Turd Blossom

Filling in for Eric Alterman, Eric Rauchway remembers Karl Rove:

Karl Rove deserves to be remembered as the man who thought Americans should have enough education to understand his fables but not enough to doubt them. Here's Rove, according to Nicholas Lemann in 2001 (The New Yorker doesn't seem to have it online):

"Our education plan allows us to make further gains in the suburbs. It will also allow us to make gains with Hispanics and African-Americans. ... As people do better, they start voting like Republicans -- unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing."

There's no more suitable summary for his career as adviser to President Bush; he is a man who thinks that if you knew a little more about what was going on, you'd vote against his candidate. So he doesn't want you to know.