NY Times Call Last Six Years: The Rovian Era

For many months now, the nation has been growing tired of the corruption coming out of the Republican leadership whether it's found in Congress or in multiple places in the Bush Administration. But the beat goes on and, for many Republicans, it's still business as usual. It appears, for example, that the main purpose of the firing of the US Attorneys was to stop ongoing investigations by US Attorneys who are honest Republicans appointed by Bush; apparently, the US Attorneys considered their obligation to uphold the law more important than being loyal to Bush and the Republican Party.

From the first day in office, the Bush inner circle has had trouble understanding the law, the US Constitution and the responsibilities of their jobs. And according to some pundits (not all Republicans, by the way), we're not even supposed to mention that Karl Rove has been leading the way on creative gimmicks to provide Republicans with a twenty year lock on power.

For a long time, The New York Times was among several major media outlets who gave President Bush a free pass. Since Judith Miller's WMD games were revealed, there has been a changing attitude. Here's Sunday's editorial from The New York Times:

Turn over a scandal in Washington these days and the chances are you’ll find Karl Rove. His tracks are everywhere: whether it’s helping to purge United States attorneys, coaching bureaucrats on how to spend taxpayers’ money to promote Republican candidates, hijacking the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for partisan politics, or helping to organize a hit on the character of one of the first people to publicly reveal the twisting of intelligence reports on Iraq.

Whatever the immediate objective, Mr. Rove seems focused on one overarching goal: creating a permanent Republican majority, even if that means politicizing every aspect of the White House and subverting the governmental functions of the executive branch. This is not the Clinton administration’s permanent campaign. The Clinton people had difficulty distinguishing between the spin cycle of a campaign and the tone of governing. That seems quaint compared with the Bush administration’s far more menacing failure to distinguish the Republican Party from the government, or the state itself.

That first paragraph sounds familiar, though. Ah, somebody wrote this just a few days back:

In a number of scandals in Washington, Karl Rove has a knack of showing up one way or the other behind the scenes of the major players in each scandal. Just to name a few, Rove is linked to Leakgate (he was directly involved in the leaking), he's linked to Purgegate (he appears to have recommended that US attorneys be fired and one of his closest associates was called to replace a US attorney in Arkansas), he's linked to the lies that were told to sell the war in Iraq (he was a member of the White House Iraq Group whose job was to sell the war), he's linked to the swiftboating of John Kerry (some of the people involved had longtime associations with Rove) and he's linked to Jack Abramoff (actually a lot of Republicans are linked to Abramoff but Rove is linked in several ways, as is his former assistant Susan Ralston).

But I have to admit it's much more impressive when The New York Times says it. It says even conventional wisdom is running out of patience with Bush.