Showing His Colors

In the post below I write a little bit about how the Nixonian politics of resentment are at the heart of the Republican electoral success these past 35 years. I mention the fact that it is crippling oppugnancy that is their achilles heel. Here’s an article in this week’s LA Weekly by Lou Dubose the author of “Boy Genius” in which he speculates that Rove got himself in trouble before the Grand Jury because he is an arrogant prick. He bases this on Rove’s past performance the few times he’s ever allowed himself to go under oath. It seems that he always lies:

In the course of questioning, Rove told the attorney representing the trial lawyers that he had a firm agreement with the governor to recuse himself from anything having to do with tobacco. A “Chinese wall” separated his tobacco consulting from his work for Bush. The lawyers knew the answers to some of the questions before they asked them. They knew that Rove had been involved in polling funded by the tobacco lobby. One of the polls was a piece of political trash, a push poll asking respondents how they would vote if they knew the Democratic attorney general had provided financial support to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan — which he never had. The day the results were released, Rove attended a tobacco-lobby meeting and immediately took the poll to Bush chief of staff Joe Allbaugh.

Caught in a lie about keeping Bush and Big Tobacco separate, Rove retreated. Rather than give it to Bush, he delivered the poll to Allbaugh, he said, knowing Allbaugh would throw it away without looking at it. The answer didn’t wash. Rove was not a party to the lawsuit, so he faced little immediate risk. But the trial lawyers had what they wanted. When Bush, acting in his capacity as governor, set out to take their fees away from them, they could stand before federal Judge David Folsom in Texarkana and point to the intellectual author of a lawsuit that would ultimately embarrass Bush.

There was a second case in which Rove was under oath before the Texas State Senate when he was appointed to a University Board of Regents:

Appearing before the Senate Nominations Committee, Rove again was both unprepared and dishonest. Since 1986, Rove had been providing tips and information to an FBI agent named Greg Rampton, who was conducting serial investigations of the finances of statewide Democratic officeholders. On one occasion Rove even announced in Washington the coming indictments of two lieutenants of Democratic Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower in Austin — more than a week before the Department of Justice unsealed the indictments.

Rove had met Rampton under unusual circumstances. In 1986, as a Democratic opponent was closing in on Rove’s candidate, the incumbent governor, Rove held a press conference to announce that a bug had been planted in his office. It was a brilliant tactic, pointing to the Democratic challenger’s desperation. Special Agent Greg Rampton investigated the bugging and no charges were filed. A source close to the Travis County district attorney told me they investigated before the FBI and concluded it was a political stunt. Rove or someone working for him had had his own office bugged. Five years later, stumbling under questioning from a Democratic senator, Rove said he didn’t exactly know Rampton. When pressed, he resorted to a Clintonesque parsing of terms: “Ah, senator, it depends. Would you define ‘know’ for me?” He then qualified his response, saying he wouldn’t recognize Rampton “if he walked in the door.” His dishonest response provided Senate Democrats a sufficient pretext to deny Rove his university board position.

I remember when I read Murray Waas’ report of Rove’s testimony to the grand jury thinking that he was incredibly obtuse if he behaved as arrogantly as it seemed he had:

… Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak’s column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

In Rove’s world this is normal behavior. In the real world, disseminating derogatory information about a man and his wife for political purposes is something that even if you do it, you do not argue that it is “legitimate.” Normal people would have the decency to be a little bit chagrined by these actions, even if what they did was not strictly illegal.

I wonder if he had the nerve to repeat to the middle aged African American women of the DC Grand Jury that he went after Wilson purely because he was a Democrat. I wouldn’t be surprised. That powerful Nixonian ressentiment almost surely came through in any case. It’s who he is. To a group of average citizens serving on a Grand Jury, this powerful man serving in the white house describing such behavior as being perfectly normal must have sounded terribly distasteful.

Fitzgerald, of course, has seen it all before. But he had to have hated seeing this powerful jerk admit that this government believes this behavior is business as usual. Plame was, after all, a CIA employees and these powerful politicos at the very least, acted with a total lack of responsibility or integrity in trafficking her name around for political purposes. And he knew from the get, of course, that Rove was one of Novak’s sources. If he said all that stuff as clearly and as obviously as the Waas article says he did, then Patrick Fitzgerald had no problem figuring out Karl Rove’s motive.

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