Wednesday, November 8, 2006

Junk this White House job


By PAT MURPHY

The man George W. Bush calls "The Architect" of his rescue from oblivion as a recovering, ne'er-do-well middle-aged alcoholic playboy to become president of the United States has handed sensible Republicans and Democrats ample ammunition for a needed, long overdue elimination of a White House office that has become Dirty Tricks Central.

Carrying various titles since Bush's 2000 triumph, Karl Rove has spent millions of dollars engineering partisan political strategies (many of them downright nasty and underhanded) designed, as he boasts, to transform the United States into a one-party oligarchy.

Should taxpayers—especially Democrats and Independents whom Rove has attacked as virtually unAmerican and cowardly—be expected to finance Rove's highjinks?

For that matter, should any taxpayers be obliged to pay for this White House function under Democrat or Republican presidents?

Whatever the title—counselor to the president, political adviser, deputy chief of staff—the office should be abolished and all its political activities shifted to the respective political parties for funds and management.

Just how much Rove has spent trying to sabotage the Democratic Party as well as design and promote GOP policies as sops to friendly voting blocks is incalculable—regular and expensive polling, staff, command of government jets to travel to partisan events for speeches, recruiting federal personnel to carry out partisan lobbying.

Conservatives complain loudly about "unelected" judges influencing American society. What about Rove, who is unaccountable and unaudited and reckless with the truth?

Mind you, Rove and his predecessors were not mere hired hands toiling in a dingy office in some nondescript, abandoned government warehouse. Rove is closer to the Oval Office than the vice president, and his reach and influence is into the entire federal bureaucracy.

His spin, slogans, tactics for deceiving Americans about the Iraq war, glib statements from Cabinet officers—all this is concocted or screened by Rove. Ethics? His office counseled privately more than 40 times with Jack Abramoff, the notorious Republican lobbyist-crook, hatching heaven knows what to bamboozle Americans.

Sitting presidents need to know the mood of the country and need advice on implementing their programs through arguing their merits. Rove, however, has used the impenetrable secrecy of the presidency for gutter tactics and for undermining the broader, better interests of all Americans, paid for by unwitting taxpayers.

Republicans who claim to stand for small government and for fiscal prudence have a chance to live up to their slogans by asking Democrats in Washington to join in abolishing the White House office that has become a branch office of political parties.

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Pat Murphy is the retired publisher of the Arizona Republic and a former radio commentator.




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