An Evening with Karl Rove

Karl Rove spoke at Goucher College tonight, which was cool of him to do. The night got off to an inauspicious start as some older protestors decided to scream incoherently that Rove was a war criminal. It didn't help that Goucher's president was screaming back at them. He should've initially issued a warning that if someone made an outburst, they would be escorted out. Instead, he berated the protestors and lost control of the situation.

Rove then moved to the podium to speak and claimed that the president’s introduction was too kind, which was awkward, because it was merely a brief outline of his resume. After, Rove gave a short speech about the history of the White House that was so banal it made me consider tearing up my degrees in history. The point of his speech was that presidents have to deal with issues not always of their choosing, a truly revolutionary point.

Then, there was a little interview session with the president, because it's all about him. Did you know that the speech at my graduation was the president interviewing Maurice Sendak? It was!

The most poignant part of the evening was when Karl Rove began pointing at an Iraqi student- who was describing his experience living in Baghdad- hollering about Saddam's rape rooms. He even tried to make the student feel guilty for the rapes and deaths perpetrated by Saddam Hussein. Instead of listening to an Iraqi's take, Rove attempted to belittle him. It was a metaphor for the march to war and the subsequent justifications.

The other interesting theme was that Karl Rove wasn't sure where he stands on torture. He has two arguments in support of the U.S.'s "enhanced interrogation techniques." One is that waterboarding and other tactics are not torture. When asked whether or not he would be comfortable with U.S. soldiers receiving that kind of interrogation, he offered the second, that it is ok to torture the "terrorists," because they did not sign the Geneva Convention.

Regardless of validity, no one likes to be called a war criminal and Karl Rove is no exception. While the accusations didn't add anything, Rove surprisingly lost his cool. He was often combative. He seemed unprepared emotionally. Occasionally, he reverted to weak rhetoric and easy applause lines that skirted the question being asked. Older people tend to ask questions to get the answer, college kids ask to seem smart or make a stand. Rove missed his audience. At one point, Rove yelled at a Latina student- who was concerned with the racist overtones of the Sotomayor confirmation debate-, "Where were you with Miguel Estrada?" a judge that Bush had hoped to appoint to a high court in 2001. Depending on the year of the student, she was around ten years old.