Bush's Brain is Going

They can start disinfecting the White House now. Karl Rove is leaving “for the sake of my family.”

It will take reams of obloquy to write his political obituary, but it’s not too soon to start.

Never the master strategist or shrewd tactician of Bush folklore, he was the greasy mechanic of the White House sleaze machine.

His first significant sighting came on Election Night 2000 just after the networks called Florida for Al Gore. With a knowing smile, Rove told a network reporter to wait for the absentee ballots, which we later learned had been rigged by the Bush people.

Fittingly enough, Rove started his career by stealing letterheads from an opponent’s office to send out fake messages and going on to perfect his craft under the tutelage of Nixon’s dirty trickster Donald Segretti.

Nixon brought shady operators into the fringes of his White House. Bush took it further, putting the man he called “the architect” into the heart of the Oval Office.

From the sliming of John McCain in the 2000 primaries to the outing of Valerie Plame and the firing of the U.S. Attorneys for not being political enough, Rove’s fingerprints have been all over every unethical, immoral and illegal move of the Bush Administration.

He may be leaving the White House, but Sen. Patrick Leahy’s Judiciary Committee will do everything possible to keep him in Washington. The capital wouldn’t be the same without him.