Ryan Grim, at HuffPO, spills (a day before the book’s release) some of the interesting bits from Bush Administration’s speechwriter Matthew Latimer’s new tell-all Speech-less: Tales of a White House Survivor.

While Karl Rove was appearing on Fox News and writing op-eds as an independent political analyst, he was privately smearing Democrats. “Karl spread rumors through the White House that one of Obama’s potential vice presidential running mates—and a United States senator—had beaten his first wife. ‘Karl says it’s true,’ the president assured a small group of staffers. Then knowing Karl, he quickly added, ‘Karl hopes it’s true,’” reports Latimer.

For a commencement address at Furman University in spring 2008, Ed Gillespie wanted to insert a few lines condemning gay marriage. Bush called the speech too “condemnatory” and said, “I’m not going to tell some gay kid in the audience that he can’t get married.” (Of course, Bush ran his 2004 campaign telling that kid just that.)

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “adamantly opposed” any reference to jailed Egyptian dissident Ayman Nour when Bush traveled to Egypt to promote freedom. She won.

Bush, it turns out, is like millions of Americans: “I haven’t watched the nightly news one night since I’ve been president,” he said.

Laura Bush, says Latimer, “was secretly a Democrat for all intents and purposes, though it really wasn’t much of a secret.” ...

Bush on Jimmy Carter: “If I’m ever eighty-two years old and acting like that have someone put me away.”

Kevin Drum is experiencing a bit of schadenfreude at Hillary Clinton’s expense this morning.

....It turns out that Barack Obama’s hiring of Patti Solis Doyle is even more interesting than I thought at first. Perhaps because I deliberately pulled back from campaign coverage during the final couple of months after Texas and Ohio, I didn’t realize that Solis Doyle had become so estranged from Hillary Clinton after she was fired as Hillary’s campaign manager. Far from her hiring being a conciliatory gesture, the developing conventional wisdom is that Team Obama is sending the same kind of message to Team Clinton that the Tattaglia family sent to the Corleones in The Godfather:

“It’s a slap in the face,” Susie Tompkins Buell, a prominent Clinton backer, said in an interview. “Why would they put somebody that was so clearly ineffective in such a position? It’s a message. We get it.” She said it was a “calculated decision” by the Obama team to “send a message that she [Clinton] is not being considered for the ticket.”

Other Clinton insiders also seethed. “Who can blame Obama for rewarding Patti? He would never be the nominee without her,” one person who has worked for both Clintons and remains close to them said. The sentiment reflected what another person in the immediate Clinton orbit described as “shock” that Obama would send such a strong signal that he is not considering Clinton as his running mate so soon.

Another Hillary supporter puts it even more bluntly: Hiring Solis is the “biggest f*** you I have ever seen in politics.”

And he’s not alone. The whole left side of the blogosphere is buzzing like a beehive over this one.

Karl Rove’s recently announced intention of riding off into the sunset at the end of the month has provoked a veritable tsunami of reaction by the left, which has been going on for days.

Some of today’s funnier examples:

James Carville says that ok, so what if Rove won a lot of elections? Bush is down in the polls late in his second term, and that means Rove really lost a generation of Republicans to the democrats.

Harold Meyerson thinks that simpleton Rove overlooked the nation’s basic need for socialism.

Best of all, Monica Hesse fumes indignantly in the Washington Post on behalf of the mortally offended mass of Rove adversaries and opponents dismissed by the great man himself in a Wall Street Journal interview as “the mob.” How dare he use the language of social condescension? Doesn’t he realize how politically incorrect it is to use “the mob” as a pejorative?

Personally, I think it is all really very simple. George W. Bush isn’t running for anything in 2008, so he doesn’t really need his political strategist on daily call anymore. That makes it a good time for Karl Rove to take some time off, and go off and crank out a book and make a ton of cash, while quite possibly looking over the GOP field of candidates. I wouldn’t be surprised myself if old Karl reappears next year, refreshed by a nice vacation (and a considerably wealthier man), all ready to help kick some more democrat butt.