Karl Rove on Sarah Palin

From the U.K. Telegraph:

“With all due candour, appearing on your own reality show on the Discovery Channel, I am not certain how that fits in the American calculus of ‘that helps me see you in the Oval Office’,” Mr Rove told The Daily Telegraph in an interview.

He added that the promotional clip for Sarah Palin’s Alaska could be especially detrimental to any political campaign. It features the mother of five in the great outdoors saying: “I would rather be doing this than in some stuffy old political office.”

Mr Rove, who remains a major force on the US political scene, also implied that Mrs Palin lacked the stomach for the rigours of a presidential primary campaign, which will begin early next year before the first polls in 2012.

Mr Rove was asked if the 46-year-old Mrs Palin, who is among the front-runners for the next Republican nomination, would be a wise choice if the party wanted to seize the White House from President Barack Obama. He replied: “You can make a plausible case for any of them on paper, but it is not going to be paper in 2011. It’s going to be blood, it’s going to be sweat and tears and it’s going to be hard effort.

Christopher Manion on Karl Rove:

From the record, let’s review Mr. Rove’s historic qualifiers for “gravitas”:

• defy the Constitution and act on the basis of your gut
• as a “good Christian,” embrace Lenin’s view of “permanent revolution,” as long as it’s democratic and imposed by American armed force and permanent occupation
• shoot your best friend in the face, almost blinding him, and never apologize (OK, it was Cheney, but in Texas, and Bush picked him)
• betray the key promises you made in your campaign
• thrive on constantly instilling fear in the populace
• destroy liberty, privacy rights, the economy, the dollar, the GOP (“them that brung ya,” in the words of another famous Texan), the conservative and pro-life movements (without whom you’d have lost miserably), while you foment international contempt for the United States and its people
• always insist that your unconstitutional wars are “America’s”
• hide proof (now revealed) that as Commander-in-Chief you approved orders that US troops should not interfere when the puppet government installed by US occupiers tortured prisoners handed over to them by US forces
• hand the country over on a silver platter to a pretentious, vapid, inexperienced, and egoistic nobody — a man much like yourself, come to think of it
• never apologize, and schedule a book tour trumpeting your “successes”

Question for Mr. Rove: Karl, Mrs. Palin aside (apparently, for all her faults, you can’t control her), who could be a worthy successor to this legacy of the marvelous W? Please advise, and thanks.

Those who live in glass houses, should not throw stones. On the other hand, I am not a Palin fan, at all. But, I do not think that Karl Rove — of all people — ought to be commenting on anyone at all.