rawstory | The former White House Deputy Chief of Staff and top Bush adviser was treated to a cadre of protesters Monday, who threatened him with a citizen's arrest and ultimately succeeded in driving him offstage.
As the local CBS News affiliate described it, "Karl Rove book tour starts out with a bang."
Maybe not quite the bang he wanted.
A co-founder of the liberal activist group Code Pink, which has repeatedly interrupted both Republican and Democratic political figures' speeches with questions about the Iraq war, brandished handcuffs at the former Bush adviser during a speech Monday night in Beverly Hills.
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"Look what you did -- you outed a CIA officer,'' co-founder Jodie Evans remarked, referring to former CIA officer Valerie Plame. "You lied to take us to war. You ruined a country.''
A second protester then called Rove a "war criminal."
"The only comfort I take is that ... you're going to rot in hell,'' she said.
"With all due respect, this goes to show the totalitarianism of the left," Rove replied. "They don't believe in dialogue. They don't believe in courtesy. They don't believe in First Amendment rights for anybody but themselves.''
"If you want to keep interrupting me, you can get the heck out of here,'' Rove said, going on to call the Downing Street memos "a complete fabrication'' and the man making the charges "a lunatic.''
In the Downing Street memos, the former chief of British intelligence is quoted as saying that American policymakers were "fixing" intelligence around the facts to lead an unwitting public into war.