Richard Stevenson, the NYT's Bush Toady Extraordinaire and the man who makes Judith Miller and Liz Bumiller look objective, does his best to make Karl Rove look like a normal, even benevolent, non-control-freak political operative who doesn't play dirty, browbeat anyone who disagrees with him, or treat the govt as if he were a Sultan and it was his private kingdom. Dicky-Bird starts with a straight-from-Hollywood-horror-movies scenario: Jack Kemp has been a bad boy, tramping around in forbidden territory (opposing the Emperor on SocSec) where The Monster is known to lurk. The camera switches back and forth, first showing us Kemp as he invades The Monster's domain, then The Monster as he closes in on Kemp. Tension stretches thin, suspense builds: will The Monster, well known for his voracious appetite, long claws and razor-sharp teeth, eat the ignorant intruder with one bite or chew on him first?

But no. After spending all that time setting us up, it turns out that The Monster isn't really all that scary. He just wanted to talk.

[T]heir exchange was less a scolding by Mr. Rove, they said, than an assertive, detailed argument against Mr. Kemp's favored approach. Mr. Rove, they said, went through a point-by-point critique of the plan and left Mr. Kemp with the message that he considered it unworkable.

See, kids? There's nothing to be afraid of. Why, The Monster isn't so bad, really. In fact, he's brilliant and 'sophisticated' and wouldn't embarrass you in public by drooling on his fingers or picking the skulls of his victims out of his teeth. He's just your garden-variety monster doing an ordinary job and there's no reason for anybody to get upset about it. Except there is, and even Stevenson can't hide it completely.

Mr. Rove is assuming a more expansive role, bringing the same intensity [that's one word for it] to the big issues in Mr. Bush's second-term agenda that he brought to the president's re-election campaign. In naming Mr. Rove deputy White House chief of staff for policy last month, on top of his continuing catch-all title of senior adviser, the president formally recognized Mr. Rove's affinity for the nitty-gritty of governance and publicly acknowledged his influence over whatever deal might emerge on Social Security, his No. 1 domestic priority.

"All roads lead to Karl," said Kenneth J. Duberstein, a Republican lobbyist who was the White House chief of staff under President Ronald Reagan and is now part of Mr. Rove's vast network of informal advisers and intelligence gatherers.

Under one of his hats, Mr. Rove is running a sophisticated campaign on behalf of the president's Social Security proposals, employing all the components of the national political machine built to re-elect Mr. Bush. Under the other, he is overseeing policy meetings where the administration's senior officials analyze the competing Social Security proposals, bone up on arcane economic concepts and plot how to hit back at the substantive arguments made by people on the other side of the issue.

In other words, Karl's coming out from behind the camera and taking his rightful place as Presidential PuppetMaster in the open where everybody can see him. And son-of-a-gun, Mr Stevenson could only find one Rove-critic..sort of. Marshall Wittman (DLC pointman and Blogistan's own Bull Moose) admits as how Karl just might have a problem with 'hubris'. Well, duh.

In Mr Stevenson's white-washed BushWorld, Rove's slime-attacks, fraudulent propaganda, lies, deceit, and infamously bad temper simply don't exist. He never refers to them. But Karl's utter control of every domestic decision (and his input on foreign ones) can't be hidden any more, much as Dicky-Bird would like to. As the Empire's Minister of Prapaganda Deputy Chief of Staff (like Andy Card would ever be able to tell Karl Rove what to do), more of Karl's portfolio is visible publicly than ever before. Dicky-Bird makes the best he can of it, though.

But on the organization chart, the new post leaves him - or the half of him that is purely policy - beneath Andrew H. Card Jr., the chief of staff and one of only two people in the White House (Vice President Dick Cheney being the other) whose power and reach are in the same league as Mr. Rove's.

"I count on him to keep me well informed and have me get engaged at the right time to help drive policy recommendations to maturity so the president can consider them," Mr. Card said.

Beyond his new bureaucratic chores, like allocating time on Mr. Bush's schedule for policy discussions, helping set the president's travel schedule and keeping track of daily policy developments for Mr. Bush and Mr. Card, Mr. Rove participates in a separate set of meetings devoted to Social Security. Twice a week he sits down to plot legislative strategy, and roughly as often participates in high-level meetings about the substantive issues in play.

There you go. That's what he's always done, but now they're admitting it, and it's scary. Rove's real past, not the Hollywood studio version dreamed up by sycophants like Stevenson, is the stuff of nightmares: dirty tricks that destroyed careers, an almost total lack of anything resembling a conscience, a win-at-any-price mindset, and anti-democratic campaigns where the president is cloaked in an impenetrable bubble and the people are kept at a distance are a few of the nicer parts. Karl Rove, a student and fan of the Roman Empire, would have been just as much at home working for Caligula as he is working for Emperor Georgius.

I don't know about you, but Godzilla's looking good to me right now.

And please, somebody at Fox offer Dicky-Bird a job. That's obviously what he's angling for, and anyway it's where he belongs.