When I heard Karl Rove call Vice President Joe Biden a “liar” yesterday, I had to laugh. Rove, “The Architect,” or “Turd Blossom,” as George W. Bush nicknamed him, is a man whose relationship with the truth is adversarial in nature. He’s a man who is so full of crap that you can hear it slosh about when he goes into a turn. That Karl Rove is assigned any credibility at all, that he’s still allowed a public platform from which to spew such nonsense, is mind boggling, to say the least.

Rove’s on-air slight of the Vice President stemmed from Biden’s statement that he had once confronted Bush about the latter’s lacking leadership skills. In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Biden recalled a brief exchange with the former President:

I remember President Bush saying to me one time in the Oval Office, “Well, Joe,” he said, “I’m a leader.” And I said: “Mr. President, turn and around look behind you. No one is following.”

Rove responded Thursday from the “fair and balanced,” bastion of objectivity (sarcasm intended), Fox News:

It didn’t happen. Look, Joe Biden does this. I remember this a couple of years ago when he made a similar claim. Joe Biden said, for example, that he spent hours with the president. Joe Biden was never alone with the president for more than a few moments. There were staff in the room at all times. He never said these kinds of things. I hate to say it, but he’s a serial exaggerator. If I was being unkind I would say he’s a liar. But it is a habit he ought to drop…

It is worth noting that Karl Rove avoided taking issue with what Biden told his interviewers just before the above quote:

…the last administration left us in a weaker posture than we’ve been any time since World War II: less regarded in the world, stretched more thinly than we ever have been in the past, two wars under way, virtually no respect in entire parts of the world…

I imagine that Rove left that tidbit untouched because truer words have yet to be spoken.

Rove’s accusation can only be taken seriously if you discount his previous behavior. Consider his disclosure of Valerie Plame’s identity to Time‘s Matt Cooper. After weeks of denying his involvement, Rove admitted his role in the leak.

As recently as this week, Rove circumvented the truth in his Wall Street Journal column, within which he declared that Obama had become a “divisive figure.” Rove based his assessment on figures from a Pew poll, which would be fine, except Pew had already publicly stated that their figures weren’t supportive of that argument.

Rove even had the audacity to lie in the same interview in which he asserted that Biden was a “liar.” He dusted off the old, discredited, nugget that gets brought up every time conservatives discuss Joe Biden. The “Biden is a plagerist” meme:

Look, this is a guy whose 1988 presidential campaign was derailed because he was found to have been copying, plagiarizing a speech by Neil Kinnock, the leader of the British Labor Party, and recounting an episode in Kinnock’s life as if it were in his own life, involving I think a coal miner relative or something.

As David Neiwert wrote in his April 10 post at CrooksAndLiars.com, “This is a lie — or at least a grotesque enough distortion of what happened to count as one.”

These are only the most recent examples of Karl Rove’s apparant inability to tell the truth. I could go on, but a proper listing of his falsehoods would be too exhaustive for a mere blog post. However, please be sure to tell me your opinion in the comments section below. Better yet, give me your favorite example of Rove’s deviousness. There are plenty to choose from.

Rove Perpwalk Composite - Flickr User: silas216 - CreativeCommons.org

