Hightower Lowdown

Poor Karl. He's had a bad few weeks and...well, Karl is cranky.

Karl Rove, I'm talking about—George W.'s Machiavellian-Svengalian political operative, who specializes in personal-attack hatchet jobs on his client's political enemies.

But one of the people Karl has been trying to slime in recent days is Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism expert who has blown the whistle on our toy-soldier "war president."Clarke revealed that George W, Donny Rumsfeld and Condi Rice, refused to take the al Qaeda terrorist threat seriously prior to September 11, instead focusing single-mindedly on Iraq––which posed no threat to the U.S. But Karl Rove's slime isn't sticking to Clarke. In fact, it's Karl and his client-in-chief who have ended up with slime blowback all over them.

So Rove was already in a foul funk when, on an otherwise serene Sunday afternoon in his swank Washington neighborhood, several hundred protesters suddenly showed up on his lawn. These were low-income folks from the Midwest who had come to their nation's capital to be heard on a bill that would provide educational opportunities for their children— a bill that Rove was keeping bottled up.

They had requested a meeting, but he refused even to reply, so—they came to him for a surprise Sunday session, chanting "Karl, Karl, come on out! See what the DREAM Act is all about!"

This threw Karl into a hissy fit. "Get off my property!" shouted the public servant to the public. The crowd shouted back in unison, "Karl Rove ain't got no soul." They waved signs at him through his locked windows as he summoned the Secret Service to "save" him from his public. Finally, he agreed to meet with two of the protesters if all the rest left. They did—and Karl opened his garage door for a two-minute "meeting," during which he mostly screamed at them, closing it off with the warning: "Don't ever dare to come back!"

Yeah, Karl, what do those people think this is...a democracy? In the future, if you want to meet with Karl, you'll just have to make a campaign contribution and hire a corporate lobbyist, like everyone else he knows.