You’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Rove was a brilliant political strategist, but the problem was that the aims of his strategies were flawed.

I like how you tried to contextualize him as a product of the Republican spin machine. That machine is being countered by progressives atwww.rockridgeinstitute.org spearheaded by George Lakoff who has a WONDERFUL book called Moral Politics, which clarifies the moral basis of conservative and liberal (progressive) politics . . . enlightening read.

You’re on the money, once again.

But that hatred and exploitation of people’s fear and bigotry goes back even further — you can’t look at all of the tape of Joe McCarthy in Good Night and Good Luck and not see a guy who would still have a serious home in today’s “conservative movement”.

Sullivan was one of the most strident Bush supporters online, from the “fifth column” remark, and was a strident supporter of the party that softened up Washington for this debacle by wasting eight years “investigating” and blocking judicial appointments instead of governing. He finally, as you said, explicitly broke with “his” movement over gay marriage because he Just Couldn’t Believe that they would behave that way to Good people.

Presumably everyone else whose lives and future he cheered them on to destroying, well, wasn’t an altar boy.

Sullivan would like Rove to be the problem, just like Mr. Frum would or Mr. Broder or any number of congresspeople and staffers and think tank welfare cases and writers at heavily-subsidized right-wing magazines (those categories overlap, of course. Just ask Mr. Sullivan).

They’d like Rove to be the problem because if he’s the problem they can go back to doing exactly what they’ve been doing and it’ll work this time.

What they’re forgetting, I’d like to think, is that what they’ve been doing only works if no-one’s watching.

I think maybe even the most apathetic among us have learned that we can’t afford not to watch.