Could Rove also be trying to protect himself? What if WikiLeaks has documents--or Rove thinks it could get documents--that prove "Turd Blossom's" role in criminal activity during the Bush years? What if someone with a conscience from the Bush administration--if such a person exists--provided WikiLeaks with documents that show Rove's role in political prosecutions, the unlawful firings of U.S. attorneys, and more? Could Rove be trying to save his own doughy butt?
Reporting from Amy Goodman, of Democracy Now!, lends support to our source's insights about Rove and Sweden. In a piece from December 2008, "Karl Rove in Sweden," Goodman wrote about the ties between "Bush's Brain" and Reinfeldt. This was just a few weeks after Barack Obama had won the presidential election in the United States:
Traditional Swedish politics also are in flux. Brian Palmer is an American, a former Harvard lecturer, who has immigrated to Sweden and become a Swedish citizen. Palmer has penned a biography of Sweden's prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt. Palmer credits Reinfeldt, 43, with leading the shift away from the progressive social policies for which Sweden has become world-famous. He said Reinfeldt, in 1993, "wrote a book, "The Sleeping People,' where he said that the welfare state should only prevent starvation, nothing beyond that. After being elected ... one of his first major visits abroad was to George Bush in the White House."
Reinfeldt and his Moderate Party hired Karl Rove as a political consultant to help with the election coming in 2010. Palmer went on: "We have a real kind of silent war on the labor movement. We have a rather dramatic change in the tax system, abolishing the inheritance tax and most property taxes, cutbacks in social-welfare institutions." This week, a new coalition of center-left political parties formed to challenge this rightward drift.
The U.S. electorate has thoroughly rebuked the Bush administration, handing Barack Obama and the Democrats a mandate for change on issues of war and health care, among others. One of the world's leading laboratories for innovative social policies, Sweden is now wrestling with its own future. Those seeking change in the U.S. would be wise to watch Sweden, beyond Nobel week.
In December 2009, Goodman conducted an interview with Brian Palmer, Reinfeldt's biographer:
AMY GOODMAN: Brian Palmer, talk about the shift that's going on in politics here--you've written a biography of the current prime minister--and how this fits in with the story we just talked about, the story of Alfred Nobel, both the Peace Prizes and his founding of, really, the weapons industry in this country.
BRIAN PALMER: One can begin by saying that the reasons for Sweden's reputation as a progressive paradise, the strongest labor movement in the world with 87 percent of workers unionized, creating over many decades the strongest welfare state, the one that on the UN Human Poverty Index has the least poverty in the world. And then, what we've seen over the last twenty years, but particularly since the 2006 election, is a move away from all of that.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
