The Bunking and Debunking of Karl Rove

This is interesting: Digby and David Limbaugh making similar statements about Karl Rove -- but for different reasons, of course.

Limbaugh does not take the most strategic approach in his column,
"Rove trumps Wilson -- it's not even close." While his descriptions of how the Left views the Bush/Rove relationship are pretty accurate, it's just hilarious to imagine these wonderful characterizations of Bush forever recycling in cyberspace.

[T]e Left obviously still doesn't consider [Bush] the man in charge. Only a superhuman Machiavellian strategist could have engineered this bumbler's unlikely ascension to the presidency.

And, anyone capable of facilitating a lightweight's rise to the highest office in the land must be not only brilliant, but sinister. For who but a sociopath would foist on the nation such a dangerous Neanderthal hell-bent on reversing the advances of "progressivism"?

Is he trying to bail out Rove or sink Bush?

But Limbaugh (cringe) and Digby are both right in scoffing at the mythical qualities attributed to Rove -- Limbaugh's "superhuman Machiavellian strategist" and Digby's "brilliant political alchemist."

[Rove] is the one person who is feared and respected for his effectiveness by people on both sides --- almost to the point of being gifted with magical abilities to tell the future and shape events.

He serves a purpose for both sides in this way, explaining for Democrats their sense of impotence and justifying for Republicans their excesses. None of this is really their doing, you see, and there is nothing they can do to change it; it the product of a brilliant political alchemist who is beyond the scope of normal human behavior or understanding. Fear him or follow him but do not question him.

Limbaugh says it only to deny it -- but the fear is there: "To destroy Rove is to neuter the Bush presidency."

Digby says it only to argue that little will change: "Roveism --- defined as politics of the supernatural --- is dead. Cutthroat Republican tactics will be alive and well as they always has been. Roveism was actually never anything more than that."