Bill Moyers Bids Farewell to Karl McRove.

Go, Bill!

By Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers Journal
Friday 17 August 2007

Bill Moyers: Some closing thoughts now on politics. When Karl Rove announced his resignation from the White House earlier this week, he got some rave reviews. Here's a sample circulating on the Internet.

CNN Correspondent: We should be congratulating Karl Rove for a long successful run - this is a guy who elected a president twice- who's known as one of the most brilliant political activists of our time...

Chris Matthews: If you've ever talked to him he's almost got, almost like a blinder's on his eyes- he looks you right in the eye - and he talks fast- faster than I do - really fast right in your face totally intent on you - and it's really like talking to a fire hydrant...

Bill Plante: He's not only the mastermind behind everything - he's the president's senior advisor...

MSNBC Correspondent: Boy genius, Bush's brain, the architect...

Karen Hughes: Karl is brilliant - he is funny - and he's a passionate advocate...

Andrew Card: Karl Rove is a superstar- he's very insightful - he's a great friend to the president- he's also a very broad thinker - he is one of the more intelligent people that I know - he's very quick witted- he's got a great sense of humor and the president will miss him...

Chris Matthews: Well generally where there's brains, there's Rove...

Bill Moyers: There is, of course, more to be said. What struck me about my fellow Texan, Karl Rove, is that he knew how to win elections as if they were divine interventions. You may think God summoned Billy Graham to Florida on the eve of the 2000 election to endorse George W. Bush just in the nick of time, but if it did happen that way, the good lord was speaking with a Texas accent.

Karl Rove figured out a long time ago that the way to take an intellectually incurious draft-averse naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket and make him governor of Texas, was to sell him as God's anointed in a state where preachers and televangelists outnumber even oil derricks and jack rabbits. Using church pews as precincts Rove turned religion into a weapon of political combat - a battering ram, aimed at the devil's minions, especially at gay people.

It's so easy, as Karl knew, to scapegoat people you outnumber, and if God is love, as rumor has it, Rove knew that, in politics, you better bet on fear and loathing. Never mind that in stroking the basest bigotry of true believers you coarsen both politics and religion.

At the same time he was recruiting an army of the lord for the born-again Bush, Rove was also shaking down corporations for campaign cash. Crony capitalism became a biblical injunction. Greed and God won four elections in a row - twice in the lone star state and twice again in the nation at large. But the result has been to leave Texas under the thumb of big money with huge holes ripped in its social contract, and the U.S. government in shambles - paralyzed, polarized, and mired in war, debt and corruption.

Rove himself is deeply enmeshed in some of the scandals being investigated as we speak, including those missing emails that could tell us who turned the attorney general of the United States into a partisan sock puppet. Rove is riding out of Dodge city as the posse rides in. At his press conference this week he asked God to bless the president and the country, even as reports were circulating that he himself had confessed to friends his own agnosticism; he wished he could believe, but he cannot. That kind of intellectual honesty is to be admired, but you have to wonder how all those folks on the Christian right must feel discovering they were used for partisan reasons by a skeptic, a secular manipulator. On his last play of the game all Karl Rove had to offer them was a hail mary pass, while telling himself there's no one there to catch it.