We cheered when Karl Rove announced he was leaving the White House, but the nagging question is why? Here’s my theory: Rove needs total freedom to ensure that Republicans — and Republicans the neocons can continue to control — stay in power.

We are all looking forward to 01.20.09, Bush/Cheney’s last day in office assuming Pelosi continues to refuse to impeach. But they will be leaving behind a crime scene worthy of several teams of CSIs. The fingerprints, buried bodies, photographs, emails, and evidence of wrongdoing that you and I haven’t even thought of will be everywhere. They simply cannot let a Democrat win.

Rove knows this. And while in years past he obscured his partisan dirty work by using Republican National Committee computers, saving the presidency for neocons is too important to do it in half-measures. It will take massive election fraud to generate the numbers to carry a candidate who will most likely garner only about 25 to 30 percent of the vote, judging by current polls. Rove can’t do that from inside the White House.

Some people are wondering if he’s already setting a trap.

In this case, Rove’s weeklong broadside against Clinton…looks suspiciously like an exercise in reverse psychology that his team employed three years ago when it was preparing for President Bush’s reelection bid…

In the run-up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when it was not yet clear who Bush’s opponent would be that November, Rove and his aides had begun to fear that their most dangerous foe would be then-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina…But instead of attacking Edwards, Rove’s team opened fire at Kerry.

Their thinking went like this, [former Rove ally Matthew] Dowd explained: Democrats, in a knee-jerk reaction to GOP attacks, would rally around Kerry, whom Rove considered a comparatively weak opponent, and make him the party’s nominee. Thus Bush would be spared from confronting Edwards, the candidate Republican strategists actually feared most…

If that sounds implausibly convoluted, consider Dowd’s own words:

“Whomever we attacked was going to be emboldened in Democratic primary voters’ minds.”

Rove knows us well, although he proved in the midterms that he’s not infallible. Still, the trick worked before.

Is Rove playing a similar game against Clinton? Is he trying to stampede Democrats into nominating her, having concluded that Obama, Edwards or someone else would pose a stiffer challenge to the Republican nominee?

…Conservative activist Grover Norquist said that he doubted conservatives were trying to meddle in the Democratic primaries and that nobody on his side thinks that party’s base would pay attention to Rove…

“I want to run against Hillary Clinton because I think she’s the easiest person to beat,” Norquist said. “But she’s by no means a pushover.”

Yeah, nobody on their team would pay attention to Rove. My ass.

The good news is Rove has left the building. The bad news is now we have no way to know what he’s up to.