The Rove Fixation: The Left and the Blathersphere

In other words, in an election year the organizers decided to avoid almost entirely any scheduling of political discussion of a war to which about 70 per cent of all Americans are opposed, and which is topic A on every newscast and newspaper front page.

There was no spot for Jack Murtha on these schedules. The Nation, politically speaking a consort of “Campaign for America’s Future”, pledges to support only candidates promising speedy withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. On that guarantee Nixon would have won the Nation's endorsement in 1968. Of course they'll promise you anything. It would be more convincing if the Nation said now it won't endorse anyone who has continued to vote appropriations for the war.

The war grinds on, but the pwog Democrats prefer to talk about other matters, such as the fact that Rove is not going to be indicted. Thank God. the left will have to talk about something else for a change. As a worthy hobby horse for the left, the whole Plame scandal has never made any sense. What was it all about in the first analysis? Outing a CIA employee. What’s wrong with that? Many years ago a man came into the offices of the New Left Review in London where I was manning the portcullis at the time and said his name was Philip Agee and he wanted to write a book about the CIA. Did we call for a special prosecutor to have this fellow hauled over the coals? No we did not.

Rove has swollen in the left’s imagination like a descendant of Pere Ubu, Jarry’s surreal monster. There was no scheme so deviously diabolical but that the hand of Rove could not be detected at work. Actually the man has always been of middling competence. He makes Dickie Morris look like Cardinal Richelieu.

Since 9/11 where has been the good news for the Administration? It’s been a sequence of catastrophe of unexampled protraction. Under Rove’s deft hand George Bush has been maneuvered into one catastrophe after another. Count the tombstones: “Bring it on”, “Mission Accomplished”, the sale of US port management to Arabs. It was Rove who single-handedly rescued the antiwar movement last July by advising Bush not to give Cindy Sheehan fifteen minutes of face time at his ranch in Crawford.

And when Rove’s disastrous hand is wrenched from the steering wheel it passes to another bugaboo of the left, in the form of Dick Cheney. It was the imbecilic vice president who gave Jack Murtha traction last October when the Democrats were trying cold shoulder him for calling for instant withdrawal from Iraq. In his wisdom the draft-dodging Cheney insulted the bemedaled former drill instructor as a clone of Michael Moore, and had to apologize three days later.

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