Center Square | The real coward

It's very rare that we see mainstream media writing anything negative about Karl Rove. So imagine my suprise when I read this article in the Philadelphia Inquirer today:

By Chris Satullo
Inquirer Columnist

The only bullets Karl Rove has ever dodged were legal.
Last week, after learning he would avoid indictment for his role in the sliming of an Iraq war critic, Rove had this to say about two men who risked death in service of country, John Murtha and John Kerry:
"Like too many Democrats, it strikes me that they are ready to give the green light to go to war, but when it gets tough and when it gets difficult they fall back on that party's pattern of cutting and running."

In any sentence with the names Kerry, Murtha and Rove, there is only one possible coward. It's not the Pennsylvania congressman nor the Massachusetts senator.

The only combat for which Rove ever volunteered was political. In that realm, he's mastered the coward's way, the sly attack from the hidden place, the anonymous flier full of innuendo, the invective by surrogates, the timely leak to the friendly writer. The shiv goes in the back, but the fingerprints are smudged.

Sadly, it works. So it gets rewarded and imitated.

Jack Murtha, by contrast, served 37 years in the Marines and volunteered for duty in Vietnam. When he expresses despair over Iraq, he speaks for many fine warriors who have his ear. John Kerry also faced enemy fire in Vietnam. Despite the fierce efforts of Rove surrogates to defame his service, he remains the winner of five combat medals.

You want to call Murtha and Kerry "cut and run" cowards? Go to the Hill and do it to their face. Don't do it only at Republican fund-raisers.

By most accounts, Karl Rove is a friendly, hardworking, brilliant fellow. No doubt, in his mind he is a patriot trying to serve his country.

But much of what he's done while serving the genial bully whom he made into a president has been a disaster.

It was Rove whose political strategy led President Bush to fritter away the national unity forged by the grief of 9/11, turning the phrase war on terror into a partisan club. It was Rove who masterminded the selling of the Iraq invasion to the American people on false pretenses and a politicized timetable. It was Rove who pressed for the tax cuts that looted the nation's treasury in a time of war.

Now he's back at it. His prints are all over the "war on terror" resolution the House debated last week. Its bland language isn't meant to spur the full, fair, anguished debate on this war that Congress has never had. It's a campaign tool that seeks to frame a complex issue as: "Do you agree with everything President Bush does, or are you an unpatriotic fool putting our soldiers at risk?"

In other words, Rove once again uses America's brave and honorable warriors as a shield. He urges his political clients to cower behind that cover, to avoid the voters' wrath that their incompetence and greed have earned them.

In other words, a textbook example of cowardice. More>>>