I am a middle aged photographer with nothing left to shoot


Allan Sekula, The Rich Are Destroying the Planet, 2007


KARL, WE HARDLY KNEW YE!

CELEBRATE TODAY
HIS OFFICIAL RESIGNATION DAY

with a small sample of the outpouring of love for the man:

"Citing executive privilege, he defied a subpoena and refused to show up for a congressional hearing just two weeks ago on the allegedly improper use by White House aides of Republican National Committee email accounts. Fellow Bush advisers have said they believe the congressional probes have been aimed in part at driving Rove out." The White House said his departure was unrelated to the investigations. -The Washington Post

"We aren’t rid of the fat pig just because he’s leaving the White House. He’s never really been a "presidential" adviser anyway, IMO. He’s a political operative for the Rethug Party, pure and simple. He’s just slithering off to become the brains behind the campaign of whoever gets the Rethug nomination for ’08." -Joolz

"Rove is one of the worst political strategists in recent times. He took a chance to realign the country and to unite it in a war—and threw it away in a binge of hate-filled niche campaigning, polarization and short-term expediency." -Andrew Sullivan (a conservative!)

"For those of us in politics, an operative like Karl Rove comes across once in a generation. The Reagan generation had Lee Atwater. And we had Rove." -Patrick Ruffini

"I wish we had nailed Rove years ago. Him leaving now is like resigning from a poker tourney after breaking the bank." -The Sinstral

"He's America's Joseph Goebbels. As a 21-year old Young Republican in Texas, Karl Rove not only pimped for Richard Nixon's chief political dirty tricks strategist Donald Segretti but soon caught the eye of the incoming Republican National Committee Chairman, George H. W. Bush. Rove's dirty tricks on behalf of Nixon's 1972 campaign catapulted Rove onto the national stage. From his Eagle's Nest in the West Wing of the White House, Rove now directs a formidable political dirty tricks operation and disinformation mill." -- Wayne Madsen

"'The question isn’t whether or not Karl Rove was juicing,' says Davis Logsdon, a University of Minnesota professor who studies steroid use among White House political advisors. 'The question is, exactly how much was he juicing?'… And Mr. Logsdon suspects that steroids may have also played a role in the 2000 presidential election, in which Mr. Rove engineered a victory for Mr. Bush even though he received fewer votes than former Vice President Al Gore. 'If Rove was using steroids during all that, then the 2000 election has to go down in the record books with an asterisk,' he says." -Andy Borowitz (The Borowitz Report)

Video of Karl Rove's greatest hits. -- Daily Show


SO WE’LL GO MORE INVADING
--Karl Rove

(with a little help from Byron & Dylan)

So we'll go no more invading
So late into the night,
Though Dick be fibrillating
And the boss still pass-fail bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And David Spade nails Yasmin Bleeth,
And greed itself must rest.

Though the night was made for loving power,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more invading
Till the darkness at the break of noon.


"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." -- Bill Moyers

-- Today’s post a co-production with West Coast Correspondent klipschutz