Reply #28: Mr. Rove, My parents were and are moral people, and they taught

[JDPriestly]

me that before you do something you consider as objectively as you can how what you are doing will look to other people and to the world.

The law on the wiretapping and on torture were written very clearly. It did not take a genius to look at what the Bush administration was doing and realize that there would be legal repercussions for the crimes being committed at some point in the future.

If they wanted the right to torture, they should have gone to Congress and asked for a law that stated when and how they could torture. That is our system of government. That is the only legal way to change the parameters of what is permitted and what is not.

Rove thought he was building the Fourth Reich -- endless Republican rule over the U.S. and that there would never be a government that would look at the crimes that the Bush administration committed.

Rove is not the first criminal to have thought he could get by with it. That is the key to the mentality of certain criminals. That is what so many of them have in common. They know the rules. They violate the rules. And they violate them without a sense of guilt or fear because they either think no one will ever find out what they did and/or they convince themselves that their crime serves a greater purpose. It's the end justifies the means mentality. It was good enough for Hitler. It was good enough for Stalin. It's good enough for Karl Rove. Rove's translation: telling people what we did is wrong because it makes us less safe (nobody will ever find out because they won't dare tell what we did) and it may have been a crime, but it kept America safe (the end justified the means).

Go to any jail. Talk to the inmates. Again and again, you will hear a slightly different version of these Republican talking points with just the names and facts changed slightly for each inmate.

The prosecutor says I killed so and so, but it isn't true. Yes, I shot her but she didn't die. She was still alive. I saw here.

I've actually heard someone say that. The rationalizations of criminals are incredibly creative.