I have watched, and I have waited. I have kept my eyes and ears
open but still cannot seem to find the missing piece of the story.
No one has yet asked the most obvious question about the Mark Foley
scandal: How did Karl Rove pull this off?
What Rove may have done — tricking a Republican congressman
into a series of sexually explicit internet exchanges with a
teenage boy, recording and saving that exchange, then leaking it to
the media immediately prior to the November elections — is
despicable. It is beyond words.
Actually, that is precisely what it is. No one has uttered a
word about Rove’s involvement since the Foley scandal broke. Where
is the outrage? The inquiries? The calls for investigation? How
could the media and Democrats be so clueless?
The media look increasingly like pawns in Rove’s machinations,
given the convenient decision not to reveal the source of the leak.
As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank once universalized,
“All roads lead to Rove.” Why is this formula no longer
applicable?
Rove’s name hasn’t turned up because the Foley scandal seems to
be hurting Republicans as planned and, as far as anyone can tell,
is hurting them badly. It led a major conservative-leaning
newspaper, the Washington Times, to demand that House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) resign
from his leadership post. With less than a month to go before the
elections, Republicans are in disarray. It’s absurd to think Rove
is behind this.
But was it not equally as absurd to suggest that Rove was
plotting to sneak WMD into Iraq? Or that he was feeding answers to
George W. Bush during a presidential debate by way of a secret
microphone implanted on the president’s shoulder? Evidently, all
wires led to Rove, too.
IT IS HARD TO OVERSTATE Rove-inspired paranoia. In the minds of so
many normally rational people, here is a man eminently capable of
Houdini-like stunts. Karl Rove, White House mastermind
extraordinaire, is thought to be behind every leak, controversy, or
October surprise that somehow benefits Republicans. Numerous times
a story has broken that initially seemed fatal for Republicans,
only then to boomerang and help them instead. The theory was always
the same: Karl Rove threw the boomerang.
In September 2004, after it was revealed that documents
suggesting George W. Bush had cheated on his national guard
requirements were fake, there was a severe backlash against not
only Dan Rather but against anything that appeared to be an
anti-Bush ploy. The original target, President Bush, suffered no
political damage; all the aches were felt by the liberal media and
consequently, though indirectly, by the Kerry campaign. How did
this happen? Who was responsible? “I think I would ask Karl Rove
that question,” offered DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe.
The real explanation, according to Congresswoman Maurice Hinchey
(D-NY), was that the White House “set up Dan Rather…. It
originated with Karl Rove, in my belief, in the White House. They
set that up with those false papers.” If that’s really how it
happened, then Rove should be working for NASA.
A month later, when Osama bin Laden released a videotape four
days before the election warning Americans not to vote for George
W. Bush, people wondered aloud if the world’s most-wanted terrorist
was taking cues from a pen pal named Karl. The tape’s release
seemed awfully fishy to Walter Cronkite, who told Larry King, “I’m
a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at
the White House, who is a very clever man, that he probably set up
bin Laden to this thing.”
Perhaps the most outlandish allegation of Rovian mischief came
in 2002. After Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane
crash a little more than a week before the midterm elections, many
people thought Rove was the culprit. Professors James Fetzer and
Don Jacobs have even written a book, American Assassination: The Strange Death of
Senator Paul Wellstone, suggesting that Rove was responsible
for the “murder.” (Is Rove behind their book, too?)
ON THE NATIONAL LEVEL, Rove’s campaign misconduct dates back to the
2000 Republican primary, when he allegedly spread rumors among
South Carolina voters that John McCain was both a homosexual
and the father of an illegitimate black daughter. (Now
that would be a trick.) However, if those same rumors had been
directed against Bush himself, Rove would have been suspected of
that, too. It would have been part of an effort to portray Bush as
an innocent victim of vicious lies who deserved voters’ pity and
compassion — a not-too-subtle validation of compassionate
conservatism. It would have been Rathergate without the memos.
To his critics, everything Rove does is a riddle wrapped in a
mystery inside an enigma — all covered with lies.
“If Karl Rove is cheering for Howard Dean, should the Democrats
choose anyone but?” asked CNN Anchor Sean Callebs in July 2003.
“If Karl Rove said that the sky was blue, I think I’d
double-check,” responded Michele Mitchell.
Hardly anyone in the media or the Democratic Party needed any
double-checking when it came to the unsubstantiated charge that
Rove had engineered an attack on Joe Wilson. “There’s no question
that Rove was the one that leaked the information about the CIA
agent’s name,” DNC Chairman Howard Dean told MSNBC’s Norah
O’Donnell on April 28, 2006. According to Paul Krugman in the New York Times,
“there’s no question that he damaged national security for partisan
advantage. If a Democrat had done that, Republicans would call it
treason.” In an unresolved matter with so few definitive answers,
there was “no question” that Karl Rove was guilty of treason.
Krugman explained that Rove’s smear tactics succeed because
“[a]ll they have to do is get a lot of media play, and they’ll
create the sense that there must be something wrong with the guy”
being smeared. Insofar as there is “something wrong” with Mark
Foley, why can’t his downfall be counted among Rove’s success
stories?
Among all the talk of a former congressman and a former teenage
boy, no one has bothered to ask if the boy genius is implicated for
one reason: To imply that Rove had something to do with the present
scandal would mean that the boy genius was never so genius to begin
with.
