The Digging Up Dirt On Karl Rove (Minus Contact Information) Thread

[norml]

I had another thread on this subject locked for posting lots of addresses, and phone numbers for Karl Rove. Having never violated the contact information rule before, I wasn't aware that it was a rule. Oops! Let's see how much info we can gather on Karl Rove, without of course posting any addresses, or phone numbers. I'll start with some biographical information, and commentary........................ Rove prepared for the harder edges of US politics by surviving his youth. Born on Christmas Day 1950 in Denver, Colorado, he grew up in or near the Rockies, where his father worked as a geologist. On his 19th birthday, his father walked out on him. Soon afterwards, he found out that he was not his father after all, the news dropped into a dinner-table conversation by his aunt and uncle. Twelve years later, alone in Reno, his mother committed suicide.

At high school in Utah, Rove was known as a nerd and a motor-mouth, unpopular but irrepressibly opinionated. While his peers were fixated on girls he became obsessed with school politics, campaigning for student positions in a precocious jacket and tie. Although his parents were apolitical, he was a vocal Nixon supporter from the age of nine.

Like Dick Cheney, he avoided the Vietnam draft with a college deferment, but gave up his education to work on Republican campaigns, and never got a degree. He launched his political career by wresting control of the College Republicans, a radical group in the Nixon era. It was an unpleasant business. In an interesting precursor to the Florida battle 17 years later, Rove took on his opponent, Robert Edgeworth, principally on procedural grounds - challenging the credentials of every single Edgeworth delegate to the1973 College Republican convention and putting forward a rival delegate.

The aggressive tactics won the 22-year-old Rove a walk-on role in the Watergate saga that was consuming the nation. A report was published in the Washington Post on August 10, 1973, titled " Probes Official as Teacher of Tricks", gave an account, based on tape recordings, of how Rove and a colleague had been touring the country giving young Republicans political combat training, in which they recalled their feats of derring-do, such as Rove's Chicago heist at the Dixon headquarters.

snip http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1165126,00.html

[Hugin]

1. Anyone have a back hoe handy?

I heard at one time G.W. Sr. had the FBI check out
Rove before he'd play with him.

Good digging there.

It was a rumor... Don't remember where I heard it.

[norml]

2. The Controller: Karl Rove "Profiles," The New Yorker Magazine

The Controller: Karl Rove is working to get George Bush reelected, but he has bigger plans.
by Nicholas Lemann
"Profiles," The New Yorker Magazine
May 12, 2003


Politics is a field with a lot of former practitioners: there is a high failure rate, and success comes tinged with a gnawing nervousness that makes it not worthwhile for everybody. Robert Edgeworth, a Virgil scholar who teaches at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge, is in politics purely avocationally these days. Edgeworth is practically a museum-worthy example of what is connoted by the word "professorial": at fifty-six, he has white hair and parchment skin, he wears tweed, and he speaks with great precision. It's hard to imagine him as a budding politico, but, then, his most active period ended nearly thirty years ago, when he placed himself in the onrushing path of Karl Rove, President Bush chief political adviser. This has never been a smart thing to do, but Edgeworth, as one of the first of many to find that out, had the excuse of not having been as well informed on the subject as people in Washington are now.

The story of Edgeworth and Rove is a well-burnished legend within a very small circle-well burnished enough that just saying "Lake of the Ozarks" is enough to evoke it. The circle is made up, of people connected with College Republicans, a group tight enough (it became an independent organization in 1971) that all its significant figures at least know one another's names. Theirs is a subculture that took form in the mid- to late sixties, at a time when what was officially going on in the United States was a great uprising of rebellious youth and a flowering of liberal politics. The College Republicans were young people who believed that the coming thing was a resurgence of the political right. They felt this so strongly, and loved politics so much, that they devoted a ruthless, all-consuming effort to gaining advantage in a small student organization that today seems a little eccentric. The history of College Republicans is like that of a left-wing group, full of coups and counter-coups and intrigue. And the most College Republican of College Republicans was Karl Rove.

Rove had come out of nowhere-to be specific, Utah, from a nonpolitical and not very well-established family that he didn't talk about much. As a seventeen-year-old, Rove made the leap beyond high-school politics by volunteering in a United States Senate campaign. In 1969, at the University of Utah, he signed up for the College Republicans, and showed enough promise that the organization dispatched him to Illinois the following year to work as a campus organizer in the unsuccessful United States Senate campaign of Ralph Tyler Smith, who had been appointed to the seat of the Senate's Republican leader, Everett McKinley Dirksen, after Dirksen died. This amounted to hitting the big time, because Illinois was the most active College Republican state. In 1971, Rove became a protege of Joe Abate, the College Republican chairman, who hired him as the organization's national executive director, a position that paid very modestly.

Rove, who is fifty-two, has always appeared to be affable and extroverted he has a foghorn voice and an innocent face, with pale-blue eyes, a tuft of flyaway blond hair, and light skin that flushes when he's angry-while, at the same time, being very hard to know well. His few close friends knew that in the period preceding his roaring entry into the College Republican world he had been through a tough, even searing, time. His parents' marriage had ended on his nineteenth birthday-Christmas Day, 1969-when his father walked out. Then, shortly afterward, Rove received a second and more unexpected blow. In Illinois, he had dinner with an aunt and uncle, and, during a discussion of his parents divorce negotiations, they casually mentioned that the man he thought of as his father actually wasn't. "I literally, I think, dropped my soda," Rove told me, in one of three long interviews we had in his office in the West Wing of the White House. In a family of five siblings, he and an older brother were the children of another man, whose connection to his mother had been kept secret, at her insistence, all the time he'd been growing up. Among his friends in College Republicans, the story, to the extent that it circulated, took the form that he had been adopted which is somehow not quite as upsetting. One person remembers Rove saying to him, "Whose birthday is on Christmas Day. You have to be kidding! They didn't know exactly when I was born, so they just took a guess." But when I asked Rove about it he said the real story is that he was, as it were, half-adopted. I asked him if he'd ever found out who his real father is, and he said that he had, but didn't meet him until many years later, when he was in his forties. He got in touch with the man, arranged to visit him, and was greeted with a chilly reception. Rove spoke of his adoptive father in a tone of fierce admiration, love, and loyalty, for, as he put it, "how selfless his love had been," as shown by his willingness to play, persuasively, the part of a blood parent for two decades. The bond between Rove and his adoptive father became even more important, no doubt, after Rove's mother committed suicide, in Reno, Nevada, in 1981.


snip http://bnfp.org/neighborhood/Lemann_Rove_NYM.htm

[fooj]

3. He's a bully and a coward. My theory-He has overplayed his hand!

[norml]

4. Karl Rove, From Wikipedia

Karl Rove
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Karl RoveKarl Christian Rove (born December 25, 1950 in Denver, Colorado) is an American political consultant, and (as of 2004) U.S. President George W. Bush's Senior Advisor and chief political strategist. On February 8, 2005, Rove was appointed to deputy chief of staff.

Karl Rove began his political career with the College Republicans, which he chaired from 1973 to 1974. For the next few years, he worked in various Republican Party circles and assisted George H. W. Bush's 1980 vice-presidential campaign.

In 1981, Rove founded a direct mail consulting firm, Karl Rove & Co., based out of Austin, Texas. This firm's first clients included Republican Governor Bill Clements and Democratic Congressman Phil Gramm, who later became a Republican. In 1993, Rove began advising George W. Bush's gubernatorial campaign. He continued, however, to operate his consulting business until 1999, when he sold the firm to focus his efforts on Bush's bid for the presidency.

After Bush became the 43rd president, Karl Rove became a Senior Advisor to the President. Rove is generally considered one of the most influential advisors in the Bush administration, and he has earned a reputation as an aggressive campaigner.




snip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Rove

[auntAgonist]

17. born dec 25th .. hmmmmm

maybe shrub thinks he's the 2nd coming?

[OneBlueSky]

5. he works for Bush . . .

and if that ain't dirt, I don't know what is . . .

[Fridays Child]

6. He sounds like a Freudian poster boy...

...consumed by a deeply repressed hatred of himself which causes him to a) identify with the party of hate and fear and b) project his self loathing onto those who are, in his view, infuriatingly well-adjusted. If he had not made it to the position he now holds, he'd probably be a serial murderer.

[Clark2008]

7. Or Ned Beatty's character in "Deliverance." n/t

[two gun sid]

11. LOL. He shore has a purty mouth don't he.

[norml]

12. Norman Bates?

(YET ANOTHER) LITTLE MOMMA'S BOY

Nobody’s afraid of old little women. Or wimpy hotel managers. Especially when they look like Norman Bates. But when there is a split-personality between the two, the results are nothing short of messy. Oedipus complex? Not exactly, but just as tasty and fascinating for the viewers. It seems that Norman Bates felt guilty about poisoning his mother. So, to compensate for her absence, he decided to “be” her, as well as being himself. But can one single brain handle the responsabilities of two very different people? After all, Norman’s mother was a very dominant person while Norman was just a weak little puppet. The clash could not be avoided, and when Norman gets angry at mother and vice versa, the consequences are deadly!

Since dealing with problems can be a difficult thing when you’re an insecure person, Mother took over when necessary. But the easiest way to solve problems is to eliminate them. Playing two people at the same time can be an exhausting thing, so Norman, to save his energies, unconsciously took the easy solutions. What better way to get rid of unwanted visitors than stabbing them with kitchen knives? After all, everyone has a kitchen and some knives in their house don’t they?




The fancy part is the disguise. But can we really call the “Mother” outfit a disguise? Norman never tried to hide his identity with the disguise. Everyone who got the chance to see Norman is his battlesuit didn’t get the opportunity to talk about it to his next door neighbor. A tall old cotton dress, a very ugly wig and a kitchen knife was all it took to help Norman forget that his mom was dead and buried.

snip http://www.horror-asylum.com/frameset.asp?page=http%3A//www.horror-asylum.com/psycho/norman/norman.asp

[norml]

8. Turd Blossom

Karl Rove
AKA Karl Christian Rove

Born: 25-Dec-1950
Birthplace: Denver, CO


Gender: Male
Religion: Anglican/Episcopalian
Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Government

Level of fame: Somewhat
Executive summary: Turd Blossom

Learned at 19 that his father had adopted him at age 2.

In February 2005, senior White House political advisor Rove was promoted to Deputy Chief of Staff under Andrew Card. Rove was tasked with overseeing policy formulation and implemention for domestic matters, economics, national security and homeland security.

Father: Louis Rove (adoptive, mineral geologist, d. Jul-2004)
Mother: Reba Wood (gift shop manager, d. 1981, suicide)
Sister: Reba Hammond (younger)
Brother: Eric
Wife: Valerie Wainright (div.)
Wife: Darby Hickson (graphic artist, m. 1986)
Son: Andrew Madison Rove (b. 1989)


snip http://www.nndb.com/people/353/000022287/

[norml]

20. Did Turd Blossom Ever Do La Margarita?

WH Pool Report: Wake Up, Maggie
Today's White House pool report on the nomination of Margaret Spellings for Education Secretary lets slip Spellings' real qualifications for the job: She once turned down Karl Rove for a date. Presumptive Person of the Year (oh, we love the fake drama of that!) told reporters "that when they were both single in the early 1980s he asked her for a date and she turned him down 'brutally.'" The report continues: "'It has taken my ego decades to recover,' he joked. Ha-ha. "Joked." Sure, his ego recovered. . . after spent two months sitting his bedroom listening to joy division singles and drinking cough syrup.

And if she'd have said yes, she'd be Secretary of State by now.

Full report after the jump.

From: White House Press Releases
Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2004 11:35 AM
Subject: POOL REPORT #1, 11/17/04

Pool report
Bush nomination of Margaret Spellings

A touching nomination scene in the Roosevelt Room as Bush announced his choice of Margaret Spellings for Education Secretary. Bush introduced Spellings, who also worked for him in Austin, as an “energetic reformer.” After his comments Spellings gave Bush a pat on the back and kiss before making remarks. Near the end of her comments she visibly choked up as she talked about educating children. She then gave the president another kiss and they exited the room. Those in the room included the rumored man of the year Karl Rove, who conceded that Margaret dealt him a rare defeat in life. Rove said that when they were both single in the early 1980s he asked her for a date and she turned him down “brutally” he recalled. “It has taken my ego decades to recover,” he joked. Rove said he first met Spellings when they worked on Texas gubernatorial campaign of Bill Clements in 1982. (Clements lost his reelection bid that year) Rove later introduced Spellings to Bush when he was running for governor. At the time she was working on Texas School Boards Association. Bush asked her to work on his campaign and then hired her on his staff when he was elected in 1994. Rove called Spellings an “incredible, special person. She has a passion for education ” (but not apparently for Rove)

Bennett Roth
Houston Chronicle
http://www.wonkette.com/politics/republicans/wh-pool-report-wake-up-maggie-025878.php

[norml]

21. Bio for La Margarita

Margaret Spellings
AKA Margaret LaMontagne

Born: 1958
Birthplace: Michigan


Gender: Female
Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Government

Level of fame: Niche
Executive summary: Secretary of Education

President Bush's nickname for her is La Margarita.

Daughter: Mary
Daughter: Grace


University: Texas A & M
University: BA, University of Houston




http://www.nndb.com/people/892/000079655/

[norml]

9. Link to Google search results for "turd blossom"

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Boy Genius or Turd Blossom?
... Profile: Karl Rove Boy Genius or Turd Blossom? Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday October 2, 2003 The Guardian When George Bush ...
www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1053901,00.html - 33k - Cached - Similar pages

BAD ATTITUDES: Turd Blossom to Ride Again!
... January 14, 2003. Turd Blossom to Ride Again! Columnist Helen Thomas,
on a new book about Karl Rove called Boy Genius: "Several ...
badattitudes.com/MT/archives/000148.html - 9k - Cached - Similar pages

"Turd Blossom" Karl Rove : All-American WHITEHOUSE.ORG Gift ...
... », George W. Bush: UNITER, », "Turd Blossom" Karl Rove, ... WHITEHOUSE.ORG. All-American
WHITEHOUSE.ORG Gift Boutique : "Turd Blossom" Karl Rove. ...
www.cafepress.com/thewhitehouse/438933 - 32k - Feb 10, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages

Karl Rove
... point of Time Magazine's history of powerful journalistic coverage, a 2001 report
revealed that George W. Bush's pet name for Rove is "Turd Blossom." No, really ...
www.rotten.com/library/bio/usa/karl-rove/ - 22k - Cached - Similar pages

Cruel: Member Page for Turd Blossom
Name: Turd Blossom. E-mail: Private. ... Subject, #, Posted, Ct, Author, Don't tell me
that shit don't stink, 161587, 2005-01-31 19:10:03, 373, Turd Blossom. ...
www.cruel.com/discuss/viewMember.php/Turd+Blossom - 21k - Cached - Similar pages

Turd Blossom
> >. Turd Blossom. Karl Rove, Barbara Walters' Most Fascinating Douchebag
of 2004. Posted: Wed - December 8, 2004 at 09:16 PM. Quick ...
homepage.mac.com/akitzmil/iblog/C119883728/E278526563/ - 15k - Cached - Similar pages

B12 Partners Solipsism: Turd Blossom
B12 Partners Solipsism. Saturday, April 10, 2004. Turd Blossom. Briefing
on Al Qaeda Included Specifics (www.washingtonpost.com) The ...
www.b12partners.net/2004/04/turd-blossom.html - 18k - Cached - Similar pages

Whiskey Bar: A Turd Blossom By Any Other Name
... A Turd Blossom By Any Other Name. ... Bush's other nickname for the Boy Genius is "Turd
Blossom" - a Texanism for a flower that blooms from cattle excrement. ...
billmon.org/archives/001195.html - 66k - Cached - Similar pages

Resonance: More Work For Turd Blossom
... February 08, 2005. More Work For Turd Blossom. The White House streamlines:
President Bush's senior adviser, Karl Rove, will take ...
www.brianarner.com/weblog/archives/001483.html - 11k - Feb 10, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages

Horns of the Unicorn: <strong>Free Turd Blossom!</strong>
11.4.2004. Free Turd Blossom! ... That good ol' Turd Blossom -- well. . . he's been
quite a Senior Advisor and an awesome political campaigner. ...
hornsoftheunicorn.blogspot.com/ 2004/11/free-turd-blossom.html - 22k - Cached - Similar pages


http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22turd+blossom%22&btnG=Google+Search

[norml]

10. www.rotten.com bio on Karl Rove

Karl Rove
It's hard to imagine how Karl Rove's appearance could fit his role any more perfectly than it does.
Portly, balding, malicious, simpering, he looks like a cross between Sesame Street's Mr. Hooper and the Third Reich's Heinrich Himmler. And he acts like a cross between Heinrich Himmler and Henry Kissinger. Whom he also looks like. And not in a good way.

Oh yeah, he's a man who compromised national security, putting lives of American agents in danger. Wait, I forgot a word there. What was it? Oh, I remember! Allegedly.

Rove is an old-school political operator who would have been right at home working on Huey Long's campaign. Of course, Long did a lot of good things for his constituents, to offset the sleaze and corruption. Rove's protege, George W Bush, has a ways to go in that regard.

Rove was a "Young Republican" back when being a Young Republican wasn't cool (a historical era ranging from 1959 through the present). As a student at the prestigious University of Utah, Rove (who still had hair at the time) teamed up with a young Lee Atwater to seize control of the College Republicans political club in the early 1970s.



snip http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/usa/karl-rove/

[norml]

15. They talk about him looking like Heinrich Himmler in this review.

I like their description of Karl Rove best of all.

[devinsgram]

13. Someone emailed me a couple of weeks ago

with a tid-bit of interesting info that I have been trying to research but haven't had time to work on it much. Anyway they said that his grandfather was Nazi Gualeiter of Magdenburg and that he was a good study of Goebbels propaganda.

So far the only thing I could come up with was that the Gauleiter of a town was like the leader of the party in that town. Anyone else with info about this subject would be appreciated.

[Quakerfriend]

14. Does anyone have a link to the photos??

posted on dkos 2 days before the election (04) comparing rove a terrorist on a tape that had just come out...they called it the "American" terrorist. The veiled terrorist looked exactly like Rove right down to the glasses!

They quickly duped it a fake and the story was buried 24 hrs. later when the 'real' tape came out of bin laden.

Can't find it anywhere. It's no longer available @ google.

[mitchum]

16. I would like to thank everyone who did post contact information on...

Rove (before it was deleted and the thread was locked)
mitchum is a VERY fast scribbler :)

Now, about that Grover Norquist...

[Kingshakabobo]

18. Reminds me of Dr. Evil.

My father was a relentlessly self-improving lingerie salesman with low-grade narcolepsy and a panchant for buggery. My mother was a 15-year-old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, make outrageous claims like he had invented the question mark. Sometimes, he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. My childhood was pretty typical. Summers in Rangoon, louge lessons, in the spring we would make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap sack and beaten with reeds. At the age of 12 I received my first scribe. At 13 I met an Austrian barber-surgeon named Wilma. She ritualistically shaved my testicles. There's nothing like a freshly shorned scrotum. It's breathtaking, you should try it.

--Dr. Evil

[robertpaulsen]

19. Dirt on the Rove/Donald Segretti link.

Exposing Karl Rove
by WAYNE MADSEN

He's America's Joseph Goebbels. As a 21-year old Young Republican in Texas, Karl Rove not only pimped for Richard Nixon's chief political dirty tricks strategist Donald Segretti but soon caught the eye of the incoming Republican National Committee Chairman, George H. W. Bush. Rove's dirty tricks on behalf of Nixon's 1972 campaign catapulted Rove onto the national stage. From his Eagle's Nest in the West Wing of the White House, Rove now directs a formidable political dirty tricks operation and disinformation mill.

Since his formative political years when he tried to paint World War II B-24 pilot and hero George McGovern as a left-wing peacenik through his mid-level career as a planter of disinformation in the media on behalf of Texas and national GOP candidates to his current role as Dubya's "Svengali," Rove has practiced the same style of slash and burn politics as did his Nixonian mentor Segretti. Many of us remember the Lincolnesque Senator Ed Muskie breaking down in tears during the 1972 campaign over Segretti-planted false stories in a New Hampshire newspaper that accused Mrs. Muskie of being a heavy smoker, drinker, and cusser and accused Muskie of uttering a slur in describing New Hampshire's French Canadian population. Rove's hero also forged letters on fake Muskie campaign letterhead, disrupted rallies and fundraising dinners, and spread false stories about the sex lives of candidates. Segretti's brush also smeared George McGovern, George Wallace, Shirley Chisholm, and McGovern's first vice presidential choice, Senator Tom Eagleton. Segretti of course did not go on to a high-level White House job -- he was sentenced to six months in federal prison for distributing illegal campaign material.

In many respects, however, the apprentice Rove has far exceeded the chicanery and evil-mindedness of his mentor Segretti. Rove is a tech-savvy puppet master for Bush. Take, for example, last June's discovery of a "lost" CD-ROM in Lafayette Park across from the White House. Contained on the CD was a PowerPoint presentation given by White House political director Ken Mehlman to Rove on the strategy for next Tuesday's off-year election. The slide show showed First Brother Jeb Bush being vulnerable in Florida. Jeb Bush later joked that the disc was part of a plot cooked up by him and his brother to make it appear that he was vulnerable in order to rally an otherwise complacent GOP base in the Sunshine State. Or was it a joke? Jeb Bush and his political minions like Katherine Harris have shown us that if anyone thinks what the GOP has done in Florida is funny they have an incredibly sick sense of humor.

Rove's own tendency to be sick-minded originates with his mentor Segretti. The 2000 GOP primary was a chance for Rove to hone his skills in dirty tricks. His target then was Senator John McCain who appeared to be within striking distance of Dubya in South Carolina after the then-GOP maverick's surprise upset victory in New Hampshire. Rove's operation proceeded to target McCain with false stories: McCain was a stoolie for his captors in the Hanoi Hilton (this from a lunatic self-promoting Vietnam "veteran"); McCain fathered a black daughter out of wedlock (a despicable reference to McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter); Cindy McCain's drug "abuse"; and even McCain's "homosexuality." In the spirit of Segretti, Rove engineered a victory for Dubya but at the cost of trashing an honorable man and his family. Muskie, McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Hart, Tsongas, Clinton, Biden, Dole, Perot, and others had all seen the Segretti/Rove slash and burn tactics before.

http://www.counterpunch.org/madsen1101.html

How's that for DIRT?!