Rove says he's blameless for Republican slippage

**Tumbleweed** · Admin Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts votes: 4

Rove won't take credit for anything he was involved in. Laughing

Quote:

In a television tour of three Sunday morning shows as his departure from the White House nears, Rove, President George W. Bush's chief political adviser, complained that Democrats on Capitol Hill were Captain Ahabs relentlessly pursuing him as the big white whale.

"Let's face it, I mean, I'm a myth," Rove told Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" when asked about his critics. "You know, I'm Beowulf, you know, I'm Grendel. I don't know who I am. But they're after me."

In the spirited hunt for White House culprits, Rove is a favorite target, though many Republicans are also inclined to blame him for the sinking popularity of the president and his party.

On Sunday, Rove, who is leaving the White House at the end of the month, did not cut an especially heroic or villainous figure. The strategist who looms in the public imagination as a political mastermind and West Wing Svengali used rare appearances on camera to deliver an exiting White House aide's most time-honored Washington message: Mistakes were not made, and it's not my fault.

He even denied responsibility for his hip-hop performance as a rapping "MC Rove" at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in March.

"They dragged me up there," he told Wallace. "I was uncomfortable, and I said: 'I've got a choice. I can be irritated and everybody will see it, or I can play along and try and show them I'm a good sport.' " He noted that his black-tie rap routine, shown repeatedly on television and the Internet, was his "most humiliating moment in Washington, bar none."

The incident, and a video clip of it, didn't come up during Rove's appearance on "Meet the Press," perhaps because David Gregory, the NBC White House correspondent who filled in Sunday for Tim Russert, was also dancing on stage that night.

Rove said he was blameless as well for his role in the unmasking of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame Wilson. White House officials were accused of seeking to discredit her husband, Joseph Wilson 4th, who wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times in 2003 questioning the administration's case for war in Iraq.

Asked if he owed Wilson an apology, Rove gave a one-word answer: "No."

Gregory asked Rove if he felt responsible for the downward slide of the Republican Party. "Well look, everyone who identifies with the Republican Party ought to, ought to, ought to feel some responsibility," he replied.

Rove said the Constitution prevented him from complying with a congressional subpoena to describe his part in the firings of U.S. attorneys.

When Wallace argued that executive privilege did not prevent him from answering a reporter's questions ("Why did you push to fire some U.S. attorneys in the president's second term?"), Rove turned testy. "I know you don't understand you're being an agent of Congress when you ask me that question," he said. "But you are."

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**CHUQ** · Agitator Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts votes: 3

I guess it will take the perspevctive of the individual, if you thinbk that Rove was Bush's brain then he is lying, but if you think he was just an nadviser and Bush made up his own mind then, he is correct.