The Villain

Many Shakespeare plays have a character who is seemingly wholly twisted and sinister. The characters may be motivated by envy and hatred, but mostly they just embody evil. Karl Rove might be a good choice for that role when Shakespeare writes up the current Administration. Nicolas Lehmann's New Yorker profile The Controller: Karl Rove is working to get George Bush reelected, but he has bigger plans tells a little of his history.

Frank Rich has a nice New York Times OpEd today that lays out the fundamentals of Rove's current scandal: Follow the Uranium.
 Rich reminds us not to pay any attention to the crowd behind the curtain blowing smoke and talking loudly. The story isn't really Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Joe Wilson, Matt Cooper, or even Bob Novak.
This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players.
The real story is the Administration's fraudulent basis for starting a costly war. Cheney, Rice, Powell, and Rove were out there lying and distorting, but let's not forget whose liars they all were.

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