“Wait! What about the frog march?”

I was lamenting in a recent email to a correspondent that one of the problems of the nascent Iraqi democracy is its lack of pluralism – in its first iteration, a grudge and shame culture has merely chosen a new way for the power hungry to claw their way to the top of a heap and execute the powers of government by “winner-take-all” decree. Our own democracy, I might have added, is so much more mature.

So much more mature that the only people who are in any real danger of political crucifixion are those actually in a position to wield power. Thus it was that Scooter Libby was sentenced to two years in jail and a fine for having a different recollection of past events than a journalist did, while Sandy Berger was merely chastened for having stolen classified government documents from the US Archives. As chief of staff to a sitting vice president, Libby was a juicy target, a player in the game. But what point would there be going after Berger? After all, he was a relic of the 90’s era of power politics, and that whole decade?

So ten years ago.

Thus it was this morning that I awoke to the news that Karl Rove has once again slipped the hangman’s noose, my slumbers disturbed by the anguished cries of those whose most cherished dreams revolved around the image of the president’s political advisor “frog marched” out of the White House for crimes they just knew he had to have committed. Evidence of course, could not be found – not even by a special prosecutor determinedly playing the role of a 21st century Javert to Rove’s unlikely Jean Valjean. Yet absence of evidence does not necessarily imply evidence of absence, and how else to explain the fact that George W. Bush was not once but twice elected installed as president? Crime enough, declare the committed partisans of our mature democratic system, and if there isn’t a law well then maybe there ought to be.

Ecce: Mute witness to the tracks of their tears, a screen cap from today’s Memeorandum:

The timing of all this is exquisite to such as dearly love to “question the timing” of such things. A Congress which has battered itself against the wall of presidential immobility – especially with regard to an Attorney General whose job title now appears to include “Embattled” as an obligatory modifier – is now in recess. When it returns the political scene will be taken up with spending bills and the Petraeus report, and by October Rove will have completed his transformation into a Bergeresque anachronism. Karl who?

He will leave, but not without taking one – in my view quite justified – parting shot:

A big debate among Republicans these days is who bears more blame for 2006 — Messrs. Bush and Rove, or the behavior of the GOP Congress. Mr. Rove has no doubt. “The sense of entitlement was there” among Republicans, he says, “and people smelled it.” Yet even with a unified Democratic Party and the war, he argues, it was “a really close election.” The GOP lost the Senate by its 3,562 vote margin of defeat in Montana, and in the House the combined margin in the 15 seats that cost control was 85,000 votes.

A prominent non-Beltway Republican recently gave me a different analysis, arguing that the White House made a disastrous decision to “nationalize” the election last autumn; this played into Democratic hands and cost numerous seats.

“I disagree,” Mr. Rove replies. “The election was nationalized. It was always going to be about Iraq and the conduct of Republicans.” He says Republican Chris Shays and Independent-Democrat Joe Lieberman survived in Connecticut despite supporting the war, while Republicans who were linked to corruption or were complacent lost. His biggest error, Mr. Rove says, was in not working soon enough to replace Republicans tainted by scandal.

Rove goes on to say that the political right might well win another turn at the executive helm in 2008, a prediction I suppose he has to make, no matter how little he might believe in it himself. Even if the electorate’s reliable appetite for “change” did not manifest itself in the usual eight year cycle, the Republican Party machine – having forgotten nothing and learned nothing – has split along cultural lines, having shot itself in the foot by pandering to nativist sympathies and continuing to engage in willful self-deception on the real root causes of their congressional losses. They seem passionately dedicated to a generation or two in the wilderness working out a theory of government that doesn’t involve spending just a little less than the boys across the aisle while diddling the help.

Karl Rove will get to watch it all from retirement.