Hypocrite of the Week

Kudos to former Bush White House operative Karl Rove.  By Tuesday he had already comfortably locked up the Hypocrite of the Week Award.

The Republican hatchet-man turned Fox"News" commentator (is there actually any difference?) took to the airwaves yesterday demanding that a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate Republican allegations that President Obama violated Federal anti-bribery laws by offering Congressman Joe Sestak an administration post so he would not challenge incumbent Arlen Specter in the recent Pennsylvania Democratic Senatorial primary.  Sestak declined the offer and went on to beat the 80-year old Specter, a long-time professional politician, who had switched parties barely a year earlier to run as a Democrat after it became apparent he would be challenged in, and likely lose, the Republican primary. There's a man of principle for you.

When he switched parties, Specter extracted the agreement of Obama and the state party apparatus to support his re-election bid.  It was Sestak himself who revealed that the Obama administration had offered him an unspecified position to clear the way for Specter in the primary.  Obama's support for Specter turned out (predictably) to be less than fulsome, at least when he saw the opinion polls moving in Sestak's favor.  Sestak's victory is great news for the Democratic rank and file; they should be able to select their party's candidate in a free and fair election; they shouldn't have to settle for an aging political turncoat foisted on them by the party brass.  And Sestak, 20 years Specter's junior,  is exactly the kind of Senatorial candidate the Democrats should be looking for.  He is a former 3-star Navy admiral and Director of Defense Policy on Bill Clinton's National Security Council,  a compelling resume for the candidate of a party that the chicken-hawk Republicans like to smear as being "weak on defense". 

Obama's attempt to fix the primary doesn't look good - although he would justify it on the basis that he needed every Senate vote he could muster to pass health insurance legislation.  But the assertion that Obama violated criminal anti-bribery statutes is ludicrous even had it come from someone who understands what ethics is and knows the difference between politics and criminality, i.e., someone other than Karl Rove.  It is well accepted that the President has a broad discretion in picking senior administration staff.  We don't know what job Sestak was offered, but he would have been a first rate candidate for a top job at Defense, or a position on the National Security Council.  But where was Rove's concern about the anti-bribery statute when the Bush Administration was handing out public jobs, including plum ambassadorial posts, to political cronies and deep-pocket contributors who had little or no qualifications?  And Rove himself was the central figure in a series of Bush era ethics violations and scandals.  He was one of those involving in leaking, in violation of U.S. law, the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, apparently in a mean-spirited act of retaliation attack after her husband Ambassador Joe Wilson publicly debunked Administration lies that Saddam Hussein was attempting to purchase uranium in Niger.  Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby was sentenced to jail after being convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements.  (His buddy Bush commuted the sentence.  All criminals should have friends in such high places.)  Rove himself was  investigated for perjury after e-mail evidence indicated that he had "forgotten" to disclose key information to a grand jury investigating the affair.  Rove was also linked with the Bush Administration's decision to fire seven U.S. Attorneys for no reason other than their perceived lack of loyalty to the Bush crowd, an unprecedented political interference by the White House in the Federal justice system.

Karl Rove epitomizes everything that is bad about American politics; he is a cynical political operative apparently lacking any moral or ethical compass; a shadowy character, never elected to office, who nonetheless exercised enormous power and did so for purely partisan political purposes; someone who believes that might makes right and that the ends always justify the means.  A man with no respect for, and little apparent understanding of, the Constitution.   He's right at home on Fox News where, as in war, truth is always the first casualty.

If Barack Obama were ever in need of refresher course in ethics-in-government, Karl Rove would be the last person he should turn to.