Die "leeren" Memoiren von Bushs Spindoktor Karl Rove

--- Tim Rutten von der Los Angeles Times hat die Memoiren von George W. Bushs Spindoktor Karl Rove gelesen:

"Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight" pretty much completes the recollections of those who surrounded George W. Bush during his eight-year presidency. ... Rove, of course, was the political architect of all Bush's successful campaigns, as well as those of dozens of other Republican candidates. ... interesting are the vague and largely unexamined origins of Rove's conservatism. As he tells it, he holds the views he does largely because he grew up in the mountain West, where self-reliance is prized, and because when, as a 10-year-old Denver boy, he put a Richard Nixon sticker on his bike, a little girl down the street whose family supported John F. Kennedy beat the heck out of him. ... For a man who repeatedly used "family values" and "faith-based" considerations as wedge issues in his campaigns, there is in this book nothing of how his own two marriages failed nor why he, like Bush, remains unchurched. Still, it's clear that his great disappointment was the failure of "compassionate conservatism" -- defined mainly as privatizing Social Security and Medicare supporting faith-based social services -- to accomplish a fundamental electoral realignment. ... His is a Manichaean view of American society -- divided irremediably between dark and light, allies and enemies. ... Rove considers his singular shortcoming the failure to mount a push-back against those who charged the administration had misled the country into going to war in Iraq by falsely asserting Saddam Hussein's possession of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and by alleging his complicity in 9/11. One reason for the lack of rebuttal, the author writes, "was that we felt it was beneath the dignity of the president to refute such outlandish charges." ... It's worth wondering just how much of our current political discontent grows out of the dominance on both sides of the aisle of men and women, like Rove, whose only serious experience of American life is politics itself.