Karl Rove: Bush's Hermann Goering

What can one say about the announced departure of Karl Rove as Bush's go-to guy? "It's about time" just doesn't begin to convey the necessity of his long overdue banishment from Washington. Yesterday he made the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows and joined the ranks of pontificating politicians and analysts who are already scavenging over the still-kicking body of the bloodied Bush administration. And it was no surprise that the Machiavellian Rove neither admitted to mistakes in the White House nor took responsibility for any of the indiscretions of which he's been accused. Oddly, watching him on TV - a fat, self-satisfied Republican war criminal worthy of prosecution - I had this vague recollection of Hermann Goering, Hitler's second-in-command. (One is compelled to note that Dick Cheney, as vice-president, is also competing for the role of Goering in comparisons between the Bush administration and Nazi Germany.)

Unfortunately, I'm beginning to doubt that we'll ever see Rove paraded in front of the courtroom cameras in the way the monstrous Goering was reduced to human frailty by the flash bulbs of Nuremberg. Even yesterday, Rove continued to misuse the Constitution and misread history in his refusal to appear before Congress to address the firing of federal prosecutors for political reasons. To me, his silence - and his cowardice - are damning. Rove will go to his grave defiantly believing his actions were moral and legal, in the same way Goering continually proclaimed his innocence and defied the will of the court by taking his life just hours before his scheduled execution. At least Goering's influence, however, died with the collapse of Nazi Germany. Our country and our political institutions will likely feel the effects of Rove's immoral actions for many years. Indeed, his cancerous influence on the White House and our system of checks and balances may prove a permanent injury, whatever the party affiliation of future presidents may be. Sadly, this resignation will not resurrect the dead U.S. military personnel or the thousands of innocent Iraqis who died in an illegal war supported by Rove and his associates. If we're lucky, however, he'll be forgotten to all but the yellowing pages of esoteric political treatises, consigned to the dustbin of popular memory, and remembered only marginally for the sickness with which he infected the republic.