James Moore and Wayne Slater, authors of Bush's Brain, have just published a new book about Karl Rove; this one's called The Architect. I see from Radar magazine that it contains some interesting stuff.

The big headline is that Rove, the chief strategist of a virulently anti-gay party, had a gay father stepfather. (I'll make no further comment on that; as we learned from the discussions of Mary Cheney in the 2004 campaign, practically anything a liberal or Democrat says about a gay person who has GOP ties can be declared shockingly offensive, while the Republicans' relentless hostility to gay people is treated as merely business as usual.)

But I agree with Steve Benen of the Carpetbagger Report that this is the weirdest of Radar's revelations:

Soon after Rove moved into his new office in the West Wing, previously occupied by Hillary Clinton, he invited three top Catholic priests to conduct a ceremony to purge the room of evil spirits. "It was an actual liturgical ceremony," says participant Deal Hudson. "We sat at the table, we prayed. A priest said a series of prayers, including a blessing."

Steve and his commenters can't quite decide whether this was done sincerely or a joke, or not at all. Maybe it never happened -- maybe Rove fed a phony story to the authors via Hudson. But it's revelatory no matter which of these is true.

Think about it: To the Bushies, the entire White House had been polluted by eight years of Bill Clinton. But, we're told, top adviser Rove didn't recommend an exorcism for the whole building, or even the Oval Office, or even, er, certain areas in and around the Oval Office where unsavory activities took place.

No -- the priests, according to the story, were asked just to purge the icky creepy feminist woman-cooties of Hillary.

That fits perfectly with the creeped-out reaction the GOP base has to Hillary -- Hillary the broom-riding wicked witch, also regarded as "The demon guardian of the 9th level of Dante's hell - a.k.a. SATAN."

Righties thinks Bill is evil, but they think Hillary is evil in an elemental female way that utterly unhinges them. Rove actively seeks to inspire that feeling in the base -- either that or he actually shares it.

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UPDATE Thanks to Shakespeare's Sister in comments for the clarification.