The Guardian profiles Karl Rove today. His dirty tricks date back to 1970 when working for a campaign, he flooded Chicago's red light and soup kitchen district with invitations to a campaign event promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing."

This sounds like him:

At high school in Utah, Rove was known as a nerd and a motor-mouth, unpopular but irrepressibly opinionated.

Somehow Rove got from there to here:

The nerdy political brawler with only a secondary school education is now the man the president likes to call his "boy genius" - a testament to Rove's role in orchestrating Bush's rise from a feckless, hard-drinking politician's brat to Texas governor to president in barely a decade. And unlike other electoral svengalis who have gone before him, Rove has carried his power intact from the campaign bus to the White House.

Where's he going?

The Republicans now control the presidency, the senate, and the house of representatives. Rove's task now is to consolidate that dominance of the White House and Capitol Hill and then use it to recast the Washington's third source of power, the supreme court, from its current cautious conservatism to a more red-blooded Republicanism.

But maybe the grand jury will get him first:

Last year, however, Rove's taste for personal politics entangled him in an extraordinary spy scandal. He is reported to have made calls to Washington journalists last July identifying a CIA undercover agent, Valerie Plame, who was married to Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who had called into question the administration's claims about Iraq's alleged nuclear programme. Rove allegedly told the journalists that Plame was "fair game" because her husband had gone public with his criticism.

A grand jury is now investigating the leak of Plame's name, a federal felony. Rove has denied being its source, and Wilson believes now he may have tried to push the story only after her name had already been published. Rove has yet to appear before the grand jury, but he has retained an expensive Washington lawyer.

The kicker? Bush's pet name for rove is "Turd Blossom."

....a Texanism for a flower that blooms from cattle excrement.