Another Yawnshell
The McClellan bombshell du jour is that Karl Rove should have been fired.
Mon dieu, did the man even read his own book? Didn't he claim that one of the Bush Administration's failures has been “excessive embrace of the permanent campaign approach to governance”? Which I think is an accurate statement, though hardly a shocker. Frankly, the last White House that hasn't been in permanent campaign mode was Jerry Ford's (and doesn't that former joke-butt look better by the day?). Bush, typically, took an executive power trick that had been done for decades behind thick curtains and darkened glass and performed it right out on the front lawn where it would scare the horses.
But here's McClellan, now saying:
Wrong. Karl Rove never should have been allowed to get near the White House. All he does is run campaigns and political plays. He's the kind of necessary evil that gets you into power whom you then reward with a cushy ambassadorial post on some tropical island far, far from the place where you intend to govern.
Then bring him back three years later.
But I doubt we've learned anything from this episode. The next president will just have to re-install the curtains and opaque glass, and we'll go back to pretending all is as it should be.
Mon dieu, did the man even read his own book? Didn't he claim that one of the Bush Administration's failures has been “excessive embrace of the permanent campaign approach to governance”? Which I think is an accurate statement, though hardly a shocker. Frankly, the last White House that hasn't been in permanent campaign mode was Jerry Ford's (and doesn't that former joke-butt look better by the day?). Bush, typically, took an executive power trick that had been done for decades behind thick curtains and darkened glass and performed it right out on the front lawn where it would scare the horses.
But here's McClellan, now saying:
WASHINGTON - President Bush broke his promise to the country by refusing to fire aide Karl Rove for leaking a CIA agent's identity, said Scott McClellan, the president's chief spokesman for almost three years.
"I think the president should have stood by his word and that meant Karl should have left," McClellan said Sunday in a broadcast interview about his new tell-all book, a scathing rebuke of the White House under Bush's leadership.
Wrong. Karl Rove never should have been allowed to get near the White House. All he does is run campaigns and political plays. He's the kind of necessary evil that gets you into power whom you then reward with a cushy ambassadorial post on some tropical island far, far from the place where you intend to govern.
Then bring him back three years later.
But I doubt we've learned anything from this episode. The next president will just have to re-install the curtains and opaque glass, and we'll go back to pretending all is as it should be.
Labels: executive power, Karl Rove
