So Long Turd Blossom

I called for his firing on this blog 18 months ago, and finally he's gone. This morning White House political adviser Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove announced his resignation August 31, one step ahead of a Congressional subpoena and Valerie Plame's book.

Rove began his political career at age 19 by stealing his opponent's letterhead and typing "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing." Later he trained GOP campaign volunteers to through the opponent's trash.

But the biggest of all the Rove smears was the Plame affair, a controversy that outlasted the attention span of most Americans, but luckily not that of Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. It began after Valerie Plame's husband Joe Wilson wrote an article accusing the Bush administration of faking intelligence in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, an article that has turned to be entirely true. What does Turd Blossom do? He decides to smear Wilson's wife. Both Rove and his assistant Scooter Libby told Robert Novak that Plame was a CIA agent, and that she got Wilson sent to Niger to look for the non-existant uranium the Bush administration later claimed was a justification for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Since it is a Federal crime to reveal the identity of a CIA agent, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald investigated. Finally the mystery was solved on February 12, 2007, when Robert Novak testified under oath that he got confirmation on his article from Karl Rove that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent. Earlier this month Rove dodged a Congressional subpoena, sending his assistant instead.

This resignation marks the end of W. His spell over America is broken. The problem is that we have to wait 17 months before we're rid of him.