Sunrise, Sunset

Aaron: You've got to turn on your television right now. Arnold Schwarzenegger is on The Today Show, Good Morning America and the morning news - I think he's live on two of them.
- Broadcast News

Political junkies across the land greeted the day with the dissemble-a-thon known as a Rovian media appearnce. Make that appearances plural. Karl Rove appeared on NBC's Press the Meat, Fox News Sunday, and CBS's Face the Nation. (ABC turned over This Week to the Democratic presidential field - so there's reason to believe Turdbossom would otherwise have been on that too.)

An odd series of vignettes this past week: the cozy exit interview with Paul Gigot at the WSJ; the teary farewell on the White House lawn; and now the mad scramble to write his version in the pavement before the cement sets.

Perhaps Turd fears he'll fade into irrelevance once he surrenders his White House badge. Perhaps he had planned a quieter exit but worried that he was losing control of the narrative: enter the Hurry-Up talkathon. (Since I don't regularly read Michelle Malkin, I rely upon Frank Rich to waft the occasional Hot Air vapors my way:

One popular conservative blogger, Michelle Malkin, mocked Mr. Rove and his interviewer, Paul Gigot, for ignoring "the Harriet Miers debacle, the botching of the Dubai ports battle, or the undeniable stumbles in post-Iraq invasion policies," not to mention "the spectacular disaster of the illegal alien shamnesty."

With friends like these...

The self-pity party rolls on in Turd's interview with Jim Rutenberg of the NYT today.

Asked why some of his former colleagues, specifically his former deputy Matthew Dowd, have left Mr. Bush’s inner circle in bitterness, Mr. Rove said sadly, “I don’t know.”

So many questions hath Mr. Rove. Perhaps the following selection from the same article offers some illumination on why he's so in the dark. Here, Rove wishes to counter the perception that his every word is met with deference in the West Wing:

“What I’ve learned is that if I want my voice to be heard around the table,” Mr. Rove said, “it can’t simply be, ‘Well, he’s the long-term associate of Bush from Texas’ — I’ve got to dig in.”

What Turd doesn't seem to see is that 'digging in' was precisely the problem. Fighting for space at the table when people only tolerate your presence there isn't likely to win too many friends. That Mayberry Machiavelli routine isn't necessarily suited for all audiences. From Joshua Green's justifiably oft-quoted Atlantic piece:

Rove’s behavior toward Congress stood out. “Every once in a while Rove would come to leadership meetings, and he definitely considered himself at least an equal with the leaders in the room,” a Republican aide told me. “But you have to understand that Congress is a place where a certain decorum is expected. Even in private, staff is still staff. Rove would come and chime in as if he were equal to the speaker. Cheney sometimes came, too, and was far more deferential than Rove—and he was the vice president.” Other aides say Rove was notorious for interrupting congressional leaders and calling them by their first name.

Talk talk talk all the day long.

'Night, Rove.

Aaron: See you in da lobbies.
- Broadcast News

[cross-posted at Vernon Lee]