Hopefully the Last about Rove

Amid all the sturm and drang -- okay, a lot of it was the usual Big Media fog of bullshit -- about Bush's brain's retirement, I thought that Rove's biggest sin, what he should be most reviled for, was all the stuff he did below the presidential level, the further debasement of politicking right wingnut style. Not to mention the not-unimportant query: How gone is he anyway?

Finally, I'm seconded, more or less. Josh Marshall:

Is it me or is the most remarkable thing about Karl Rove's resignation that it seems almost like a non-event? I had the feeling as the day wore on that all of us in the news and commentary business were trying to make it a big event. But somehow it just wasn't there.

Rove has been one of the two or three central, polarizing figures of the decade -- an often feared and hated figure among Democrats, at the center of most of the major political scandals of the Bush era, the architect (or so it seemed) of a Republican dominance slated to last a generation. Little more than a year ago you could find a half dozen newly-minted books on the shelves explaining the perpetual motion machine of right-wing dominance he had created. And yet today, when he resigns, I sense that no one really has much to say about it.

Yes, every politics or hard news publication has at least a couple articles marking the moment. But not with much ooomph or much to say.

In part this must be because Rove's departure seems unequal to his billing. It fits no one's expectations. He's certainly not leaving in triumph. And, for the moment, not in handcuffs either.

As I wrote years ago now, Rove's whole model of political advocacy and organization was built on a confidence game. Say improbable things are true often enough, and confidently enough, and the believing of it by enough people will make it so. The pyramid scheme, borrow-against-tomorrow nature of their game now seems exposed for all to see -- whether it's in the agony of Iraq or more prosaically in low state in which he appears to be leaving the Republican party. But judged in purely amoral, functional terms, for three straight elections, it was quite a run. It was only because of that improbable string of successes that many people, deep into the 2006 election cycle, still refused to believe what the polls were manifestly showing them.

I continue to think that there's an unrevealed factor behind Rove departure. But at this point it almost doesn't matter. This feels like a non-event because the story is already played out. The question of Iraq remains bitter and intense. But on the cynicism of Bush-Rove rule, its damage to the country and its destructiveness to the Republican party, across a broad swath of the electorate, it's difficult to find much of an argument. So really what is there left to say?