Preturnaturally Confident

by digby

Jane has a great Karl Rove Plamegate primer up tonight in case you’ve forgotten all the minutia of the case and want to get back up to speed.

Karl has now testified before the grand jury five times, which most lawyers say would never happen in a normal case. Karl, however, believes he can wiggle out of this so he keeps volunteering to go back to the grand jury and explain himself.

He has always thought he was very, very good at this kind of thing:

Rove was no lawyer but he carried a kind of preturnatural confidence in court cases. Like in his high school debates, he always felt better than anybody in the room. He could beat anybody with the strength of his argument or the weight of his will. When a team of blue-chip lawyers in a tobacco case grilled Rove for a deposition some years earlier, he was not just confident, but arrogant, fending off their questions with playful insults. On the stand in the Kay Bailey Hutchison trial, he was masterful in frustrating the prosecution. Now he had a former U.S. Attorney General in his cross hairs, and as Rove sat at the table in the federal courthouse, he turned his head slowly and looked over at the defense table with the thin sliver of a smile. It was a dark smile, determined, and there was not mistaking the message: You are my enemy and you will pay.(Bush’s Brain p. 190)

Waddaya think? Does the recently demoted Karl still have that kind of mojo? Or was it his “preturnatural confidence” that led him to think he could lie his ass off to the FBI and the Grand Jury and nothing would happen?

He doesn’t seem quite so formidable these days does he? A 32% approval rating and massive policy failure will do that to you.

Update: According to the Washington Post, Rove is using the “it would have been stupid to lie so it’s ludicrous that I would have done so” defense. It sounds like he’s as arrogant as ever.

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