BOAT AD BLAMED ON BUSH AIDE
THE makers of the new documentary "Bush's Brain" claim that President Bush's powerful political guru Karl Rove is behind the Swift Boat scandal that continues to torment John Kerry.
"This was a third-party attack that was hatched by Karl Rove," co-director/producer Michael Shoob alleges. "When you see the Swift Boat ads," says his partner, Joe Mealey, "You can see that it's been repeated over and over - they did the same thing to Ann Richards in Texas, to Max Cleland in Georgia and to John McCain in South Carolina."
Shoob and Mealey offer no proof that Rove, considered the most brilliant and bare-knuckled campaign strategist in modern politics, is behind the controversial Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads, which Bush denounced this week.
But the filmmakers allege in their documentary, based on the book, "Bush's Brain" (Wiley) by Texas political reporters James Moore and Wayne Slater, that Rove has orchestrated several similar "third party" attacks against Bush's opponents in the past.
Among the Rove-bashers interviewed in "Bush's Brain," which opens Friday, is John Weaver, McCain's presidential campaign director in 2000 and a one-time colleague of Rove. Weaver suggests Rove was behind a smear campaign prior to the 2000 South Carolina primary that claimed McCain had sired a black love child. (He adopted one daughter from an orphanage in Bangladesh.)
Others in the film say Rove may have stoked false rumors that former Texas Gov. Richards was a lesbian during her race against Bush, and say he secretly backed the controversial TV ads that linked former Georgia Sen. Cleland, who lost two legs and an arm in Vietnam, to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden after Cleland refused to sign Bush's Homeland Security Bill.
The movie also advances the widespread belief among Bush-bashers that Rove punished former Ambassador Joseph Wilson after he wrote a New York Times op-ed piece saying there was no truth to charges that Iraq tried to buy weapons-grade uranium from Niger. Rove ally Robert Novak subsequently wrote a column outing Wilson's wife as an undercover CIA agent.
Rove denies he planted the story. But "Bush's Brain" claims that Rove was fired from the 1980 Reagan/Bush campaign for leaking another story to Novak.
Asked for comment, a White House spokesman told us, "We simply don't offer film reviews from the White House."