Karl Rove Once Got His Ass Kicked By A Little Girl… Really

Karl Rove is a fascinating sort of swine.

He’s agnostic, yet Rove managed to win the hearts and minds of many-a Christian in Bush’s thumping endorsements by the Religious Right.

His beloved stepfather is gay, yet Rove played a key role in orchestrating the most shameful gay-bashing campaign in America’s history just before the 2004 presidential election — and it worked to his favor.

He seems to exist in this space between reason, power and insanity, without any air of regret for the damage his politics and maneuverings have brought upon his countrymen.

In his book “Courage and Consequence,” due out next week, Rove goes completely off the rails, claiming that Bush ushered in unprecedented economic growth, that the administration was truthful in pursuing fictional weapons of mass destruction and that he had nothing to do with the prosecution of Don Siegelman or the leaking of Valerie Plame’s covert status with the CIA.

(In other words, Rove is full of shit … And he almost made Post reporter Dana Milbank “choke on a pretzel” — snark.)

In one of the book’s lesser noticed passages, Rove discloses that he was once beaten up by a little girl who was an avid John F. Kennedy fan and took exception to the Nixon bumper sticker on his bicycle.

Washington Post’s Steven Levingston writes…

At age 9 — and already a political nerd — he became a spirited supporter of Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential smackdown against John F. Kennedy. So intense was his devotion that he landed a coveted Nixon bumper sticker and displayed it proudly on his bicycle basket — until a little girl in his neighborhood who favored JFK beat the stuffing out of him, bloodying his nose and ego. “I’ve never liked losing a political fight since,” Rove writes.

That same passage was featured earlier today in a New York Magazine blog. But there’s more to this possibly life-altering childhood trauma.

In the book “Born to Cheat,” a highly detailed case study of Karl Rove’s and George W. Bush’s childhoods and young adult lives, author Jackson Thoreau (a pen name for a mainstream journalist who I know personally) dug up a slightly different accounting of Rove’s beating. The book was amazingly ignored by media at the time of its release in 2007, but it now seems fortuitous considering the nature of America’s political discussion and Rove’s reemergence as a powerless political hack on Faux News.

From page 27 of “Born to Cheat”…

In published reports, Rove said he knew he was a Republican at the young age of nine when he supported Nixon over Kennedy in 1960. He paid for that support — by being beat up by a girl. “There was a little girl across the street who was Catholic and found out I was for Nixon, and she was avidly for Kennedy,” Rove was quoted as saying in one report. “She put me down on the pavement and whaled on me and gave me a bloody nose. I lost my first political battle.”

With Rove’s book dropping mere hours from now, I cannot think of a better piece of companion reading material than “Born to Cheat”. You will certainly get more truth from my friend Jackson than you will trying to swallow Rove’s shallow fictions.

I’ve just got to wonder how greatly that beating, at the hands of a little girl no less, influenced Rove’s worldview. Some men spend years trying to find another woman just like the one who broke their heart. Perhaps something similar happened to Karl’s subconscious in the wake of the woman who broke his nose. Flash forward 50 years and … Well, we all know how THAT turned out.

Meanwhile, brace yourself for wall-to-wall Turd Blossom on the news networks this week. Rove’s sure to offer journalists plenty of red meat, even though every ounce is pure, meaningless distraction.