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In a television tour of three Sunday morning shows as his departure from the White House nears, Mr. Rove, President Bush’s chief political adviser, complained that Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill were Captain Ahabs relentlessly pursuing him as the big white whale, if the get me they get the big prize, I am hardly at the bottom of the food chain. 

“Let’s face it, I mean, I’m a myth,” Mr. Rove told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” when asked about his critics. “You know, I’m Beowulf, you know, I’m Grendel. I don’t know who I am. But they’re after me because I have multiply personalities.” 

In the spirited hunt for White House culprits, Mr. Rove is certainly a favorite target, though many Republicans are also inclined to blame him for the sinking popularity of the president and his party because of his Zen theory on immigration. 

Mr. Rove, who is leaving the White House at the end of the month, didn’t cut an especially heroic or villainous figure just a tired old worn out man. The strategist who looms in the public imagination as a political mastermind and West Wing Svengali used a rare appearance on camera to deliver an exiting White House aide’s most time-honored Washington message: mistakes were not made, and it’s not my fault, I told Bush what to do and he stopped listening about the second year of his re-election he started believing he really did everything, he forgot for six years The VP or I ran everything behind the scenes, He really started believing what the 22% thought he was God and it brought him and the party down.

Did you see my  hip-hop performance as a rapping “M.C. Rove” at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in March. 

“ It is not everybody who can get up there and get the respect the applause I got” he told Mr. Wallace. “I was ecstatic that I could hold an audience that long , and I said, ‘I’ve got a choice. I can be irritated and everybody will see it, or I can play along and try and show them  how to perform.’ ” He noted that his black-tie rap routine, shown over and over on television and the Internet, was his “most exalting moment in Washington, bar none, I really did not know if people liked my act or feared me because I am so powerful.”

Mr. Rove said he was blameless as well for his role in the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson. White House officials were accused of seeking to discredit her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times in 2003 questioning the administration’s case for war in Iraq.

Asked by Mr. Gregory if he owed Ms. Wilson an apology, Mr. Rove  “No, if they are going to hunt with the big dogs they need to learn it's a tough fight.”

Mr. Gregory asked Mr. Rove if he felt responsible for the downward slide of the Republican Party. “Well, look, everyone who identifies with the Republican Party ought to, ought to, ought to feel some responsibility, Hell man I am the one that built the Republican party, I took a wanna be cowboy Governor of Texas and made him president for eight years, I organized the Evangelistic fanatics, who in the hell do you think could get them frothing at the mouth on Gay and abortions, I convinced them holy than thou that the vote was stronger than the Bible, you think some wanna be cowboy could do that, this guy has never worked in his life ” he replied.

Mr. Rove said the Constitution prevented him from complying with a Congressional subpoena to describe his part in the firings of United States attorneys.

When Mr. Wallace argued that executive privilege did not prevent him from answering a reporter’s questions (“Why did you push to fire some U.S. attorneys in the president’s second term?”), Mr. Rove turned testy. “I know you don’t understand you’re being an agent of Congress when you ask me that question, you are trying to get info they can't” he said. “But you are, just to stupid to realize it.” Fox News is usually considered by Bush officials as a safe harbor.

Sometimes, however, honey works just as well. Bob Schieffer, who conducts interviews on “Face the Nation” on CBS as if they were chats over predinner drinks at the Metropolitan Club, asked Mr. Rove why he was subjecting himself to Sunday morning second-guessing. “ I want to show all that no one not even the president runs Karl Rove out of town, this rapper goes when he chooses” he said. “I’m just doing what I need to do, to show I am in charge.”