Two Justice Department investigators came to Sin City last week with subpoenas for six local business, reports a TV news station — part of what’s described as a “wide-ranging and deadly-serious criminal probe.”

According to the report, the subpoenas sought all available information on contacts between the businesses and Ensign, his top staffers, or Hampton.

The Feds are investigating whether Ensign violated lobbying rules by helping to set up former aide Doug Hampton as a lobbyist. Hampton’s departure from Ensign’s office was triggered by an affair between the senator and Hampton’s wife.

Hampton was hired by at least two Nevada companies with ties to Ensign, including a political consulting firm run by a former top Ensign staffer, Mike Slanker. But it appear that investigators want to know whether any other businesses were urged to hire Hampton, and whether they were promised any favors in return.

The news channel adds, in an ominous note:

The Washington grand jury wants all of the subpoenaed records by the end of this month, indicating the investigation is moving rapidly.

The report also adds an additional wrinkle. It notes that, around the time Hampton was looking for a job, a Nevada company, eCommLink, was looking for Ensign’s help in avoiding regulation. According to sources, Ensign told the company that donations to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which the senator chaired, would aid its cause. And eCommLink gave $28,000. But there’s no evidence offered that the issue of hiring Hampton ever came up.

Ensign continues to say he broke no laws.

Original Article: Report: Six Businesses Subpoenaed In ‘Deadly Serious’ Ensign Probe – TPMMuckraker

The rest of the money raised by the group went to operating expenses, salaries for the PAC’s top officers, and back into fundraising appeals — which often ask supporters for as much as $144 in exchange for sending faxes opposing health care reform to members of Congress.

The lion’s share — roughly $1.3 million — of the group’s 2009 fundraising haul went to a murky Arizona telemarketing firm that goes under the name Political Advertising, which has been linked to questionable PAC activities in the past. Its business type in the state’s registry is given as “telephone fundraising.”

Republican Majority Campaign’s Executive Director is Gary Kreep, the California-based attorney and activist who produced and starred in the Birthermercial. That was the late-night program that, much like the Republican Majority Campaign email appeals, asked viewers to donate $30 to send faxes to Attorney General Eric Holder demanding that President Obama produce his birth certificate.

The Birthermercial was produced by Kreep’s United States Justice Foundation, which describes itself as “your conservative voice in the courts.” United States Justice Foundation and the Republican Majority Campaign are in adjacent suites at the same address in the San Diego County, CA, town of Ramona.

And while the groups have different phone numbers, calls to each group were answered by the same receptionist.

The Republican Majority Campaign paid Kreep about $60,000 in 2009, mainly for “legal services,” according to FEC records. Randy Goodwin, the group’s co-founder and treasurer, was paid just over $75,000 for, among other things, “accounting services,” “management services,” and “medical reimbursement.” Neither man has responded to requests for comment.

“It’s a business model,” says Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center. “Whoever gives to one of these groups, they probably don’t realize it, but there are no laws or rules governing a percentage PACs need to give to candidates or spend on a particular kind of activity.”

One of Republican Majority Campaign’s recent fundraising pitches, sent on the email list of the conservative magazine Human Events, is headlined “Obamacare: The Final Battle!” and begins like this:

Recipients who click through find a page where they can choose from several donation options — $19 to $144 — to send faxes to, for example, “ALL 59 Democrat/Independent U.S. Senators And a Donation for just $49.”

McGehee notes that sending faxes can be a legitimate way to lobby Congress, but with some groups “it is a product without much value. It is a product geared to getting the money in, not towards actually producing meaningful results. They’ll do a fairly perfunctory thing.”

You can see Republican Majority Campaign’s anti-health reform fax to Congress, which is headlined “‘NO MORE FEAR; NO MORE LIES!’ VERY IMPORTANT FAX / PLEASE ELIMINATE OBAMACARE,” here.

The group made news this last week when it released an ad trying to link Sen. Harry Reid to Arab “slave-bosses.”

That ad represents a rare instance of the Republican Majority Campaign spending in support of a candidate. While the PAC spent $3 million in the 2008 cycle, mostly on ads against Barack Obama, the picture has changed markedly since that time.

In 2009, the group spent just $15,600 — out of $1.6 million in total spending — on contributions to candidates, according to its latest FEC report.

Most of that money went to New York conservative congressional candidate Doug Hoffman and Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL). The Republican Majority Campaign also spent about $15,000 on independent expenditures — paying for a consultant — to work in support of Marco Rubio in the Florida Senate race.

So where did most of the money go?

About $1.3 million went to the Arizona telephone fundraising firm called Political Advertising for services described on FEC forms as “phone/mail communication.” Located on the tenth floor of an office building in downtown Mesa, Political Advertising is another name for the Political Call Center, according to Arizona corporate records.

The company’s Web site advertises for “tele service agent” positions, but contains virtually no information about what the firm does. State records list Political Call Center’s owners as a pair of Delaware-based companies called the Corporation Trust Center and HCC Investment.

Despite the records listing, a spokeswoman for Corporation Trust Center’s parent company says that Corporation Trust Center does not own Political Call Center, but rather provides a legal service for the firm.

The number for HCC Investment goes to a company called Wilmington Equities, which, like Political Call Center itself, did not respond to a request for comment.

This isn’t the first time Political Advertising has been on our radar.

TPMmuckraker first reported on Political Advertising and the Republican Majority Campaign in 2008. At the time, several PACs associated with former Reagan Administration official Linda Chavez and her family had been the subject of a Washington Post expose detailing how the groups churned through millions on fundraising and salaries but spent little on political activity.

Two of the Chavez-linked groups — the Pro-Life Campaign Committee and the Republican Issues Committee — had used the services of Political Call Center under a previous name, HCC Political Advertising.

Original Article: In It For The Money? Conservative PAC Spends Big, But Not On Candidates – TPMMuckraker

The House Republican Conference adopted the one-year moratorium on earmark requests — funding secured by members of Congress for projects in their districts — last week as a way to cut government spending.

Inhofe, who has been named the most conservative U.S. senator by the conservative National Journal, said eliminating earmarks will not save money, but will shift the ability to appropriate to federal bureaucrats.

“I know what the public thinks about earmarks, but eliminating earmarks doesn’t save a penny,” Inhofe said. “It only sends the funds back to committees and some bureaucrat spends the money. A moratorium doesn’t do anything for Oklahoma.”

By voting a moratorium on earmarks, Inhofe said House Republicans left only Democrat U.S. Rep. Dan Boren to take care of Oklahoma. The moratorium, Inhofe said, could hurt his ability to help Enid and Vance Air Force Base.

Inhofe said he acted earlier to save an appropriation for a new $10.4 million control tower at Vance Air Forxe Base in Del City. He said the measure passed committee then was stymied by an amendment by U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. Inhofe said he managed to get the appropriation passed anyway.

“I’m trying to get someone to fully understand the handicap I will be under,” Inhofe said. “We will try to get the House to reverse it, we want to help Vance and other Enid needs. I’m still the most conservative member of the Senate, but something needs to be done.”

U.S. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., disagreed with Inhofe, saying the House Republican Conference talked about how to deal with earmarks for a year and a half.

“We had a very intense conference the day it was adopted, and I voted with them,” said Lucas, who represents Oklahoma’s 3rd Congressional District, which includes Enid.

Republican House members’ view, Lucas said, is the system is out of control and someone needs to take a principled stand.

“I have the greatest respect for Sen. Inhofe’s opinion,” Lucas said. “We’ve worked hand-in-hand for Vance Air Force Base. In this particular circumstance, I must agree with my House Republican colleagues.”

In an article in the National Journal, Inhofe took issue with other conservatives, such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.; Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.; and Coburn. He said last year’s earmarks amounted to 1.5 percent of federal discretionary spending, and earmarks are nothing more than a distraction from the real spending and debt crisis facing the nation.

Inhofe said helping Oklahoma is what he does for a living.

“The Constitution says we have the power of the purse,” he said. “This is what we do. We create and authorize money, and they are saying they will no longer do that.”

Neither Republicans or Democrats in the Senate have passed such a moratorium. Neither have House Democrats.

“We are supposed to be looking out for our state, that’s what the Constitution says,” Inhofe said.

via Sen. Inhofe against eliminating earmarks – The Enid News and Eagle, Enid, OK.

General Petraeus has announced that he supports a review of the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Policy. Too bad that in his presentation to the Senate Armed Services Committee he told the Committee that eliminating DADT could negatively impact military function.

Petraeus gained support from equal rights advocates when he told Fareed Zakaria that he served with gay individuals in the CIA and that he didn’t think that troops would have trouble adjusting to working with openly gay service members. Today he prepared an eight minute statement, which he was not allowed to give in its entirety, in support of a review of the military’s policy regarding LGBT troops.

Instead he said he supported a careful review of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. At the end of his short presentation he was asked:

“As you said I believe in my office the likely effects could go in either direction… I believe you told me, either negative or positive, the study could show.”

And answered, “It could. It could.”

I have written before about how offensive and unnecessary the one year study is regarding DADT. But for a top ranking general to state that this study might actually find that gay troops negatively affect military function is patently absurd.

Not only is there great international evidence that openly LGBT troops are integrated easily into military forces, Petraeus himself admitted that he served next to gay CIA officers without a problem.

The presentation today was a step backwards for Petraeus, personally, and the movement for military openness. It also made it clear that this one year study is being used by conservative forces as a potential roadblock to the repeal of DADT. With all the talk of moving slowly and carefully through reform, conservatives are hoping for a document that indicates DADT’s necessity in U.S. military function.

They won’t get that without some serious manipulation of the facts.

Petraeus, among others, seems to be anticipating this kind of manipulation. What we learned today is that the study is not only a waste of time and resources, it is a dangerous opportunity for a derailment of the progressive discourse surrounding LGBT rights in the military.

Original Article: Emma Ruby-Sachs: Petraeus Sells Gay Troops Down the River – The Huffington Post

The reconciliation bill, which will be the vehicle for the health care “fixes” the Democrats will add later this week, passed through the panel on a 21-16 vote. Two Democrats, Reps. Allen Boyd (Fla.) and Chet Edwards (Tex.), joined every Republican in opposing the measure. The process is starting in the House because, by law, any legislation that raises revenues (i.e., imposes taxes) must originate in the lower chamber.

The proposal now moves to the House Rules Committee, where Democrats are expected to attach the health reform language later this week before moving the package to the chamber floor. Democratic leaders have been mostly tight-lipped about the specifics of the health reform fixes, largely because they’re still waiting for the official cost estimates to come back from the Congressional Budget Office.

At least as controversial as the Democrats’ plan to go the reconciliation route has been their strategy, announced today, to pass the reconciliation bill alone, and then use an obscure rule to “deem” the larger Senate bill to be passed as well. Still, even Rep. David Dreier (Calif.), senior Republican on the Rules panel, conceded that, if the Democrats can rally the votes behind the reconciliation bill, there’s nothing that GOP leaders can do to block the deeming strategy.

Original Article: House Panel Jumpstarts Reconciliation on Health Care – Washington Independent

“If the president is successful,” said DeMint, answering a question about the prospects for cap-and-trade, “I think it will give him some boldness to go back to other programs.”

DeMint, of course, spent some time as the public face of opposition to health care reform after predicting the debate over it would become Obama’s “Waterloo.” If he sounds more pessimistic now, he also reassured his online audience that the Democrats lacked 50 votes for reconciliation and that “the Senate is not going to fix the bill the way they like it.”

Rubio, whom DeMint confidently called the “next senator,” stuck largely to donation appeals and punted on policy questions — he suggested that we’d have been better off had the stimulus failed but Congress passed “some of the alternatives that were floated at the time,” without really getting into what those alternatives were.

DeMint’s eventual answer on energy legislation, by the way, was: “I think the cold weather has been our best friend when it comes to this cap-and-trade scheme.”

Original Article: DeMint: If Obama Is ‘Successful’, ‘It Will Give Him Some Boldness to Go Back to Other Programs’

With these fighting words, Teddy Roosevelt shrugged off an assassination attempt by a deranged Milwaukee saloon owner and — bullet still lodged in his chest — launched into a ninety-minute address railing against the corporatism and corruption that dominated both parties in Washington.

The year was 1912, a time of widespread discontent among both Democratic and Republican reformers. With his fiery speech, the former president established the Progressive Party, known affectionately as the Bull Moose Party, thus initiating a political movement that would stridently challenge corrupt political bosses, big corporations and a pro-business judiciary over the next dozen or so years. Though Roosevelt fell short of his goals, many of the Progressive Party’s priorities, such as the direct election of U.S senators, workers’ compensation and women’s suffrage, became law within the decade. Nearly 100 years later, his speech and his Bull Moose Party platform still speak to many of contemporary Americans’ deepest concerns.

A century ago, Roosevelt explained the need for his third-party candidacy:

The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly what should be said on the vital issues of the day.

These words ring truer today than they have in quite some time. Trillions of taxpayer dollars are propping up a financial sector bloated with profits; but Congress, looking ahead to the midterm elections, is too paralyzed to act decisively and help relieve ordinary Americans suffering through the recession. To make matters worse, the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United overturned a century’s worth of campaign finance law, giving corporations more influence in elections than they’ve had since Teddy Roosevelt delivered his Bull Moose speech in Milwaukee.

During Roosevelt’s presidency, a conservative Supreme Court comprised of railroad lawyers consistently blocked dozens of progressive federal and state legislative proposals. The pro-corporate Supreme Court appointments of Roosevelt’s successor, President Taft, who filled six vacancies, did nothing to temper progressive outrage. True to form, Roosevelt jumped into the fray, decrying the Supreme Court’s out-sized role as a barrier to social justice. In his Progressive Party convention speech, Roosevelt declared:

The American people, and not the courts, are to determine their own fundamental
policies. . . . The stick-in-the-bark legalism, the legalism that subordinates equity to technicalities, should be recognized as a potent enemy of justice.

Even more boldly, Roosevelt went on to argue for referendum to recall Supreme Court decisions, presaging by several decades his cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s high-stakes attempt to pack the Court in response to its intractable opposition to wildly popular New Deal reforms. Today, after Citizens United, Teddy Roosevelt’s proposal seems eminently reasonable.

Roosevelt entered the Republican presidential primaries in 1912 and easily vanquished Taft, winning nine state primaries. Robert LaFollete, more progressive than Roosevelt, won two states, while Taft won only one. The party was still in the grip of conservative bosses however; reading the writing on the wall, Roosevelt bolted from the Republican Convention to found the Progressive Party. The Progressive platform minced no words, declaring:

“To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt
business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”

Roosevelt was not immune to charges of “radicalism”, the common label affixed to anti-corporate populists then and now, but Roosevelt’s patriotism was unimpeachable; he was a war hero, the leader of the world famous Rough Riders. He had been one of the most popular presidents in American history. His platform was appealingly dubbed the New Nationalism. Nevertheless, sidelined for the final weeks of his campaign by the injuries he sustained at the Milwaukee speech, Roosevelt placed a distant second to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, winning 27% of the popular vote and eighty-eight electoral votes. It may have been a small consolation, but he did beat President Taft, who became the only incumbent ever to come in third in a presidential election.

Roosevelt successfully tapped into a rich vein of American outrage over corporate influence in politics, but it is important to remember that he wasn’t the first — and certainly not the last — great American leader to recognize the threat.

Alexander Hamilton wrote that at the Constitutional Convention: “Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption.” Thomas Jefferson believed that “banking institutions are more dangerous to
our liberties than standing armies.” Abraham Lincoln fumed, “The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity . . . It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.” Franklin Roosevelt declared, “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob…” Dwight Eisenhower famously warned, “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Many of our greatest leaders have recognized, and worried deeply about, the unchecked influence of corporate power on our political processes.

Today, an overwhelming majority of Americans are coming to the same conclusion,
supporting limits on corporate spending in elections, particularly for foreign companies, government contractors and bailout recipients. But Americans are up against formidable opponents in the corporate-dominated Republican Party, the corporate-influenced Democrats, an ideologically driven, right wing Supreme Court, and a powerful army of business lobbyists.

This is just the kind of opposition that would have gotten Teddy fired up. It’s time to revive the spirit of the Bull Moose. Americans are ready for real reforms to the most pressing problems of the day, but the Republicans and (most) Democrats are too busy thinking small. Without a leader of Teddy Roosevelt’s massive statute, a Bull Moose movement today could never survive as a viable third party, but it could wake up and mobilize a lot of disillusioned Americans.

One hundred years later, it’s time to bring the Bull Moose back!

Original Article: Daniel Firger: Why We Need a New Bull Moose Movement – The Huffington Post
Dan Firger and Janos Marton are both members of the Bull Moose Movement.
Visit bullmoosemovement.wordpress.com to find out how to get involved.

The incident occurred in 1985, when Kevin Garn was 30, and married. In 2002, when Garn, a Republican, was running for Congress, the woman, Cheryl Maher, began contacting reporters with the story, prompting Garn to pay her and have an attorney draft a non-disclosure agreement, reports the Salt Lake Tribune.

With his wife by his side, Garn yesterday told reporters: “I expect to suffer public humiliation and embarrassment. Some lessons are hard to learn. This is something I should’ve done back in 2002 but I was scared. I did not want to be publicly judged by one of my life’s [worst mistakes].”

Maher detailed the incident in an interview with the paper. She said that in 1985, age 15, she was employed by Garn, then 30, at his business, Pegasus Records and KSG Enterprises. Garn, she said, “struck up a relationship” with her, as the paper puts it. One night, he took her to a location in Salt Lake City — it’s unclear where — where they both got in the hot-tub nude.

Garn yesterday told reporters about the incident. “I can unequivocally tell you there was no physical contact, there was no touching, there was no intercourse, there was none of those things. It simply did not occur. I’m not trying to downplay what did occur but I want to make it very plain.”

Nonetheless, Maher, who now lives in New Hampshire, blames the incident for triggering the subsequent unraveling of her life. She has struggled with drugs and drinking, and has had mental health problems.

The two had no more contact until 2002, when Garn was running for Congress (he would ultimately lose the GOP primary to Rob Bishop, who won the seat and remains in Congress). Maher was still “a mess” at the time, she said. After she began contacting reporters and legislators with her story, Garn and his wife arranged a meeting with Maher and her Mormon bishop. Garn offered to pay her $20,000, but Maher’s husband insisted it wasn’t enough, and she demanded $150,000. Garn paid up, and had his lawyer draft a non-disclosure agreement in which she pledged not to go public with her story.

Garn denied yesterday that he was paying Maher for her silence. “I treated this no different than any other event in my life … no different than any other event where someone feels they had been wronged,” he said. “I would sit down and work it out with them and that’s what I did in this case. He added: “Whether there was an election in place or not, that would have been the case.”

But the payment didn’t put the matter to rest. They saw each other several times in the last few years, and in 2008 Maher emailed Garn’s son, writing, “nothing will stop me from getting exactly what this matter needs, and that is justice and compensation.”

And in recent days, Maher has been contacting reporters and legislators again about the incident. Garn called Maher this week, but she hung up on him. That led to Garn’s public confession last night.

Maher, who is going through a difficult divorce and custody battle in New Hampshire, said she is going public with her story for her own peace of mind.

After the confession, lawmakers lined up to embrace Garn and his wife.

Original Article: Utah House Leader Admits Naked Hot-Tubbing With 15-Year Old Girl – TPMMuckraker

While most historians agree these people were among some of the greatest legal minds of their respective times, if not of all time, Ms Cheney believes she knows better because daddy says so.

Now, without further ado, we present Liz Cheney’s “Unpatriotic Seven”

John Adams defended British solders accused of perpetrating the Boston Massacre; he even had the gall to call it “one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.”

Cartoon Courtesy of Nuts and Dolts

Alexander Hamilton represented Crown Loyalists following the Revolutionary War and advocated against expelling them from the United States.

Abraham Lincoln defended the accused murderer of Lincoln’s former commanding officer in the Black Hawk War.

Henry Clay defended Aaron Burr, who was accused of trying to make war on Mexico.

Felix Frankfurter publicly argued for a retrial of alleged anarchist murderers Sacco and Vanzetti.

Robert Taft aided Nazi war criminals by criticizing the Nuremberg Trials.

Telford Taylor, chief prosecutor at Nuremberg Trials, turned soft and defended Communists during the 1950s.

Cheney’s office declined to comment on reports that she is aggressively pursuing the abolition of the penny and the ten dollar bill.

Original Article: Liz Cheney Announces New “Unpatriotic Seven”: Alexander Hamilton “Irate”

In the memoir’s final chapter, humbly titled “Rove: the Myth,” the architect of a two-term Republican presidency reports how angry he was when he read a passage in then-Sen. Barack Obama’s second book lumping him in with Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, and Ralph Reed as “conservative operatives” with “fiery rhetoric” like “No new taxes” or “We are a Christian nation.”

“I certainly don’t believe and have never said, ‘We are a Christian nation,’” writes Rove. “I put the offending page in my pocket and went about my business.” Later that day, he encountered Obama and fell victim to “feistiness,” challenging the senator for using “my name and the word ’said’ and quote marks.” Obama, Rove reports, blanched when the torn-out page was shown to him and tried to wriggle out of the conversation: “It seemed to me he didn’t much care that he had attributed to me something I had never said and found offensive.”

Four years later, Rove offers up the encounter as proof that Obama’s image as “the truest, purest proponent of a fresh new style of politics” is a ruse, and snarls that “the last time I checked, I hadn’t bombed any government building (like, say, Obama’s great friend William Ayers); or asked that God ‘damn’ America (like, say, Obama’s former pastor and close friend Jeremiah Wright); or declared that I was proud of my country for the first time in my life only when I was in my forties (like, say, Obama’s wife, Michelle).”

It’s a revealing passage — it takes up three whole pages — that demonstrates just how Rove thinks. Accused of being a steamrolling, divisive political operative, he locates a loophole in the argument, and closes by insulting the wife of the person who criticized him. Apart from some gripping narrative sections about how the inner sanctum of the White House reacted to the September 11 attacks, “Courage and Consequence” reads less like the story of one of history’s most powerful presidential advisers and more like a quickie fightback book from some apparatchik ensnared in a petty scandal.

Rove’s quest to debunk and overpower his enemies in politics and the press begins with his account of the “broken family” that raised him. Nineteen pages in, he starts swinging at journalists — James Moore, Paul Alexander, Wayne Slater — who’ve looked into the suicide of his mother and the rumored homosexuality of his father for clues about his psychology. “The writers who are fascinated with whether my father was gay,” Rove snarls, “are really more interested in implying that all people who have gay relatives or friends must support same-sex marriage; otherwise they are bigots and hypocrites. And if one of these people happens to be Karl Rove, so much the better.”

In other, less personal sections of the book, Rove takes the same care in dissembling what his enemies have been saying. Throughout, he settles scores with political opponents while seeing past the fault in his own. Recapping one of the coups of his early career, he admits that he “destroyed the career” of former Texas Railroad Commissioner Lena Guerroro by leaking the proof that she had embellished her academic record. “Did I pass on to a reporter the information that pointed to our opponent’s lie?” Rove writes. “Absolutely, you bet, and I have no regrets about it whatsoever. Why should I? The information, after all, was true. That should have some bearing on this issue.”

Rove doesn’t have the same attitude about information that damaged his own client, George W. Bush. Rove devotes a chapter title — “Derailed by a DUI” — and five pages to how Democrats killed the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign’s momentum with a leak about Bush’s 1976 DUI arrest in Maine. Mournfully, Rove recounts the reaction of his campaign — “Bush called it ‘dirty politics’ and said, ‘I don’t know if my opponent’s campaign was involved, but I do know that the person who admitted doing it at the last minute was a Democratic and partisan in Maine.” Rove’s regret was that he didn’t outsmart the Democrats by leaking the information before they did: “Of the things I would redo in the 2000 election, making a timely announcement about Bush’s DUI would top the list.”

Rove’s pride and tunnel vision about his campaign tactics aren’t anything new in the Washington memoir genre. Much of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” featured the same sort of finger-pointing about her brief bid for the vice presidency. If anything, Rove takes more obvious relish in attacking the people who made his campaigns difficult — it’s mostly “the kooky left-wing blogosphere” that thinks he ran a dirty campaign against John McCain in 2000, or that only an “imbecile” could have believed the 2004 exit polls that showed a Kerry-Edwards win, and so on.

But unlike Palin — unlike most people with his portfolio — Rove was in the cockpit for much of a consequential presidency that launched two wars and dramatically expanded the size of the federal government. He writes about this the same way he writes about minor tiffs and campaign tricks. He spends a page trying to debunk the idea that Bush ever told Americans to “go shopping” after the September 11 attacks. Technically, he’s right. The closest Bush ever came to using those two precise words — the moment that most people remember as the “go shopping” moment — were his September 27, 2001 remarks at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport when he urged Americans to “get down to Disney World in Florida” and “take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” But Rove insists that the “closest he ever came” was a different speech in which Bush praised Americans for “going about their daily lives, working and shopping and playing, worshiping at churches and synagogues and mosques, going to movies and to baseball.” Even there, Rove skips past the argument made by critics — that Bush, in a unique position to demand more of Americans, gave an “all-clear” sign and moved on. In writing about Hurricane Katrina, one of his only regrets is “flying over the region in Air Force One on Wednesday, rather than landing.” In one of Rove’s few admissions, he admits that he’s “one of the people responsible for this mistake.”

“Courage and Consequence” is filled with such arguments. Pre-release excepts about Rove’s take on the Iraq War — that his biggest regret was that he should have worked harder to spin the fallout over the lack of WMD in Iraq — foreshadowed the way Rove would tackle most of the controversies of his tenure. At several points, he simply misstates facts. He impugns the character of former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, who was removed from his position in New Mexico after declining to file politicized lawsuits, by claiming that Iglesias was incompetent and gunning for electoral office. Paragraphs later, he claims that the only qualm that Democrats have with former U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin — who resigned after negative attention on his own politicized appointment — is that they feared it would help Griffin’s career. Left unmentioned is the real Democratic argument, that Griffin helped the Bush-Cheney campaign challenge the voter registrations of voters in largely African-American, Democratic-leaning areas. But to Rove, the most important Republican political strategist of his generation, Democratic worries about election integrity are basically one big joke. In an unsurprising chapter about the 2000 presidential election recount — revelations are limited to the angry looks and sighs that various players gave to Rove — he refers to the Bush team in Florida as “freedom fighters whose homeland had been occupied as they grappled with a blitzkrieg of lawsuits filed by Gore’s attorneys and street protests led by Jesse Jackson.”

Very little of this should surprise observers of Rove in power or out of power, as a quotable White House aide and then as a Fox News pundit who has reliably attacked the Democrats. Rove’s disinterest in policy or consequences of policy isn’t surprising, either. (”I didn’t pretend to be Carl von Clausewitz or Henry Kissinger, but I knew the Iraq War wasn’t going well,” Rove writes of his thinking in December 2006.) The historical value of the book itself is minimal. It functions, instead, as a test of whether Rove’s combination of pique and pride will be helpful as Bush administration veterans argue that they spent eight years changing America for the better, over the cries of critics, only to watch their work be ruined by Barack Obama and his pack of elitist liberals.

Original Article: Rove Speaks: It’s Everybody Else’s Fault – Washington Independent