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WASHINGTON: Democrats celebrated the resignation of master White
House strategist Karl Rove, while a leading US daily excoriated
President George W. Bush’s trusted adviser as a practitioner of
politics as “blood sport.”
The influential New York Times urged lawmakers
on Tuesday to pursue its probe into Rove’s role in the firings of
several federal prosecutors and other efforts to politicize
government in Washington.
“By getting out of town he is . . . hoping to
avoid spending any time at all with congressional investigators,”
the Times wrote Tuesday, one day after Rove announced his departure,
effective August 31.
“Congress needs to use all its power to bring
Mr. Rove back to Washington to testify, in public and under oath,
about how he used his office to put politics above the interests of
the American people,” the Times’ editors wrote.
Rove is the latest key aide to leave Bush’s
side, reflecting the US leader’s waning powers in the twilight of
his second term.
The architect of Bush’s 2000 and 2004 election
triumphs, and the Republican rout in 2002 congressional polls, said
he would quit as deputy White House chief of staff on August 31, and
paid tribute his boss’s “farsighted courage.”
Democrats, who avenged their string of defeats
to Rove only by seizing control of both chambers of Congress last
year, cheered his departure.
“Goodbye, good riddance,” said Democratic
presidential candidate John Edwards in a terse statement.
Another 2008 Democratic hopeful, Senator Barack
Obama, was also scathing.
“Karl Rove was an architect of a political
strategy that has left the country more divided, the special
interests more powerful, and the American people more shut out from
their government than any time in memory,” he said.
Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick
Leahy, who subpoenaed Rove in a row over the firing of federal
prosecutors, which critics say was for political ends, accused Rove
of putting himself above the law.
“There is a cloud over this White House, and a
gathering storm. A similar cloud envelopes Mr. Rove, even as he
leaves the White House,” Leahy said.
Rove delivered his bombshell in an interview
with the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, then appeared
before the cameras with Bush.
--AFP
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