‘COLONELS IN MIRRORED SUNGLASSES’…. I can appreciate why Karl Rove is upset about recent revelations about Bush administration torture policies. After all, who wants their friends and colleagues to end up looking like war criminals? Rove has a specific job to do: make Bush and his team look better, while trying to destroy President Obama and his team. The latest evidence puts Rove in a tougher position. Poor guy.

But that hardly excuses the kind of foolish rhetoric Rove is throwing around. Last night, on Fox News (where else?), for example, Rove said the administration’s recent disclosures about torture are “very dangerous.” Rove insisted, “What they’ve essentially said is if we have policy disagreements with our predecessors…. [W]e’re going to turn ourselves into the moral equivalent of a Latin American country run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses and what we’re gonna do is prosecute systematically the previous administration, or threaten prosecutions against the previous administration, based on policy differences. Is that what we’ve come to in this country?”

You see, in Rove World, the way to avoid becoming a banana republic is to have a chief executive who ignores the rule of law. Then, the chief executive is replaced, and his/her successor must ensure there are no consequences for those who ignored the rule of law in the recent past.

No matter how serious alleged crimes, no matter how compelling the evidence, no matter the consequences, if a president believes those who came before him/her broke the law, he/she must not prosecute, or even investigate. If he/she disagrees, the president would be acting like a Latin American colonel in mirrored sunglasses.

I sometimes wonder if Rove can even hear the words coming out of his mouth.