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Karl Rove Resigning Aug 31
tetrahedrassface writes "According to CNN current Bush Administration political advisor Karl Rove will be resigning his post as senior political advisor at the end of August to spend more time with his family. Few if any prior senior political advisors to presidents have been the lightning rods for controversy that Mr. Rove has. Accused of running smear campaigns and celebrated for pioneering district level up campaigns that rely heavily on databases and fake grassroots origins, Mr Rove is one of the chief architects of the Republican Revolution."
yes, the man is a slimeball
and this thread will get about 10,000 cheers for his departure and exclamations of his slimeball status
regardless, neither the comments nor this story has anything remotely to do with slashdot
"news for nerds", right?
yes, this is news, but not slashdot news
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yes, he's leaving the White House, but that in no way means he's done working *with* the White House and the Republican Party. All it really means is that he'll be free of the restrictions on doing political work out of a government office.
Then again, if or when it hits the fan, any work he may have done after that date would not have the protection of his White house job or "Executive Privilege".
In any event, expect the dirty tricks to continue as usual.
I mean, this simple sentence has practically become equivalent with "I need to resign in a hurry, to organize my legal defense", for Pete's sake!
So, let's start the rumor mill: why is Karl Rove really resigning?
Any ideas?
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
One of the best political campaign advisers in the history of politics, has been released into the wild to prepare for next year's elections. In other words, this story has implications for both sides of the political aisle and it's not simply a 'ding dong witch is dead' deal.
It is news for nerds, when the top advisor of an administration who has supported topics like changing the fight on global warming, letting the FCC let lobbyists write its daily agendas, encouraging telcos to say that the internet is "theirs" and that they can charge a premium to different internet sites around the globe if they want 'increased' bandwith.
It is news for nerds, when an administration is guilty of supporting failing industries like airlines, stopping the path for new airlines to make headway into the arena. It is news for nerds when we remove the advisor who played the "Wizard of Oz" with what should be the most powerful man in the world.
In reality though, it won't change a thing. Rove's departure is too little, too late. My hope is that charges are brought upon him for the firing of the US Attorneys and making it politically motivated, for helping cherry pick intelligence to make a case for a war of choice, for re-writing documents written by climatologists to show that global warming is a hoax, and on and on. The intelligent folks would start the indictment towards the end of Bush's term, and have it run through after he is out of office. No sentence should be passed while George Bush is in office. This way, when faced with SOLID jail time, Karl Rove will show how his underhanded life will play against George Bush and Co when he starts blathering about every bad thing he and his buddies in the White House did during his tenure. And you can bet that it would happen if he did face jail time.
For an administration so bent on war, almost all of them deferred multiple times to stay out of Vietnam, or flew aircraft that were obsolete and had no chance of being used in battle. When they are faced with the violent fact of jail -- you can bet they will try to "defer" yet again.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Well, if it's a discussion about Rove, decorum and civility would be highly inappropriate.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Ever notice the smart rats jump first from the burning ship?
Uh, no, once Bush won reelection the ship "Bush II" was home free. Perhaps you heard about an upcoming election season? Rove is a political consultant specializing in getting Republicans elected and advancing conservative initiatives. It is simply time from Karl to get involved in the elections and he can't do that from the White House anymore.
you vote for someone based on their eyes and expressions?
Here in the UK, we had a blind home secretary for a while. his eyes went crazy all the time. I guess he would have lost your vote?
I'd be happy never to see a politician, or hear them, so I'm not influenced by such trivialities. What matters is what they propose, what they have done, and what they will do. Looks, Age, voice, style, I couldn't give a damn. the main job of a president or PM is to make the right decisions. You can be a 400 pound ugly son of a bitch who dribbles constantly and sounds like fozzy bear, but if you make the right decisions, I'll vote for you, and I won't care about your race, your gender or your looks.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I wouldn't personally worry about Hillary. I don't think that she has a snowballs chance. What with the way that large parts of the country hating her and all.
I for one say good bye and good riddance to Rove. I mean seriously, he has done more to damage this country's political system than just about anybody since the British.
Pushing his radical agenda, which doesn't even reflect genuine conservative values, while making a complete mockery of the entire political process. It genuinely amazes me how so many minority view points have managed to permeate an administration, even after it has lost so much popularity.
The way of campaigning in recent years has been just appalling. The war in Iraq wasn't sufficiently important for congressional attention in '04, but trying to pass a anti-same sex marriage constitutional amendment was worthy of time. I don't get it, why exactly are Republicans so quick to pretend to be conservative? I mean I thought that conservativism had something to do with states rights, keeping the government out of ones business and cutting spending. I haven't seen any progress on any one of those issues in the last 6+ years. Embarrassingly enough, there was more progress on those fronts during the Clinton administration than in GWB's.
And I should probably just mod this down, because this is slashdot, and I'm sure that somebody will do me that favor. I mean, thoughtful posts should never be in the positive, right?
It is really stretching to say that this is news for nerds. Plenty of political news happens every day from both sides, yet the only ones that seem to matter to slashdot is when it only concerns Republicans?
This politics section is a joke. This is not news for nerds. This is raw meat for the digg/kos crowd. Remember when CmdrTaco said they would be fair? It's not even close. Trolls like kdawon and Zonk use this section as their personal soapbox. It's ridiculous when anyone says it's anything but.
1.) K, it's not exactly tech news, but I still think it's very relevant to us news-reading nerds. Love or hate, discussions about this administration fueled a great deal of the web 2.0/blog explosion. Granted, that would've happened regardless of who was in the white house, but U.S. politics has had its nose in lots of issues directly related to technology. It's also correctly filed under "politics" so I don't have a problem with it.
2.) Love him or hate him, Rove is a brilliant and cunning political strategist. His president cannot be re-elected and is effectively a lame duck. Bush will wane in the public mind, take lots of vacations, and shoo away congressional investigations like irritating flies for his remaining term--he really doesn't need Rove anymore and would prefer he go off and do what he's proven himself so good at--campaigning for the Republican party in what will doubtlessly be a very difficult upcoming election. I doubt Rove will jump in head first as an official political advisor to anyone anytime soon, but I also doubt he'll be able to resist helping out in an unofficial capacity--it's what he does best.
3.) The "Miss Piggy / Gay bar" bit is just silly. Even if he was gay (which I doubt) he's far too clever to fall into a trap remotely like that. Let me know when there's a vaguely credible source for that goofy rumor and maybe I'll bother to give it more thought.
...a balance and due consideration of all sides...
Ironically, in the middle of your effort to point out what's wrong with political discussion in the USA, you're encouraging one of the more insidious flaws in mainstream media coverage: the idea that "due consideration" will always be "evenly balanced". Sometimes the right way to "Teach the Controversy" is just to point out the objective facts which make the fringe side of the controversy look stupid, not to fill 50% of your story with flat-earther quotes and title the whole thing "Shape of Earth: Views Differ".
Most online discussion is even worse, since people have ten thousand popular blogs to choose from and so naturally gravitate to the ones that reinforce their pre-existing beliefs - so instead of reading stories that don't challenge our objectively questionable views, we get to read stories that don't challenge any of our views. By this standard, Slashdot's political discussions are actually pretty good - the tech crowd skews more libertarian than average, but because Slashdot is not inherently a political site there's still enough liberals and conservatives and socialists and such in the crowd to make things interesting, most of whom aren't just trolls. The nested comments are lightyears ahead of most sites for encouraging constructive debate, and if you set your threshold to 4 or lower you'll even get to read the most well-written anti-groupthink side of that debate.
Hillary was the wife of a person that committed adultery. She handled it publicly and was very conservative with how she handled the public. In terms of popularity, she held on to her position as Senator of New York, so that has to account for something. About what her platform is based on, it's been pretty consistent even though I disagree with some of it. How it develops overtime is anyones guess.
I do know that I am ultimately responsible as a citizen of the US to educate myself about whom I would chose to represent us to the world. So instead of writing someone off because you have a superstitious feeling about them, try to make an educated unbiased guess before you concede to a nihilistic haphazard attitude. Stand up for once and stop saying that it doesn't matter. Apathy is the most ridiculous aspect of humanity sometimes. If you don't like someone, there has to be a reason why other than just superstitious intuition.
Bush doesn't care about his lack of popularity as he's already accomplished most of his goals.
Like reforming immigration, privatizing Social Security, and establishing an independent, democratic, and peaceful Iraqi state?
Colin Powell resigned as Secretary of State in 2004, and was the first high ranking Republican official to go on to testify on record about all the many mistakes were made leading up to the war, including the lies that were included in his speeches leading up to the invasion.
I'm not aligned either way, but in my opinion he's the *only* Republican that has an ounce of credibility left.
This is a man who had a well-known dream of creating a permanent Republican electoral majority and who really perfected the use of wedge issues to obtain and hold power.
The contention that we should be respectful towards him is absurd. He spent decades working as hard as he could to ensure that everyone's interests were not represented equally or fairly, and helping to destroy the middle ground, to make the "us versus them" vision of politics more deeply entrenched.
Sure, there have been power plays for a long time; Machiavelli wasn't born yesterday, nor was he the originator of all his described tactics. But that said, the fact that something is old does not make it desirable or excusable.
As such, I say "FUCK YOU" to Mr. Rove, and I sincerely hope that one of those dove's that he's planning on killing drops a turd right in his eye.
And a "FUCK YOU" to you too, you righteous asshole. This is a man who perfected the modern use of hate as a political lever. He shall reap what he was sown.
Which goals are those? If he was thinking of making vast amounts of money for his cronies from the invasion of Iraq, the Insurgency has taken care of that. His education program is a disaster. Congress wouldn't co-operate on his immigration reforms. His social security reforms have evaporated. His good pal Michael Brown made sure that FEMA was an absolute joke during Katrina, which pretty much revealed to the world (including all those enemies slinking around in nasty places waiting to blow Americans up) that the richest nation on the planet was intensely incompetent. The ball has totally been dropped on catching bin Laden and the NATO coalition is now finding itself battling a recharged Taliban. The White House's most important Central Asian ally, Pakistan, looks more and more to be sliding towards some sort of pro-Islamist regime.
I dunno. It doesn't look to me like Bush has accomplished any goals, unless his goals were the humiliation of the US on the international stage.
(I would lay the blame for 9-11 on him as well, but to be honest, his part in that was rather small. The blame for the attacks sits more on Bill Clinton's shoulders. So take that, you Dwemocwats).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Hey, it could happen. It's just hard to remember, as for the last 16 years we've had no one but Clinton and Bush. I remember the first time I really paid attention to Bush on TV, after he won his first nomination. I remember thinking, "holy cow, the lefties are going to hate this guy every bit as much as we righties hate Clinton." And I was right. But it doesn't have to be that way. Of course it would be with Hillary. With Obama, I think it would just be a general disgust at his incompetence, like with Carter. The key is whether the person will polarize or unite the center. Someone like Fred Thompson, I think would likely win them over, the way Reagan did. If Newt runs, it's hard to say. He eventually lost the center to Clinton as house speaker, but first he masterminded the Contract with America and won Congress for the Republicans by winning them over. But if he had the machinery of a presidential campaign with which to respond and react to the MSM, who knows?
That's a good point, but I think his performance in the run-up to the war proved to me that he made the right decision when he said he wouldn't get into politics.
At the time, everyone pretty much knew that Powell didn't agree with the way the war was going to be executed. After all, the "Powell Doctrine" of always going in with overwhelming force was named after him, and the Bush administration (thanks mainly to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) were convinced they could get it done with a much smaller force. Not to mention that he was perfectly willing to go up in front of the UN and present intelligence that he (allegedly) knew to be faulty when he made the speech. The fact that he said he regretted it later doesn't change the fact that he was willing to tow the party line in the face of his own (alleged) doubts.
The thing that makes him ill suited for high office, though, is not that he was right about these things, it's that he was totally ineffective at convincing the people that mattered to do things his way. What good is someone who has all the right answers if he is incapable of exercising any influence over anyone? Powell was Secretary of State, one of the most powerful cabinet positions in terms of foreign policy, and he was unable to convince anyone in the administration that his viewpoint was the correct one.
Yes, the President and his advisors are notoriously hard headed, but if you can't at least reach some sort of compromise with hard headed people, how can you manage foreign affairs, a game that involves talking to heads of state that are pretty much all egotistical and hard headed by nature? We don't need, and we frankly can't afford, another President whose only influence over foreign heads of state derives from his willingness to conduct preemptive strikes.
Bush (and some in his administration) has created such a mess that we will be cleaning it up for some time. You will be hearing complaints for a good while after he is gone, I'm sure of it.
Hell, people are still complaining about Clinton's BJ. How long has he been out of office now?
Yeah... I'm just looking forward to the next election simply because once Bush is out, I no longer have to hear about people constantly complaining about him. I'm starting not to care who wins, I just don't trust Hillary one bit. I can see it in her eyes and her expressions. I didn't get a good feeling about her even during the 1992 elections.
bork bork bork!
If Gore had campaigned on a platform of "keep doing what my predecessor did, except I'm faithful to my wife", he very well could have had an undisputable win in 2000.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda.
Going by Clinton's approval ratings is misleading. Even against a lackluster candidate like Dole, Clinton was only able to muster 49.2% of the vote during his relection campaign in 1996, despite having around 60% approval ratings at the time. In other words, that high approval rating didn't translate very well into votes at election time. Also...Gore manifestly had a lot of problems:
1) He wasn't Clinton.
2) He didn't have ANY of Clinton's charm or charisma. Where Clinton came across as your buddy, Gore came across as the condescending guy no one likes.
3) From 1992-2000, Gore veered to the left. Politically, he went from being a fairly conservative blue dog Democrat as a Tennessee Senator to being a left-wing idealogue VP. This happened at the same time that the country, as a whole, was trending more conservative. To give you an idea of the impact, Gore lost his home state of Tennessee to Bush in 2000. Forget about Florida, if Gore had simply won Tennessee, he would be President today.
The fact that Gore lost after a successful illustrates his overall weakness as a candidate. Good candidates win elections, bad candidates do not. A fairly simple formula that people, especially party operatives, seem to forget. The Democrats electoral success in 2006 hinged in no small part to them putting forth better candidates than the Republicans (who, in many cases, actually ran to the right of Republicans on certain issues like immigration).
As an aside, the problem with Hillary is...she's not a good candidate. Not because she isn't effective at politics...she is. She is immensely talented, ruthless, and goal oriented. She has a great fund raising machine, and a lot of people owe her favors. The problem is a little over half the voting population won't vote for her under any circumstance. She's extremely polarizing. As popular as Bill was across demographics and party lines, Hillary has never had cross over appeal. Feminists love her, west coast and east cost liberals love her. And that's it. And you can't win an election on that alone.
> The loss of intelligence in the Islamic world happened under Clinton's watch.
And yet, even with all that lost intelligence, even with all the horrible, horrible things Clinton supposedly did to our intelligence and national security apparatus... it was still able to provide written warning of pretty much exactly what was going to happen and put it in Bush's hands on August 6th.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
I'm not talking about information that is provably incorrect, like whether the Earth is flat. I'm talking about philosophical and ideological differences on whether, e.g., promoting the development of democracies in the Mideast - for myriad reasons - is or isn't a good idea, and what the arguments are for each.
Some editorial discussion is also an issue of severely misplaced priorities. A greater disservice is done to the population being served by a particular media outlet when they disproportionately represent threats from, e.g., our own government, versus radical Panislamic terrorists or longer term from China.
There are many supposedly intelligent and well-educated individuals who literally and fervently believe that the Bush administration is the single greatest threat to the American people that has existed in the history of the nation, and any other current or historical external threat is either manufactured or pales in comparison to the present "internal" threat. Further, any media outlet that does not represent the situation in this fashion is therefore not reporting the "truth".
Then again, a disappointingly - and increasingly - large number of these people also genuinely believe that 9/11 was executed (or at the very least "allowed to happen") by the United States government as an excuse to warmonger in the Mideast, so I suppose I should not find this surprising. I do, however, find it extremely disheartening.
It's almost not so much what the media is reporting; it seems a great deal of people have already chosen their ideological "side", as it were, in many of these debates, and will simply seek out "news" that supports their point of view, and discount any other source that doesn't.
One more note: I really wish that politicians of all sorts would stop using moral equivalence to justify their actions.
It's sickening how often I see somebody justifying bad actions by saying that the other side has done the same thing, or as is the case in your post, that the other side might want to do the same thing.
This moral equivalence argument has become so common that you even followed it up by calling me a hypocrite for not granting the argument against a pure hypothetical.
Two wrongs don't make a right. They never will.
Again, this is not a party-specific complaint, but the fact that you would make these comments, seemingly sincerely, goes a long way to showing how many people view democracy as nothing more than an "us versus them" game in which one side wins and the other must lose.
Bullish Machine Tzar
Hey, it could happen. It's just hard to remember, as for the last 16 years we've had no one but Clinton and Bush. I remember the first time I really paid attention to Bush on TV, after he won his first nomination. I remember thinking, "holy cow, the lefties are going to hate this guy every bit as much as we righties hate Clinton." And I was right. But it doesn't have to be that way.
So far, so good.
Of course it would be with Hillary. With Obama, I think it would just be a general disgust at his incompetence, like with Carter. The key is whether the person will polarize or unite the center. Someone like Fred Thompson, I think would likely win them over, the way Reagan did. If Newt runs, it's hard to say. He eventually lost the center to Clinton as house speaker, but first he masterminded the Contract with America and won Congress for the Republicans by winning them over. But if he had the machinery of a presidential campaign with which to respond and react to the MSM, who knows?
And now we get content-less denigration of four Democrats, and praise for three Republicans (plus a quick dig at the "main stream media").
This type of party-line thinking is just exactly why it currently happens to to "be that way".
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
No, a man stands up for what he believes in and keeps his word. I seem to recall the President swears to uphold and defend this little document called the Constitution when he is sworn into office. Bush has taken a paper shredder to it.
To be a man is not to be afraid, to defend the weak and your ideals. Bush is the school bully who uses fear to get what he wants. American's should not be afraid, we should not cower and we should not give up the liberty that MEN like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin risked everything to win for us. Those were men, Bush is a coward and a bully who sells the beliefs and principles we fought so hard to gain for a bit of power.
Have you ever been to a High School that has one of those nosy people that wants to be in every bit of your business and can't stand it when you tell them to go away you want some privacy? Yeah... that is Bush if that same person was also the school bully who made you do what he wanted out of fear and intimidation and then runs to the principle to cry foul if he doesn't get what he wants. The guy who was so macho but under knew he was really weak and pathetic so he would not stand up to anyone unless 20 people where there to back him up against the one. A man stands up for himself no matter what.
Soldiers risk everything to defend what they believe in. The founding fathers of the US of A risked hanging and their homes to create this country and the rights people today so easily let go. Tell me one thing Bush has done that shows he is willing to risk ANYTHING so much as someone disagreeing with him?
A man as you say... would not use fear to control. He would not use fear to get his people to let him spy on them. He would not use fear and threats to intimidate people into doing what he wanted. A man does not do these things. Bush is a coward, a bully and an idiot that has violated his oath to the American people. Colin Powell was a man, and he would not sacrifice his own personal honor to give Bush credibility.