Cheat Sheet

Seems it’s not too difficult to wind up Karl Rove. He submitted to the Q and A in the Times magazine and ended up getting what Al Gore would call “snippy” with the interviewer. He was his old bruising self along the way, describing Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel as “a tough, hard, take-no-prisoners, head-in-your-face, scream-and-shout, send-them-a-dead-fish partisan” and Joe Biden “an odd combination of longevity and long-windedness that passes for wisdom in Washington.” Then the questioning turned to his being booed in public. “You’ve been booed off stages lately,” said Deborah Solomon, clearly tweaking the dignity of the modern Machiavelli. “No, I haven’t,” he snapped. “I’ve been booed on stages. I’m a little bit tougher than to walk off a stage because someone says something ugly.” When asked what parting advice he would offer his boss and pupil George W. Bush he snipped, “With all due respect, I don’t need you to transmit what I want to say to my friend of 35 years.” Which is not exactly playing the game.