Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

SENATOR FAIR: You haven't hit his soft spots.
BUSH: I know. I'm going to.
FAIR: Well, they need to. Somebody does, anyway.
BUSH: I agree. I'm not going to do it on N.
The mastermind behind Bush's dirty tricks campaign in South Carolina and beyond
was a man by the name of Karl Rove, whose fleshy and formless physique belies a heart as
cold and steely and deadly as a discarded refrigerator with the door still attached. Rove,
whose official White House title is Senior Political Advisor, has so much influence over the
President that he's been described as "Bush's brain" in the book Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove
Made George W Bush Presidential. Any student of Rove's personal history would not be surprised
by the chicanery in South Carolina.
In 1970, while still a teenager, Rove pretended to be a campaign volunteer for the
Democratic candidate for Illinois state treasurer, Alan J. Dixon. He swiped Dixon's letterhead
and sabotaged the opening of Dixon's campaign headquarters by sending out over one thousand
copies of an invitation offering "free beer, free food, girls, and a good time for nothing"
to homeless shelters and soup kitchens. He now refers to this as "a youthful prank" that he
regrets.
A few years later, a rapidly maturing Rove conducted training sessions for College
Republicans on the nuance and technique of Nixon-style dirty tricks. George Bush, Sr., who
was then head of the Republican National Committee, had to send the FBI to question the upand-coming
scam artist. Bush was so impressed that he later gave Rove a job.
In 1986, while working on the Texas gubernatorial race, a fully blossomed Rove dramatically
"discovered" a mysterious electronic bug in his office. Instead of calling the police,
he called a press conference. The timing of Rove's discovery was particularly fortunate: It
was the morning of the only televised debate between his candidate, William Clements, and
the Democratic governor, Mark White. White was forced to answer questions about the bug
instead of about the issues, and subsequently lost. The Travis County D.A.'s office and the
FBI later concluded that the bug had been planted by Rove himself on the same day he discovered
it. The fact that the maximum battery life of the bug was a mere ten hours (meaning
that a spy would have to sneak in and replace it at least twice a day) may have been something
of a giveaway.