I’m not much in the habit of reading the RNC’s web page, so I’m glad Josh Marshall gave a heads-up about the special cavalcade of quotes defending Karl Rove that went up on the site today.Each of these quotes has its own special taste of unintended humor, but there are two big howlers running throughout: (1) Senate Democratic criticism of the silly little business about Rove is detracting from all the big, important things the GOP is trying to do for The People; and (2) Democrats are unaccountably and without provocation acting partisan.The “tempest in a teapot” argument, made most explicitly by Orrin Hatch, is certainly interesting. If true, the Rove allegations involve (a) a deputy White House chief of staff, and the president’s acknowledged political guru, with enormous access to classified information; (b) a possible felony violation of federal law; (c) an act compromising our national security, and motivated by personal spite, as part of a larger coverup of information related to the invasion of Iraq; (d) a deliberate leak in an administration where leaking is a far worse sin than, say, gross incompetence in office. This certainly sounds as important to me as the so-called agenda of the Senate Republican leadership, which at present is focused on a semi-filibuster of stem-cell research legislation. But it’s the second claim that’s really mind-blowing: that those bad, partisan Democrats have gone medieval on that poor, respected civil servant Karl Rove. This is just bizarre. Whatever you think of the man, it’s incontrovertible that Rove has devoted his entire political career to a strategy of partisan and ideological polarization. He’s also been deeply and consistently implicated in a long series of truly savage “politics of personal destruction” campaign tactics, and has evinced a sort of giggling adolescent pleasure in those dark arts. The idea of Karl Rove as a victim of partisanship is sort of like the idea of Ken Lay as a victim of corporate malfeasance. He may or may not be guilty of the specific allegations against him in the Plame outing, but give me a break: you have to really go through the looking glass to consider him an innocent lamb among the wolves. Rove is one wolf who dare not don sheep’s clothing.