There are all kinds of suboptimal things that happen when you give Karl Rove a column. The most predictable consequence, of course, is that you regularly publish things that just aren't true, or are so misleading as to render the difference between “misleading” and “false” obsolete. Steve Benen catches one such example today.

But it isn't just the falsity of Rove's columns that sets him apart from your run-of-the-mill lying right-wing hacks. It's the audacity.

Consider, for example, Rove's column today, in which he criticizes “activist” judges and favorably quotes Antonin Scalia saying “It is simply not compatible with democratic theory that laws mean whatever they ought to mean, and that unelected judges decide what that is.” Then he criticizes “judges who think of themselves as legislators” and says Republicans and the nation “favor[] judges who strictly apply the law”

And then consider that Karl Rove got his cozy West Wing office because Antonin Scalia and like-minded Justices handed down a decision that was so at odds with precedent, law, common sense and basic principles of democracy that they explicitly wrote that it should not be used as precedent in any future case.