Rove hatched and ran the presidential campaign, deploying the Bush family Rolodex and the might of the oil industry and unleashing the most vigorous direct-mailing blizzard of all time. 'If the devil is in the details,' writes Dubose, 'he had found Rove waiting to greet him when he got there.'
By the time George W. became President, Rove was the hub of a Texan wheel connecting the family, the party, the Christian Right and the energy industry. A single episode serves as metaphor: during the Enron scandal last year, a shadow was cast over Rove when it was revealed that he had sold $100,000 of Enron stock just before the firm went bankrupt.
More intriguing, however, was the fact that Rove had personally arranged for the former leader of the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, to take up a consultancy at Enron - Bush's biggest single financial backer - worth between $10,000 and $20,000 a month.
This was the machine of perpetual motion that Rove built. His accomplishment was the 'Texanisation' of the national Republican Party under the leadership of the Bush family and to take that party back to presidential office after eight years. Rove is unquestionably the most powerful policy adviser in the White House.
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Wolfowitz's group formalised itself into a group called Project for the New American Century, which included Cheney and another old friend, former Pentagon Under-Secretary for Policy under Reagan, Richard Perle.
In a document two years ago, the Project pondered that what was needed to assure US global power was 'some catastrophic and catalysing event, like a new Pearl Harbor'. The document had noted that 'while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides immediate justification' for intervention, 'the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein'.
At a graduation speech to the Military Academy at West Point, Bush last June affirmed the Wolfowitz doctrine as official policy. 'America has, and intends to keep,' he said, 'military strengths beyond challenge.'
Ed Vulliamy in The Observer , February 23, 2003
{it may be this simple. spanking children, traumatizing young children for disciplinary purpose, and the lifetime weight it gives intention, so that why something was done outweighs the thing that got done. learned that young, it's a moral view of things that's 'known', a fundamental aspect of things. below the conscious light of reason that 'knowing' sits, and it has to be carried to the world outside the self. because that world doesn't acknowledge intention. biology scorns intention. biology rewards successful adaptation, however it's achieved, intentionally or accidentally. this explains so much. the hatred and fear of the natural world, the domination and cruel subjection of the non-human, the mythic patriarchal figure of punishment and reward, the moral primacy of will and intent. and the psychotic insistence on an essentially moral architecture in the universe, though there is no evidence for it anywhere. people make their children crazy, but it's a practical kind of craziness. but then it builds up, and then it's not practical anymore.}
