Traitors in the Bush Administration

A little news from Jim Hightower's blog:

The Most Insidious of Traitors
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 30 September 2003

"Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors."
-- George Herbert Walker Bush, 1999


Karl Rove, senior political advisor to George W. Bush, is a very powerful man. That is not to say he has never been in trouble. Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush Sr. campaign for trashing Robert Mosbacher, Jr., who was the chief fundraiser for the campaign and an avowed Bush loyalist. Rove accomplished this trashing of Mosbacher by planting a negative story with columnist Bob Novak. The campaign figured out that Karl had done the dirty deed, and he was given his walking papers.

Demonstrably, Rove is back in the saddle again. The January 2003 edition of Esquire magazine carried an article by Ron Suskind which quoted comments from John DiIulio, a domestic policy advisor to the White House who had just retired from his post. On October 24, DiIulio had sent a letter to Suskind describing what he had seen while working for the Bush administration. The meat of the letter described an administration far, far more interested in raw political triangulation and ruthless spin than in actual policy and government functionality. Some excerpts from DiIulio's letter:

"Some are inclined to blame the high political-to-policy ratios of this administration on Karl Rove...some staff members, senior and junior, are awed and cowed by Karl's real or perceived powers. They self-censor lots for fear of upsetting him, and, in turn, few of the president's top people routinely tell the president what they really think if they think that Karl will be brought up short in the bargain. Karl is enormously powerful, maybe the single most powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political advisor post near the Oval Office." ...{article link continued}