Karl Rove gets the curtain pulled back on his (and the W. Bush adminstration's) duplicity, stupidity, and criminality

If the Crown Prince makes a royal run starting next year, he now has to be seriously considering what type of public role he will have for the main Bush family retainer and political enforcer, Karl Rove, after revelations that Rove masterminded a bizarre plot to cover up evidence of WMD found in Iraq by the US military in 2004.  Both the New York Times and The Daily Beast have released extended reports on this recently, and the rationale advanced by Rove and his supporters for his monumental stupidity is both stunning and inexplicable, and has created a firestorm of negative reaction among right wing radio media and blogosphere, including Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Erick Erickson's Red State, etc., none of whom are not yet publicly on board with JEB! 2016.

These revelations may have put Rove in the position of being an "emperor with no clothes" when it come to his future king making abilities.   His reputation, already damaged by his less than stellar performance on Fox News on election night in 2012, now appears to be in tatters.

The basic story is this: in 2004 the US military discovered several caches of old nerve gas and some enriched uranium in Iraq.  Rove coordinated a strategy of non disclosure of this information to the public because he believed it would be politically (with emphasis on the politics not the policy) counterproductive to have a public debate on the nature of WMD found in Iraq, because the caches were old and degraded, and did not support the position advanced by the administration of an active and ongoing WMD program.  George W. Bush signed off on this plan.  Now we know just how stupid the younger Bush is.

The obvious political and policy choice would have been to release everything to the public about any WMD found in Iraq.  Shout it from the rafters.  Any WMD stores found, however degraded, would have validated, in the public's mind, the underlying argument for war: that the Iraqi regime was hiding WMD, and not cooperating with the UN in the abatement of such weaponry. Consider that Bush had only to convince a public that was gullible enough to (almost) elect him in the first place, and actually narrowly elect him for a second term.  Rove is now revealed as a fool, not just a criminal, and one with a brain no better than the man he was thinking for.

On top of that, we are now getting an absurd new paranoid spin on this by desperate Bush GOP propaganda mill, Fox News, and other neocons:  ISIS just might have gotten, or may yet, get their hands on some of these hidden weapons caches of now revealed WMD if we don't go back into Iraq in force with another invasion. If the public succumbs to this line of fear mongering, they deserve the damnation they are going to get.  What they should be doing is demanding a national debate on whether to indict and arrest Karl Rove, George W. Bush and other top W. administration officials, or turn them over to the Hague.  Why? Consider the implications of what is now being pandered by these people.

If WMD were found by US forces in Iraq while we occupied that country, why are we now in danger of such weapons falling into the hands of ISIS?  The whole point of invading Iraq (at least the point that was sold by Bush and Rove) was to occupy the entire country, discover such weapons caches by any means necessary, and prevent them from being used in the future either by Saddam Hussein's government or anyone else.  If we now are unsure if any such weapons are still out there in Iraqi territory, now occupied either by ISIS or the Iranian puppet Shiite government we set up after the invasion, then this represents a monumental failure by the US and the W. Bush administration, and renders the whole invasion pointless.

The dirty little secret here is this: Rove and Bush were never really interested in WMD at all, expect as a selling point for the war, which was about nothing more than creating a neocon "national greatness" exercise to mobilize public opinion in favor of their real goal: making money for certain US business interests, and crony capitalists with fat government contracts. Read Imperial Life in The Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone if you want to get the nasty low down on the dark and dirty level of corruption that motivated and drove the whole sordid operation. Actually finding a lot of leaking caches of old nerve gas, or enriched uranium was the last thing Rove wanted to have to deal with. The US invaded Iraq with a military force that was far too small to effectively occupy the entire country and conduct proper WMD abatement and search and destroy, and this was never the military's primary political (emphasis political) mission.

And now JEB! will have to be the neocon and Bush dynasty point man for starting it all over again from scratch, and maybe this time including Iran also.  Fat chance, unless the American voters have a national death wish.

Politico: Karl Rove Is Ruining the GOP

American Thinker: Karl Rove: Weapon of Mass Delusion