JESSE JACKSON : Under Rove, U.S. paid hefty price

http://www.suntimes.com/news/jackson/508783,CST-EDT-jackson14.article

Under Rove, U.S. paid hefty price

August 14, 2007
JESSE JACKSON

Karl Rove, the presidential adviser dubbed "George Bush's brain," has announced he will resign at the end of this month. Hold the applause. This master of back alley political tactics has been the architect of the worst administration in America's history. His very successes were catastrophic for the country.

George Bush was never much interested in history or in policy. He didn't travel widely or exhibit curiosity about other nations. His passion was politics. He was an acolyte of Lee Atwater, master of dirty tricks and race-based politics. And in Rove, he found his instrument, a man for whom political calculation overruled morality, policy or even the national interest.

Rove boasted that he would forge an enduring ruling majority for conservatives, yoking the wealth of the global corporations and banks with the troops of the religious right. He had his way. He helped steal an election in 2000. He used Sept. 11 for partisan purposes and he consolidated the right's hold in 2002 and 2004.

The result was catastrophic for the country. The policies that Bush and Rove pursued fed a Gilded Age of inequality and the worst corporate crime wave in history.

Abroad, Rove stood with the neocons who scorned the "reality based community." They thought the United States was so powerful militarily, it could create its own reality. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were used to turn the president into a "commander in chief." The vital reconstruction in both was botched, starved of funds and troops, even as Rove was having the president declare "mission accomplished." The result was to generate more recruits for al-Qaeda across the world, even as it reconstructed its strength in the mountains of Pakistan. The triumph of spin and ideology over reality helped create the worst foreign policy debacle in our nation's history.

Worse, Rove cynically used the Sept. 11 attacks for partisan political purpose. He pushed for trampling the laws and constitution of the country to show that the president was strong and Democrats weak. He had the president charge Democrats with being weak on security because they tried to protect the basic rights of workers herded into the gargantuan Department of Homeland Security. He helped re-elect the president at the price of dividing the nation and embittering our politics. A president who should have brought the nation together ended up driving us apart.

Bush and Rove largely had their way. And the results were horrific -- Iraq, Katrina, the attempt to privatize Social Security, the starving of vital investments at home, the plundering of billions by contractors in Iraq, the posturing over Terri Schiavo's tragedy, the failure to address climate change, energy dependence, skyrocketing trade deficits, growing inequality, a broken health-care system, soaring college costs. The list goes on.

All this has discredited the president and the conservative movement. Yet, as he leaves, Rove predicts the president will come back by once more trampling the nation's interest for partisan purposes. Rove has set up a battle over warrantless wiretapping to divide Democrats. The president plans to veto spending bills over minor differences to placate the right. Rove's team is ready to sell "progress" in Iraq. The constitution, the truth, the nation's interest will be sacrificed to partisan politics. This country will pay the price of his poisonous work for years to come.