Karl Rove titles memoir "Courage & Consequence" with straight face

Karl Rove is a douche.

And yet, despite his long history of being a douche, after leaving politics he's managed to get jobs with Fox (not surprising) and Newsweek (kind of surprising) as a political analyst. The logic behind Rove's hiring must have been that while he's not ethical or honest, he is successful... and with all that success must come some political insight.

But Rove is not some sort of ingenius, machiavellian schemer... he just lacks the shame and dignity that would prevent most honourable people from doing what he does... examples?

In the fall of 1970, Rove used a false identity to enter the campaign office of Democrat Alan J. Dixon, who was running for Treasurer of Illinois. He stole 1000 sheets of paper with campaign letterhead, printed fake campaign rally fliers promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing", and distributed them at rock concerts and homeless shelters, with the effect of disrupting Dixon's rally.

As a protégé of Donald Segretti (later convicted as a Watergate conspirator), Rove painted the Nixon opponent George McGovern as a "left-wing peacenik", in spite of McGovern's World War II stint piloting a B-24.

The Washington Post released recordings of several training seminars for young Republicans where Rove discussed campaign techniques that included rooting through opponents' garbage cans.

Rove has been accused of using the push poll technique to call voters to ask such things as whether people would be "more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if [they] knew her staff is dominated by lesbians." Rove has denied having been involved in circulating these rumors about Richards during the campaign,   although many critics nonetheless identify this technique, particularly as utilized in this instance against Richards, as a hallmark of his career.

During the 2000 Republican primary, a South Carolina push poll used racist innuendo intended to undermine the support of then-Bush rival John McCain: "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?"  The authors of the 2003 book and subsequent film Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, allege that Rove was involved.

Rove's detractors have claimed he was involved in dirty tricks. One oft-cited example is that terror warnings were regularly made at times when John Kerry's ratings rose during the 2004 presidential election. Democratic candidate and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean directly accused Rove of involvement in terror warning manipulation, stating "I suppose that's Karl Rove's MO still." Another example is the 2006 announcement that planned terrorist attacks had been thwarted, which was made soon after the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program was discovered.

On August 29, 2003, retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV claimed that Rove leaked the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee, in retaliation for Wilson's op-ed in The New York Times in which he criticized the Bush administration's citation of the yellowcake documents among the justifications for the War in Iraq enumerated in Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address.

In late August 2006 it became known that Richard L. Armitage was responsible for the leak. The investigation led to felony charges being filed against Lewis "Scooter" Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice. Eventually, Libby was found guilty by a jury. One juror announced that she felt that Libby was being used as a scapegoat and wondered why Rove himself wasn't charged. (To be fair, prosecutors determined there was no cause to charge Rove with any wrongdoing)

Scott McClellan claims in his book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, published in the spring of 2008 by Public Affairs Books, that the statements he made in 2003 about Rove's lack of involvement in the Valerie Plame affair were untrue, and that he had been encouraged to repeat such untruths.

And people wonder why politics has trouble attracting good people. Who would ever want to throw their hat into the ring knowing that there are cretins like Rove in the game?