Rove Over the Cliff?

The upcoming Karl Rove memoir is now getting revealed a few days before pub date--AP might have had the first scoop earlier today. Now NYT's Peter Baker has a copy and weighs in. Excerpt:

Mr. Rove adamantly rejects accusations that the administration deliberately lied about the presence of such weapons in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. But he acknowledges that the failure to find them badly damaged Mr. Bush’s presidency, and he blames himself for not countering the narrative that “Bush lied,” calling it “one of the biggest mistakes of the Bush years.”

Mr. Rove’s book offers the most expansive account yet of the Bush presidency by one of the people most responsible for it. Addressing the most controversial and consequential moments of Mr. Bush’s eight years in power, Mr. Rove takes responsibility for the widely criticized Air Force One flyover after Hurricane Katrina and writes that he secretly cried in his White House office when he learned he would not be indicted in a C.I.A. leak case.

For the most part, his book, “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight,” to be published by Threshold Editions on Tuesday, is an unapologetic defense of Mr. Bush and his presidency, and takes aim at Democrats, the news media and disloyal Republicans for what he describes as hypocrisy, deceit and vanity. He also recounts his hardscrabble upbringing in a family broken by divorce and his mother’s suicide.