Bye bye Karl...

The mainstream media has announced the Karl Rove is resigning. From what exactly?

Oh... he's leaving the White House:

The White House said his departure was unrelated to the investigations. In an interview published this morning, Rove told Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul A. Gigot that he had been interested in leaving last year but did not want to go immediately after the Democrats took over Congress, nor did he want to abandon Bush as he fought for his troop buildup in Iraq and an immigration overhaul.

"I just think it's time," Rove told Gigot in comments confirmed by the White House. The Journal said White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten told Rove and other senior aides that if they stay past Labor Day, they would be expected to remain through the end of the second term, Jan. 20, 2009.

"There's always something that can keep you here," Rove said, "and as much as I'd like to be here, I've got to do this for the sake of my family."

Rove said he was finished with political consulting and plans to spend much of his time at his house in Ingram, Tex., with his wife, Darby, and near their son, who attends college in San Antonio. He said he plans to write a book about Bush's years in office, a project encouraged by the president, and would like to teach at some point, but has no job lined up for now. He does not plan to work on a presidential campaign nor would he endorse a candidate.

See ya Karl... wherever you pop up next. Because I don't believe for one minute that you are 'retiring to your house in Ingram Texas.'

So -- who's campaign will you be orchestrating this time? Rudi's...? Fred's? Or maybe Jeb's? (Warning: Bush name may not be so viable right now.)

Karl, Karl... we so hate to see you go. Not that we ever 'saw' you anyway, other than that weird little dancing escapade. (Don't give up your day job.)

No - you like working in the background, in the shadows, where you can generate your propaganda spin and pull the strings. Anyone who things you're 'stepping out of the game' is a sucker. But of course -- a sucker is born every minute... right Karl? And guys like you were born to spin them like little sucker-tops.

From the Washington Post:

Rove's influence extended far beyond the politics of electioneering, deep into policymaking. He helped craft the first-term Bush agenda of tax cuts, which succeeded, and the second-term agenda of Social Security private accounts, which did not. More broadly, he provided the intellectual and historic framework for the Bush presidency and hoped to use it to open a new era of Republican political dominance, a project that today looks potentially crippled by the unpopularity of both the president and the Iraq war.

-- snip --

Rove told Gigot that he remains confident Bush will recover politically despite his low approval ratings. "He will move back up in the polls," Rove said. And he said Republicans could still retain the White House next year. The Democrats are likely to nominate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), "a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate," he said, but Republicans have "a very good chance" of beating her.

Rove laughed off his own reputation as the svengali of the Bush presidency. "I'm a myth," he said. "There's the Mark of Rove. I read about some of the things I'm supposed to have done and I have to try not to laugh."

We're all giggling with ya, Karl.

A little GOP giggly entertainment for the road...



"Stormy weather... when we and our Karl... ain't together..."

It appears Senator Leahy isn't quite done with Karl, either in or out of the White House. I guess Senator Leahy is still a little miffed about that small, untidy business with Karl's flouted subpoena.

Senator Leahy - don't be a crab! Karl just wants to retire quietly to his little house in Texas. Don't be partisan, Senator Leahy. (Heh heh.)

From the Good Vermont Senator's website:

Comment Of Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.),
Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee,
On The Resignation Of White House Deputy Chief Of Staff Karl Rove
August 13, 2007

“Earlier this month, Karl Rove failed to comply with the Judiciary Committee's subpoena to testify about the mass firings of United States Attorneys. Despite evidence that he played a central role in these firings, just as he did in the Libby case involving the outing of an undercover CIA agent and improper political briefings at over 20 government agencies, Mr. Rove acted as if he was above the law. That is wrong. Now that he is leaving the White House while under subpoena, I continue to ask what Mr. Rove and others at the White House are so desperate to hide. Mr. Rove’s apparent attempts to manipulate elections and push out prosecutors citing bogus claims of voter fraud shows corruption of federal law enforcement for partisan political purposes, and the Senate Judiciary Committee will continue its investigation into this serious issue.

“The list of senior White House and Justice Department officials who have resigned during the course of these congressional investigations continues to grow, and today, Mr. Rove added his name to that list. There is a cloud over this White House, and a gathering storm. A similar cloud envelops Mr. Rove, even as he leaves the White House.”

A gathering storm (Shiver.) Are you going to drag his butt into the Senate, Mr. Leahy? Are you guys ready to back this tough talk with some tough action?

Because yes: we see the cloud. It's obscuring the entire horizon now. It just ate our 4th amendment.

Dare we might hope this 'storm' will ever spawn an impeachment tornado? Or are you waiting until the anger out here grows into a Cat 5 hurricane?

Thompson: 18-year lobbyist and Nixon mole...

THIS is the best presidential candidate the GOP has to offer? Must be some real slim pickins. Then again, the neocons do love their Nixon throwbacks. Apparently anything or anyone that was in any way tied to the Nixon administration is to be vaulted into the highest level of power available. All corruption, all the time. And who better than a Nixon insider?

Thompson is a real piece of work. First off, Thompson (along with being a television actor) was a 18 year career lobbyist; protecting clients from asbestos suits from workers who were attempting to collect damages that were owed to them.

Well that's certainly a commendable way to make a living... if you are a neocon, that is.

Now, a new item to add to his illustrious political resume: Nixon administration mole:

"Thompson was a mole for the White House," Armstrong said in an interview. "Fred was working hammer and tong to defeat the investigation of finding out what happened to authorize Watergate and find out what the role of the president was."

It appears that Mr. Thompson, while serving as Senate Watergate Committee minority counsel, actually leaked information to the Nixon administration, concerning the committee's knowledge of the tapes Nixon had in his possession. One has to wonder if this advanced warning led to that accidental erasure of 18 minutes... oh never mind.

No wonder the neocons live this guy: loyal to party, and disdain for law. That fits their presidential criteria to a T.

It explains why Freddy has been campaigning to 'free poor Scooter' and allow him to walk away from his felony charge without doing any time. Fred is all about the double standard. Mr. 'Law and Order' actor, in reality, isn't terribly concerned about the finer points of real law. Republicans have a different standard. Their job is to win, period. They don't worry about details like law, justice, morality... even reason.

Ah, it seems the more we learn about this guy, seedier he becomes. This is the GOP's 'great white hope' for winning in 2008? If so, they are scraping the bottom of the barrel. If they really 'got it', and realized how angry people are across the length and breadth of this nation, they would find - and support - a moral and upstanding member of their party, like Senator Lugar. Instead, they continue down the neocon road, and appear willing to follow it straight off the cliff.

The view of Thompson as a Nixon mole is strikingly at odds with the former Tennessee senator's longtime image as an independent-minded prosecutor who helped bring down the president he admired. Indeed, the website of Thompson's presidential exploratory committee boasts that he "gained national attention for leading the line of inquiry that revealed the audio-taping system in the White House Oval Office." It is an image that has been solidified by Thompson's portrayal of a tough-talking prosecutor in the television series "Law and Order."

So first we hear that Fred is 'lazy.' We've learned he is a lobbyist. Now a mole. Gotcha. First rate candidate material.

More from the The Boston Globe:

John Dean , Nixon's former White House counsel, who was a central witness at the hearings, said he believed that Baker and Thompson were anything but impartial players. "I knew that Thompson would be Baker's man, trying to protect Nixon," Dean said in an interview.

-- snip --

On July 13, 1973, Armstrong, the Democratic staffer, asked Butterfield a series of questions during a private session that led up to the revelation. He then turned the questioning over to a Republican staffer, Don Sanders, who asked Butterfield the question that led to the mention of the taping system.

To the astonishment of everyone in the room, Butterfield admitted the taping system existed.

When Thompson learned of Butterfield's admission, he leaked the revelation to Nixon's counsel, J. Fred Buzhardt .

"Even though I had no authority to act for the committee, I decided to call Fred Buzhardt at home" to tell him that the committee had learned about the taping system, Thompson wrote. "I wanted to be sure that the White House was fully aware of what was to be disclosed so that it could take appropriate action."

Armstrong said he and other Democratic staffers had long been convinced that Thompson was leaking information about the investigation to the White House. The committee, for example, had obtained a memo written by Buzhardt that Democratic staffers believed was based on information leaked by Thompson.

Armstrong said he thought the leaks would lead to Thompson's firing. "Any prosecutor would be upset if another member of the prosecution team was orchestrating a defense for Nixon," said Armstrong, who later became a Washington Post reporter and currently is executive director of Information Trust, a nonprofit organization specializing in open government issues.

I still contend the Democrats are completely missing the boat when they don't find - and nominate - an actor to 'play the president' in 2008.

I'm only half kidding here: because the media goes ga-ga over actors, completely losing their minds in their starstruck awe of anyone who makes a living pretending to be someone else.

Apparently in our current political system, it is the media that crowns the champions. If neither party is willing to actually 'play' to the people, they should certainly consider 'playing' to the media as a winning campaign strategy.

And how better than by running an actor for high office?

With an actor out front wooing the media and kissing babies, the Democratic Party can slip and honest-to-God real leader into the VP 'power seat' (this has proven quite effective for the neocons, wouldn't you say?) and let the front man do the talking, and the spinning. And believe me, anyone can spin - anyone can talk - better than George Bush.

And who better to spin an image... than an actor? The GOP knows this... when will the Democrats wise up and learn to play the game?

Because it's either play the game, or for God's sake use their majority to CHANGE THE GAME. It' well past time they got the hell off the wishy-washy fence and made their move, one way or another. Clean up this broken process, or play to win. Personally I'd prefer they fix it, but since when do any of them - in either party - listen to us mere American citizens?

Stupid comments, and enlightening

First the 'oh no, our white, Christian male power structure is in jeopardy' moment. (What - a moment of truthiness, Bill?)

Bill O'Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you've got to cap with a number.

John McCain: In America today we've got a very strong economy and low unemployment, so we need addition farm workers, including by the way agriculture, but there may come a time where we have an economic downturn, and we don't need so many.

O'Reilly: But in this bill, you guys have got to cap it. Because estimation is 12 million, there may be 20 [million]. You don't know, I don't know. We've got to cap it.

McCain: We do, we do. I agree with you

Next, an idiotic comment proving that macho-guy Fred Thompson knows little or nothing of American history, let alone anybody else's...

In a recent blog post, he (Thompson) rebuked foreigners who don't like the United States: "our natural tendency is to tell the French, for example, that we'd rather not hear from them until the day when they need us to bail them out again."

Hey Fred - be thankful that the French were there to 'bail us out' in the very beginning. Those of us who actually read, and bothered to learn our own history, tend to figure we owed them one when we rescued them in WWII. The French spent a fortune on our revolution. I know you'd like to believe we did it all by ourselves, but get real. We were losing the revolution until the French 'bailed us out.'

Our little Republic would never would have existed without French money, French guns, French ammunition, and the French fleet: which drove the British out of the Chesapeake Bay in 1781. We'd have lost the freakin Revolution had the French not shown up with their armada for the battle of Yorktown. Didn't you hear about all of the years Benjamin Franklin spent in France during the Revolution, courting the French King? You can thank him too.

Not that you know about any of this...

The only guys around who may actually be more clueless than Thompson are, you guessed it, the media dunderheads who cover him. Apparently they are already swooning over his macho, maleness, tough-y-ness, and obvious mystique-y-ness.

On what do they base this judgment? Glenn Greenwald has a little fun with Newsweek's Howard Fineman and Time Magazine's Mark Halperin:

And -- like the vast, vast majority of Republican "tough guys" who play-act the role so arousingly for our media stars, from Rudy Giuliani to Newt Gingrich -- Thompson has no military service despite having been of prime fighting age during the Vietnam War (Thompson turned 20 in 1962, Gingrich in 1963, Giuliani in 1964). He was active in Republican politics as early as the mid-1960s, which means he almost certainly supported the war in which he did not fight.

So what exactly, in Fineman's eyes, makes Thompson such a "tough guy"? Fineman clone Mark Halperin, in a fawning piece in Time last week -- hailing Thompson's "magnetism" and praising him as "poised and compelling" and exuding "bold self-confidence" -- provides the answer:

Even before his Law & Order depiction of district attorney Arthur Branch, Thompson nearly always played variations on the same character -- a straight-talking, tough-minded, wise Southerner -- basically a version of what his supporters say is his true political self.

And he is often cast as a person in power -- a military official, the White House chief of staff, the head of the CIA, a Senator or even the President of the U.S. It could be called the Cary Grant approach to politics. As the legendary actor once explained his own style and success, "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be, and I finally became that person."

The only thing that makes Thompson a "tough guy" is that he pretends to be one; he play-acts as one.

It is obvious that these guys are literally praying that Thompson will be the guardian of their 'white, Christian, male power structure.' And so of course... they compare him with Reagan.

Actually, that may be the only comparison that works.

I still think we should run Clooney...