YES HE MAKES A GOOD TIRAMISU, BUT WHAT ARE HIS VIEWS ON ROE? We know Karl Rove and the Bush administration gave briefings on Republican chances in the 2006 elections to at least 15 agencies, including many that are ostensibly nonpartisan. Clearly this is bad and likely illegal, but beyond that I'm a little confused why this happened at all. What exactly did Rove hope to achieve by politicizing the Peace Corps, for instance? Why did he go to the trouble of briefing the U.S. Counsel to Bermuda about 55 key house races? With the prosecutor purge it's clear what the goal was -- get the Justice Department to use it's authority to taint various Democratic candidates. But what can a staffer for USAID do, even illegally, to sway the outcome of a federal election? How can a Treasury Department aide help the Republicans?
One possible answer is that some briefings were given as cover for others that were intended to help campaigns, but I tend to think this is unlikely because it would indicate a degree of care that the administration seems to wholly lack. Instead, my guess is it's an example of political thinking becoming so dominant that questions like these become irrelevant. If you think of every part of the government as a political tool, it doesn't matter what they can do for you specifically. The political briefings become a way of changing the agenda of the whole government from policymaking to politicking.
Is this a viable strategy? Maybe, but I think it also reflects Rove being trapped by his own rhetoric. After a while, under this theory, he stopped thinking about each act of politicization individually and simply sought to add politics to everything -- even when it wasn't particularly helpful to him. We've seen this pointless partisanship everywhere, from the Coalition Provisional Authority to the NASA, and I'm sure the next White House pastry chef will have graduated from Regents university. This is, of course, very bad, but Democrats will have trouble explaining it. That suggests this scandal won't get he kind of play that the attorney purge has -- unless someone gets indicted for violation the Hatch act.
--Sam Boyd