitions were fulfilled. Hurricane Katrina did not help – it was Rove who said that Bush should not land in Louisiana shortly after the disaster, leaving him hanging, ineffectual, mid-air, over New Orleans.
If anything, the complete domination of American politics orchestrated by Rove also brought him down. His utter confidence and bombast alienated Democrats, the electorate, Republicans even. Recently Bush has become aware of the problems attached to his consigliere. When he tried to get his immigration policy through Congress this spring, he made it clear that Rove would not take part in the negotiations. As Dick Armey, a former Republican congressman, said of Rove’s dealings with Congress: “You can’t call her ugly all year and expect her to go to the prom with you.” Rove, now 56, will not disappear from the political scene altogether. He is to write a book about his three decades with Bush. And he will remain a significant Republican operator for next year’s presidential election. But his fall will be a hard one – he has lived and breathed the Republican party since his childhood in Nevada where he was deserted by his biological father and took on the name of his Norwegian-American stepfather, a mineral geologist. His mother committed suicide in 1981. No great student, he attended three universities and graduated from none of them.
What were never in doubt were his Republican credentials. At the age of nine he decided to support Richard Nixon and, as soon as he flunked out of Utah University, he became head of the College Republicans, a powerful student body. From the late 1960s onwards he was moulding himself as the ultimate election winner, setting up his own direct mail firm to back Republican campaigns. Since then he has been the primary strategist for 41 statewide, congressional and national Republican campaigns; he has won 34 of them.
He first met Dubya in 1973 while he was working for Bush’s father. “Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma – you know, wow,” he says of their first encounter.
In 1989 he was encouraging Bush to run for Texas governor. By 1999 he was working full-time as Bush’s chief strategist for the presidential bid – a year later they were in the White House.
As the architect of Bush’s dream strolled off into the sunset last week, he left behind him an increasingly embattled figure in the White House. For Bush, the shadows really are drawing in.

NY TIMES 19 AUG 2007

What Karl Rove REALLY Had in Mind for a "Permanent Republican Majority"

Paul Abrams From HUFFINGTON POST
Most of us, myself included, tend to take our democratic institutions for granted. They were there when we were born. They were there for 200+ years. The idea that the US could somehow no longer be a representative democracy does not resonate at the gut-level, even when events should demonstrate the vulnerability of our system. Yet, twice in the last 4 decades, the US Constitution has come very close to extinction. Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, each occurred in the setting of a war begun with a series of lies, and continued beyond the point when everyone knew the ultimate outcome would be unaffected, but was pursued just for the vanity of those in power.The first was Nixon-Watergate-Vietnam. Barry Werth's excellent book, "31 Days", the story of the first month of the Gerald Ford Administration, is only the latest to indicate that the ONLY barrier to a coup d'etats was crusty, old, conservative Judge Sirica who knew he was being lied to by the Watergate burglars, and was insulted. He imposed the maximum sentence on the burglars, and then one (ex-CIA agent, James McCord) broke because he did not want to go to jail. [Scooter's commuted sentence shows that theyDO learn.] Without Judge Sirica, there would have been no John Dean, no special prosecutor, and no impeachment.Otherwise, Nixon had his stonewall erected, and spoke prospectively about how he could "crush" the opposition after the '72 election. [Dallek's book, "Nixon and Kissinger", indicates that both realized they could start ending the Vietnam war in 1971, but wanted to wait so it would not impact Nixon's re-election chances---i.e., ~20,000 additional Americans lost their lives for Nixon's re-election]. Absent Sirica's pique, Nixon would have succeeded. Nixon's Gonzales, Attorney General John Mitchell, told the Watergate committee that their abuses were done because: "all we were trying to do is get the President re-elected". The danger to our Republic was not that sentiment, but that the Attorney General of the United States, a legal expert on municipal bonds, actually believed it was a sufficient justification.What about Karl Rove, a man who had an early career job with Brown & Williamson tobacco company, learning how to sell something that no one, rationally, would buy, and being comfortable knowing that he was helping recruit 5000 children per week to start a life habit of smoking?Rove's vision for a permanent Republican majority had little to do with winning properly run elections for the simple reason that there IS no Republican majority in free elections, and Rove knows that. To get a Republican majority and make it permanent, therefore, he had to 1) gain power; and 2) destroy the vitality of democratic institutions. He accomplished (1). It did not matter to him whether he used "Republican" policies to do that or not: just consider, Bush's only positive legacy will be the prescription drug law that, while terribly flawed, added an entitlement. True, he also lined pockets of his supporters, and that helped Rove's cause. Bush also tried to gain Latino votes by siding with Ted Kennedy, John McCain and others on immigration reform, while dissing his entire rightwing base. They pushed the Iraq War in the fall of an election cycle to squeeze Democrats by providing as little time as possible to parry their lies [not that they may have acted differently if given more time], and then invaded Iraq while the inspectors were still doing their work fearing that no WMD might be found. The idea was to have a spectacular display of US military power (if you recall, Afghanistan, according to the greatest Sec'y of Defense in interplanetary history, did not have enough "high quality targets") to develop the popular support so the President could push through his domestic programs and grow executive power. The domestic agenda was to de-link financially people from government, so they would be weak and even easier prey for corporate manipulation.Even that, however, would have been insufficient, Rove knew it, and had a comprehensive approach to a true takeover. As Judge Sirica showed, and as dictators such as Hitler, Chavez, Khomenei, Saddam, and others knew, the last bastion of democracy is a truly independent judiciary where an individual can take on the entire power of the government. So, Rove et al. planned to destroy that independence by appointing truly pedestrian people, who grew up in the "movement", to interpret the law against individuals, and in favor of the government and big corporations.Rove's pretentions could not survive increased voter turnout. Hence, the attack against minorities and others who were trying to vote in non-Republican areas, and the firing of US attorneys who, apparently, had not received the memo that the rule of law was, as Attorney General Gonzales called the Geneva Conventions, "quaint". Dragging their feet on voting reform (despite the Baker-Carter Commission Report), and using non-paper trail machines, most made by rightwing Republican CEOs, they wanted to grab a majority where none existed. The districts in the '04 that had voting machines with no paper trail had greater divergences from the exit polls than those with paper trails. For '08, they are trying to get California to eliminate its winner-take-all approach to divvying up electoral college votes, so that, instead of a Democrat winning 55 votes (about 20% of the total needed to win), might only get 35 and a Republican get 20. They NEVER quit. And, they care nothing about American traditions and the Constitution.Another arrow in the Rove quiver was the radical rightwing media. Dangerous as it is as a purveyor of hate, of lies masquerading as scientific evidence, and the echo chamber that provides the imprimatur of legitimacy, it was not good enough. Hence, the move to allow more media concentration, fortunately foiled not by what John McCain called the largest outpouring of opposition he had ever seen (hang the people, they will become irrelevant anyhow), but by a judicial system that retained pockets of independence.Still, that was not enough. Rove paid columnists to plant Administration propaganda, they provided certain "reporters" like Judith Miller unique access to what they called "facts" so they would be published as "scoops", preying on Miller's vanity as an ace reporter. She published the "information" they provided her in the New York Times, and then Administration spokespeople quoted the Times as an impeccable source for their opinions. Rove also went through the government, schooling people on how to use their power to help Republican candidates, a violation of law. Perhaps the most pathetic, they insisted that any policy statement from the government mention George Bush favorably at least 3-times per page. It triggers visions of the wife of Romanian dictator Ceaucescu, who insisted upon being called "Doctor", and had her name included as co-author on scientific publications whose substance she knew nothing about.They hired people for loyalty, not competence. In the regulatory agencies, they placed industry people so that not much enforcement would occur. They found young, recent college graduates, from places like Pat Robertson's "Regent University", to take high level positions (e.g., Monica Goodling), so they could guarantee unquestioned obedience to George Bush. People were recruited for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq who had absolutely no expertise in anything, but on the basis of their opinions on Roe v. Wade, and how they felt about the Florida recount in 2000. That is how much Bush Rove and Cheney cared about Iraq.In the meantime, they proceeded mostly in a stealth fashion with increasing claims of executive power, with attacks against opponents of such claims as unpatriotic and endangering the lives our citizens. With a lockstep Republican Congress for 6 years, who were easily lulled by power into abandoning their oaths of office ("supporting the Constitution of the United States"), there was no barrier to encroaching on the balance of power among the branches. As Bush removed more and more of our civil liberties, our Constitution was more and more under attack, and there were fewer effective responses.(As an aside, for those who believe in a "unitary executive", I pose a single question: does the President believe that he could, if he wished, overrule the Federal Reserve, and set interest rates? That is, can Congress establish an independent agency, without control by the executive, or not? If the answer is the President could overrule, I suggest that today's Dow Jones Industrial average is in the stratosphere compared to what it will be if that answer were confirmed).To bring this all together, there is the Department of Homeland Security. Note that the Administration resisted making this an actual Department---why? Because Dick Cheney understood that, as a Department, it would have to provide Congress information and testimony for oversight. Imagine what it could do as an "advisor" to the President, operating in complete secrecy. Fortunately, not all rightwingers "got it" at the time, and joined the chorus for creating a Deparment. Even Bush and Cheney could not rebuff that groundswell. Immediately following World War II, many of the eastern european countries had democracies of sorts. But, the Communist Party, that was part of ruling coalitions, bargained for the internal security portfolios. They used that power to quell opponents, break up meetings, bully voters and voting places, manipulate the media, and paved the road for Communist, totalitarian dictatorships to take control.Katrina, the Iraq War disaster, pockets of a remaining independent judiciary, the rise of the internet as alternative communications, corruption, and the recognition by the American people that their liberties, and their way of life was at stake, prevented the Rove plan from working. But, it was close. Webb, Tester and McCaskill won by very small margins in their Senate races, if any had lost, Cheney would be controlling the Senate. [Remember, he is not part of the executive branch, an example of how they are willing to say absolute anything, no matter how preposterous, if they think that it will make the question go away]. Many of the Democrats who beat Republican incumbents won by very small margins; this showed the collective disgust for Bush et al. on the one hand, but the extraordinary power of incumbency on the other.And, if Katrina had not struck when it did, if the US attorneys had acted in lockstep as had the Republican Congress rather than investigate Republican scandals, I am afraid that I am not confident that the media would have had the spine to reveal the truth about Iraq, or to ask the questions that this Administration assumed would never be raised. Given the small margins of victory, it seems to me more likely than not that Bush would have had a lockstep Republican Congress for his last two years, and Rove would have been able to pursue his multi-faceted attack on democratic institutions.No, this was no ordinary attempt by a savvy political strategist to win elections by resonating with the majority of the American people. It was a partially executed, and nearly successful, plan to create a permanent majority by weakening to the point of irrelevance all potential challenges to the unaccountable exercise of power.It is a familiar story, but not an American story.

Tampering with the facts

From the NY Times

Last year a Wikipedia visitor edited the entry for the SeaWorld theme parks to change all mentions of “orcas” to “killer whales,” insisting that this was a more accurate name for the species.
There was another, unexplained edit: a paragraph about criticism of SeaWorld’s “lack of respect toward its orcas” disappeared. Both changes, it turns out, originated at a computer at Anheuser-Busch, SeaWorld’s owner.
Dozens of similar examples of insider editing came to light last week through WikiScanner, a new Web site that traces the source of millions of changes to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor’s network. The address information was already available on Wikipedia, but the new site makes it much easier to connect those numbers with the names of network owners.
Since Wired News first wrote about WikiScanner last week, Internet users have spotted plenty of interesting changes to Wikipedia by people at nonprofit groups and government entities like the Central Intelligence Agency. Many of the most obviously self-interested edits have come from corporate networks.
Last year, someone at PepsiCo deleted several paragraphs of the Pepsi entry that focused on its detrimental health effects. In 2005, someone using a computer at Diebold deleted paragraphs that criticized the company’s electronic voting machines. That same year, someone inside Wal-Mart Stores changed an entry about employee compensation.
Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, says the site discourages such “conflict of interest” editing. “We don’t make it an absolute rule,” he said, “but it’s definitely a guideline.”
Internet experts, for the most part, have welcomed WikiScanner. “I’m very glad that this has been exposed,” said Susan P. Crawford, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School. “Wikipedia is a reliable first stop for getting information about a huge variety of things, and it shouldn’t be manipulated as a public relations arm of major companies.”
Most of the corporate revisions did not stay posted for long. Many Wikipedia entries are in a constant state of flux as they are edited and re-edited, and the site’s many regular volunteers and administrators tend to keep an eye out for bias.
In general, changes to a Wikipedia page cannot be traced to an individual, only to the owner of a particular network. In 2004, someone using a computer at ExxonMobil made substantial changes to a description of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, playing down its impact on the area’s wildlife and casting a positive light on compensation payments the company had made to victims of the spill.
Gantt Walton, a spokesman for the company, said that although the revisions appeared to have come from an ExxonMobil computer, the company has more than 80,000 employees around the world, making it “more than a difficult task” to figure out who made the changes.
Mr. Walton said ExxonMobil employees “are not authorized to update Wikipedia with company computers without company endorsement.” The company’s preferred approach, he said, would be to use Wikipedia’s “talk” pages, a forum for discussing Wikipedia entries.
Mr. Wales also said the “talk” pages are where Wikipedia encourages editors with a conflict of interest to suggest revisions.
“If someone sees a simple factual error about their company, we really don’t mind if they go in and edit,” he said. But if a revision is likely to be controversial, he added, “the best thing to do is log in, go to the ‘talk’ page, identify yourself openly, and say, ‘I’m the communications person from such and such company.’ The community responds very well, especially if the person isn’t combative.”
Mike Sitrick, a longtime public relations consultant in Los Angeles, agreed. “I’m a big believer that if you’re going to correct it, correct it with a name,” he said. “Otherwise it hurts your credibility.”
An Anheuser-Busch employee eventually took responsibility for the changes to the SeaWorld page — but only after being challenged about them twice by another user. A person identifying himself as Fred Jacobs, communications director for the company’s theme park unit, said on the entry’s “talk” page that discussion of the ethics of keeping sea creatures captive “belongs in an article devoted to that subject.”
Mr. Jacobs referred questions about the editing to another company office, which did not respond to requests for comment.
The SCO Group, a software maker in Salt Lake City, made changes to product information in its own entry this year. The company has been involved in legal disputes over the rights to some open-source software.
Craig Bushman, the company’s vice president for marketing, said he had told a public relations manager to make the changes. “The whole history of SCO had been written by someone who doesn’t know the history of SCO,” he said.
An hour after the changes were made, he said, they disappeared. The company e-mailed Wikipedia administrators, who replied that the changes had been rejected because of a lack of objectivity.
In the case of the Wal-Mart revisions, David Tovar, a company spokesman, said that while he was not aware of anyone within Wal-Mart who had asked to contribute to Wikipedia, the changes could have been made by any of its workers, who are called associates. “We consider our associates our best ambassadors,” he said, “and sometimes they speak out to set the record straight.”
At Dell, the computer maker, employees are told that they need to identify their employer if they write about the company online. “Whether it’s Wikipedia, Twitter or MySpace, our policy is you have to let someone know you’re from Dell,” said Bob Pearson, a Dell spokesman.
Before that policy was put in place a year ago, changes to parts of Dell’s Wikipedia entry discussing its offshore outsourcing of customer service were made by someone from the Dell corporate network.
Most people using company networks to edit Wikipedia entries dabble in subjects that appear to have little to do with their work, although sometimes they cannot resist a silly dig at the competition.
Last year, someone using a computer at the Washington Post Company changed the name of the owner of a free local paper, The Washington Examiner, from Philip Anschutz to Charles Manson. A person using a computer at CBS updated the page on Wolf Blitzer of CNN to add that his real name was Irving Federman. (It is actually Wolf Blitzer.)
And The New York Times Company is among those whose employees have made, among hundreds of innocuous changes, a handful of questionable edits. A change to the page on President Bush, for instance, repeated the word “jerk” 12 times. And in the entry for Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, the word “pianist” was changed to “penis.”
“It’s impossible to determine who did any of these things,” said Craig R. Whitney, the standards editor of The Times. “But you can only shake your head when you see what was done to the George Bush and Condoleezza Rice entries.”
WikiScanner is the work of Virgil Griffith, 24, a cognitive scientist who is a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Mr. Griffith, who spent two weeks this summer writing the software for the site, said he got interested in creating such a tool last year after hearing of members of Congress who were editing their own entries.
Mr. Griffith said he “was expecting a few people to get nailed pretty hard” after his service became public. “The yield, in terms of public relations disasters, is about what I expected.”
Mr. Griffith, who also likes to refer to himself as a “disruptive technologist,” said he was certain any more examples of self-interested editing would come out in the next few weeks, “because the data set is just so huge.”
Mr. Wales, who called the scanner “a very clever idea,” said he was considering some changes to Wikipedia to help visitors better understand what information is recorded about them.
“When someone clicks on ‘edit,’ it would be interesting if we could say, ‘Hi, thank you for editing. We see you’re logged in from The New York Times. Keep in mind that we know that, and it’s public information,’ ” he said. “That might make them stop and think.”
Noam Cohen contributed reporting.

A Truly sinister presence in American Politics!
Karl Rove, Top Strategist, Is Leaving the White House
By JIM RUTENBERG NY TIMES
WASHINGTON, Aug. 13 — Karl Rove, the political adviser who masterminded President George W. Bush’s two winning presidential campaigns and secured his own place in history as a political strategist with extraordinary influence within the White House, is resigning, the White House confirmed today.
In an interview published this morning in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Rove said, “I just think it’s time,” adding, “There’s always something that can keep you here, and as much as I’d like to be here, I’ve got to do this for the sake of my family.”
Mr. Rove said he had first considered leaving a year ago but stayed after his party lost the crucial midterm elections last fall, which put Congress in Democratic hands, and as Mr. Bush’s problems mounted in Iraq and in his pursuit of a new immigration policy.
He said his hand was forced now when the White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, recently told senior aides that if they stayed past Labor Day he would expect them to stay through the rest of Mr. Bush’s term.
“He’s been talking with the president for a long time — about a year, regarding when might be good to go,” said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman. “But there’s always a big project to work on, and his strategic abilities — and our need for his support — kept him here,” she said.
Ms. Perino said Mr. Rove would leave at the end of August.
The White House did not say early today whether Mr. Bolten would name a successor to Mr. Rove, who held a “deputy chief of staff” title.
But even if he does, none would have the same influence with the president or, likely, the same encyclopedic knowledge of American politics.
Mr. Bush was expected to make a public statement at around 11.35 a.m. today.
With his departure, Mr. Rove will be the latest major figure to leave the Bush administration’s inner circle. Earlier this summer, Mr. Bush lost as his counsel Dan Bartlett, a fellow Texan who had been part of the original group of close advisers that followed Mr. Bush from the Texas governor’s mansion to the White House.
Mr. Bush named as Mr. Bartlett’s successor Ed Gillespie, the former Republican National Committee chair who was a crucial part of Mr. Bush’s 2004 campaign brain trust. But Mr. Gillespie has neither the history, nor the closeness with Mr. Bush, that Mr. Rove has.
Mr. Rove was not only the chief architect of Mr. Bush’s political campaigns but also the midwife of the president’s political persona itself.
His continued presence in the White House had become a source of fascination in Washington as others, like Mr. Bartlett, left, and as Democrats honed in on his role in the firings of several United States attorneys.
Yet it was nonetheless widely believed inside and outside the White House that he would walk out the door behind Mr. Bush at the end of the president’s term in January, 2009, and help him solidify his legacy before his exit.
Mr. Rove had vowed to build a lasting Republican majority, and some associates believed he would try to help his party keep the White House. But Mr. Rove said in his interview with The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page is a favored outlet for Mr. Bush and his aides, that he had no intention of getting involved in the 2008 presidential race.
Mr. Rove has portrayed the defeat in the 2006 midterm elections as a temporary setback, and said in the interview he believed Republicans were still on track for victory in the next election.
He predicted that conditions in Iraq would improve with the continuation of the surge — though he did not address speculation that the president will face pressure this fall, possibly even from fellow Republicans, to bring troops home sooner rather than later. And he predicted that Democrats would fail to show unity on issues such as the president’s eavesdropping program.
He said he intended to write a book, which had been encouraged by “the boss,” and eventually to teach.
Throughout Mr. Bush’s tenure, Mr. Rove vilified Democrats, and they vilified him right back, complaining about his infamously bare-knuckled political tactics on the campaign trail and what they considered his overt politicization of the White House.
He has been the focus in the Congressional investigations into the firings last year of several federal prosecutors, and he was until last year a focus of the C.I.A. leak case investigation that led to perjury charges for Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.
Mr. Rove emerged from the cloud of the investigation to try to stave off Republican defeats last fall. The subsequent failure was his biggest political loss during his tenure at the White House. Afterward, he continued to take a central role in key initiatives such as Mr. Bush’s ultimately failed attempt to create a new immigration law that would have legalized millions of workers that are currently living in the United States illegally.
A political strategist who solidified his reputation by bringing together the sprawling coalition that put Mr. Bush in office, and which he believed would sustain a prolonged Republican majority, he had considered Hispanic voters to be a potential source of new Republican voters.
But Mr. Rove was in the eye of the political storm once again this year as Congress set out to learn his role in the attorney firings, which critics charge had been carried out to impede or spark investigations for partisan aims.
That investigation, and others, have raised new questions about Mr. Rove’s dual role as political adviser and a senior policy aide with wide latitude to pull the levers of government while briefing even members of the diplomatic corps on the political landscape and the electoral vulnerabilities of the Democrats.
The White House cited executive privilege in blocking the testimony of Mr. Rove before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In the Wall Street Journal interview today, Mr. Rove said he knew that some people might suspect he was leaving office to avoid scrutiny but said, “I’m not going to stay or leave based on whether it pleases the mob.”
He said he believed the scrutiny would continue after he left the White House because of what he called the “myth” of his influence, which he referred to as “the Mark of Rove.”
But from the time he leaves office, Mr. Rove will no longer have the protection of White House lawyers and will be more on his own when it comes to dealing with Congressional subpoenas.
The White House has provided cover for some former aides by issuing letters directing them not to testify about their privileged conversations with the president or to answer only a limited set of potential questions.
In his exit interview today, which was with Paul Gigot, the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Rove had a parting shot for his political nemeses, telling Mr. Gigot that he believed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton would be the Democratic nominee but called her a “tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate,” and predicted a Republican victory in the 2008 presidential race. It is the sort of political boasting that had become Mr. Rove’s hallmark.

Fossils in Kenya Challenge Linear Evolution
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD NY TIMES
Two fossils found in Kenya have shaken the human family tree, possibly rearranging major branches thought to be in a straight ancestral line to Homo sapiens.
Scientists who dated and analyzed the specimens — a 1.44-million-year-old Homo habilis and a 1.55-million-year-old Homo erectus found in 2000 — said their findings challenged the conventional view that these species evolved one after the other. Instead, they apparently lived side by side in eastern Africa for almost half a million years.
If this interpretation is correct, the early evolution of the genus Homo is left even more shrouded in mystery than before. It means that both habilis and erectus must have originated from a common ancestor between two million and three million years ago, a time when fossil hunters had drawn a virtual blank.
Although the findings do not change the relationship of Homo erectus as a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens, scientists said, the surprisingly diminutive erectus skull implies that this species was not as humanlike as once thought.
Other paleontologists and experts in human evolution said the discovery strongly suggested that the early transition from more apelike to more humanlike ancestors was still poorly understood.
The challenge to the idea of a more linear succession of the three Homo species is being reported today in the journal Nature. The lead author is Fred Spoor, an evolutionary anatomist at University College London. Other authors include Meave G. Leakey and her daughter Louise Leakey, the Kenyan paleontologists who are co-directors of the Koobi Fora Research Project that made the discovery. The field work was supported by the National Geographic Society.
The fossils were found east of Lake Turkana in Kenya. It took years to prepare the specimens for study and to be sure of the identification of the species, the scientists said. University of Utah geologists determined the dates of the fossils from volcanic ash deposits.
The most recent fossils of the habilis species known before now were 1.65 million years old or older. Some fragments of fossils with apparent habilis attributes have been dated as early as 2.33 million years old.
In recent years, scientists not involved in the project said, discoveries were hinting at possible overlap between habilis and erectus. But the implications were considered so profound that little was said about these dates, pending more conclusive evidence.
The most recent Homo habilis that had been known was about the same age as the earliest Homo erectus, said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University. “Now we have extended the duration of the habilis species, and there’s no doubt that it overlaps considerably with erectus.”
In their report, Dr. Spoor and his colleagues wrote, “With the discovery of the new, well dated specimens, H. habilis and H. erectus can now be shown to have co-occurred in eastern Africa for nearly half a million years.” The fact that the two hominid species lived together in the same lake basin for so long and remained separate species, Meave Leakey said in a statement from Nairobi, “suggests that they had their own ecological niche, thus avoiding direct competition.”
In any case, Dr. Leakey said, “Their coexistence makes it unlikely that Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis.”
Dr. Spoor, speaking by satellite phone from a field site near Lake Turkana, said the evidence clearly contradicted previous ideas of human evolution “as one strong, single line from early to us.” The new findings, he added, support the revised interpretations of “a lot of bushiness and experimentation in the fossil record.”
But Dr. Spoor said the second fossil, the 1.55-million-year-old erectus skull, was probably the more surprising discovery. “What is truly striking about this fossil is its size,” he said. “It is the smallest Homo erectus found thus far anywhere in the world.”
The scientists reported that the individual was a young adult or “a late subadult.” Its size was closer to that of a habilis than previously known erectus fossils. But the distinctive ridge on the cranium, the jaw and teeth and the shape of the neck are all characteristic of erectus.
From the skull’s small size, the scientists concluded that Homo erectus was, in one important respect, less humanlike than had been previously assumed. Other erectus skull and skeletal fossils had seemed to show erectus to be the first human ancestor that was like us in so many ways, except for a smaller brain.
Susan Anton, an anthropologist at New York University and one of the report’s authors, said the small skull pointed up a significant variation in the sizes of erectus specimens, particularly differences between the male and female of the species, or sexual dimorphism. In humans, males are on average about 15 percent larger than females, and the same is true for chimpanzees. Sexual dimorphism is much more striking in gorillas, and apparently also in erectus.
“The new Kenyan fossil suggests that contrary to common belief, this may have been true of Homo erectus,” Dr. Anton said, implying that erectus was not as humanlike as once thought.
Dr. Lieberman of Harvard said, “The small skull has got to be a female, and my guess is that all the previous erectus we have found turned out to be male.”
The new findings, Dr. Lieberman said, highlight the need for obtaining more fossils that are more than two million years old. In addition, he said, they show “just how interesting and complex the human genus was and how poorly we understand the transition from being something much more apelike to something more humanlike.” NY TIMEES 8/8/07

Fighting words
Brutality by the Bay
Why did the Oakland police do so little about Your Black Muslim Bakery's thuggery?By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, Aug. 6, 2007, at 1:01 PM ET
Here is the situation regarding the enterprise known as Your Black Muslim Bakery, located on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, Calif. Its founder, a man named Yusuf Bey, was arrested in 2002 and charged with forcing an underage girl to have sex. Subsequent investigation suggested that he had a long history of rape and abuse of his followers and had by this means fathered numerous children out of wedlock. Bey died in September 2003 before his case could come to trial. His son Yusuf Bey IV has since been arrested twice, first on suspicion of leading a gang that had trashed two Oakland liquor stores and intimidated their owners, and second (and perhaps less Islamically) for running over a San Francisco bouncer with his car. Nedir Bey, one of Yusuf Bey's "spiritually adopted" sons, is also alleged to have beaten a possible business rival with a flashlight, while another member of the gang tortured the victim with a heated knife.
These and several other crimes of violence were investigated by the East Bay Express, a local community weekly. Reporter Chris Thompson was subjected to threats and to aggressive stalking, and, for his own safety, worked in a different county for several months after his series about YBMB ran. The paper's editor, Stephen Buel, has been quoted as saying that his office and staff were deluged with threats and haunted by unpleasant characters and that the threats indicated that they originated with Your Black Muslim Bakery. "We have several threats left on voice mail that we obviously had a record of. One of the threats featured a taped quotation of a speech from Yusuf Bey the elder," said Buel. At a certain point, Buel admits, it became more trouble than it was worth to write about YBMB.
Oakland is a city fairly hardened to criminal violence, but beginning last December, there was what the papers like to call a "spree." In that month, a car was raked with bullets from several weapons. In May, two people were kidnapped and one was robbed and tortured. In July, two citizens were murdered by gunshots in the northern part of the city. The bullets all appear, according to the police, to come from the same source, which by now you may have guessed. The late Herb Caen, imperishable columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, used to refer humorously to "Baghdad by the Bay," but by that he meant Beach Blanket Babylon and not this gruesome horror show.
Now, I'm just asking, but: rape, polygamy, intimidation, torture, murder, all these actions emanating from one address and some of them performed in the name of a fanatical ideology. What does it take before the police decide to raid the premises? Should we wait until unveiled women are attacked on the street or until honor killings or female circumcision take hold? (There is no official connection between YBMB and Louis Farrakhan's racist and cultish Nation of Islam, though it seems that Yusuf Bey Sr. did convert to some form of Islam under that sinister organization's auspices.)
My question was answered last Friday, when the Oakland Police Department finally did storm the premises, along with three neighboring homes, and arrested seven people, including Yusuf Bey IV. This, however, was too late to save the life of Chauncey Bailey, the well-liked editor of the black-owned Oakland Post, who had decided to take up where the East Bay Express had left off and to investigate the finances of YBMB. He was shot dead last Thursday in broad daylight on an Oakland street. A young handyman from YBMB named Devaughndre Broussard has been charged in the Bailey case, and other members of the group are being investigated for involvement in the earlier crimes. The "bakery" itself owes more than $200,000 in back taxes and filed for bankruptcy protection last October.
Now, again, I am just asking, but what if this racket had been named the White Christian or Aryan Nations Cookie Parlor? (Motto and mission statement: "Don't F*** With Us.") I think that Oakland's mayor, Ron Dellums—who I was startled to find was still alive—would have joined a picket line around the store (as would I). The same would doubtless have been true of Rep. Barbara Lee, in whose district the YBMB was situated. But instead, in its role as a "community business," the YBMB enjoyed warm support and endorsement from both the mayor and the congresswoman. And the guns for past and future slayings were inside the store.
If this isn't softness on crime, then the term is meaningless. Residents have been complaining for a long time about the atmosphere of hatred and violence—and about what some have called the YBMB's attempt to "cleanse" the neighborhood, either of godless liquor stores on the model of jihadism or simply of business rivals and journalistic critics. What were the police doing all this time, and why did Chauncey Bailey have to be murdered before they could be moved to act? Perhaps they were doing what they do best: confiscating marijuana and rousting whores so as to painlessly improve the crime statistics. I called Bob Valladon, the extremely rude and graceless head of the Oakland police union, but I didn't even get to put my question before receiving a large flea in my ear. Other California law-enforcement officials were adamant in refusing to be quoted in any way. I can't say I blame them: Thousands of their voters and citizens are living in Third World conditions of fear, with a "no-snitch" policy openly enforced at gunpoint, and they cannot be troubled to do anything about it.
This official apathy—amounting to collusion—is undergirded by a culture that cringingly insists on "respect" for any organization, however depraved, that can masquerade as "faith-based." If I had stood outside that hideous bakery with a sign saying "Black Muslims Are Racists and Fanatics," I think the cops would have turned up in a flat second and taken me into custody. I might well have been charged with a hate crime. As I have written before and am sure I will write again: This has to stop, and it has to stop right now, before sharia baking comes to a place near you.

Christopher Hitchens

The Blueprint of Wrath

From Steven Webber

Huffington Post
Henry Fonda, lean, young and malcontent. Fresh from a stretch in the penitentiary for killing a man in self-defense, all he wants is to get home. But his perception of the world is grave and flinty. He itches to fight an enemy he can sense but not see. His simple desire to live decently is harshly juxtaposed with the gritty landscape of dust and dreams and tragic hopelessness in which he now finds himself.
And yet the Joads carried on. They carried on through the wall erected of hard hearts and narrow minds. They carried on through the fog of fear that clung to the earth and lapped at their worn shoes and frayed cuffs. And they carried on, though uncertainty gnawed at their very existence. And with no one and nothing to lead them anymore they relied on their own mettle and moral barometer, forcibly freed from the shackles of dependency and materialism. It is an uneasy reliance, for promises had been made by their leaders who assured them their guidance would be sound, but who -- it turns out -- had brutally lied. Indeed had been lying all along. And when Tom Joad sets forth under cover of darkness to defend the ember of human dignity, which had been all but smothered and made disposable, as with Owell's 1984 which gave the Neo-Con's their streamlined fascist blueprint, The Grapes of Wrath shows as starkly how to counter it and to quietly but steadily seize that crucial moment in which the tyranny that hovers over us, the tyranny that waits in our back yard and smiles at us on television, the tyranny wrapped in the flag and clutching the cross, is met and defeated.
The film version of The Grapes of Wrath -- owing to certain musty codes of decency -- ends midway into Steinbeck's story, which continues past Tom's departure and moves relentlessly across the pitted terrain of the American dream, encountering disaster and hope and disaster again until it culminates with an act of such glorious clarity that in today's self-obsessed world it would be observed with all the befuddlement of a dog hearing a high pitched whistle. And yet it describes the most precious and defining elements of human life: mercy, love and humility, and of each person's awesome task to raise the collective existence above the leaden muck of greed, vanity and war. And it teaches us that survival sometimes means divesting ourselves of the ideology we once embraced, one which has resulted more in division than in unity.
It is an American epic which chronicles the shattering of the national soul, more lyric than any bowdlerized psalm, more portentous than any color coded warning. It tells of what happens when a people lose their way because they've put their faith in shrewd charlatans who have themselves lost their way. It describes the circumstances under which despotism and despair find purchase in thirsty loam and the way the spirit of a people can be leached out by exploitation and fear. The novel was, of course, despised by the very forces it sought to decry as socialist hogwash and unpatriotic rabble-rousing. Those bolts hurled from up high are often devastatingly effective and can send the roused rabble scrambling for cover -- any cover, if only to get it to stop. And yet today, those barbed platitudes are still expertly hurled and their effects still smart. But if there is to be truly beneficial change it must come from the individual who has had enough, the individual who now knows better than to shuffle over the side of a cliff without a peep. One only has to open one's eyes, summon Tom Joad's flintiness and carry on. It's been some time but it can be done.