Rove should not have been invited to speak

I'm assuming that you've received many e-mails expressing outrage, embarrassment, frustration and disappointment over the scheduled appearance of Karl Rove at Duke tonight.

Please add my name to the list.

Rove, the former chief propaganda minister (not his formal title, of course, but it should have been) for President George W. Bush, rather than being invited to speak at Duke, should instead be on trial for subverting democracy at home and for enabling war crimes abroad. As even the casual follower of current events knows, Rove was "the architect" of Bush's whole ghastly political career. He conducted the "whisper campaign" that Ann Richards was a lesbian, which resulted in Bush's being elected governor of Texas. Rove smeared John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary with a series of "push poll" phone calls to voters claiming that McCain had a "black child" and had been rendered mentally unstable by his years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Those lies revived Bush's flagging campaign and put him on the road to his hostile takeover of the presidency. As a policy maker in Bush's administration as well as a political hit man, Rove helped sell the Iraq war, torture, the Swift-boating of John Kerry and the relentless fear and faux patriotism that resulted in Bush's remaining in the White House for a second term. Rove has tellingly abandoned Bush as his former boss' ship sinks (to go out and make money at universities and other places willing to pay large sums for him to deliver speeches), but he remains the sort of man willing to tell even the most obvious of untruths. His latest "big lie" is that the Democratic Congress was responsible for rushing the United States into the Iraq War.

What will Rove say tomorrow night at Duke? That he had nothing to do with illegally "outing" covert CIA agent Valerie Plame? That there never was a war in Iraq, or that, if there was, no civilians died in it? That, contrary to Democratic propaganda, Osama Bin Laden has been captured?

I'm not advocating taking away Rove's freedom of speech; however, Duke University should not have given such a professionally dishonest man a big payday to come and spread more of his transparent lies.

Rodney Allen

Graduate School '82