Rove.
Other than The Debate, Sunday was an All Karl Rove Kick-line.
Just imagine an ugly dog’s shaved ass swaggering from station to station, flipping off the world, shitting on the Constitution, and laughing all the way to the bank.
That was Sunday, and I’ll not dwell on it other than to say this.
Rove is not a genius; he is a sociopath.
Karl Rove is good with teh maths, and has a good eye for weaknesses, but where he excels is in understanding The Base right down to their bituminous hearts.
Weak, myopic, doughy, privileged, hateful.
A liar by nature and a sleaze-merchant by trade.
Self-righteous invoker of a deity whose teachings his every action insults and defiles.
Emotionally malformed, button-busting proud of his bigotries and wattle-quiveringly indignant about every imaginary slight against the Dear Leader.
Hell, Rove is the Base with a better vocabulary and suit of clothes.
It has been said by the Right that Karl Rove did not create a Divided America, but inherited one. That assertion, as with most assertions from the Right, is a thin patina of fact camouflaging a deep and cancerous lie.
This country, like the Fisher King, has always been afflicted with a marrow-deep wound; in our case it was self-inflicted, arising from our Original Sin of trying to build a temple of Democracy on a foundation of Slavery.
The need to justify why it was OK to maintain proto-fascist Slave States in the heart of our Republic led us to waterboard our Bible and our Lord until we tortured out of them a scriptural rationale for our murderous bigotry. And its many guises (God, Ropes and Negroes) and mutations (God, Guns and Gays), that Southern White Male Conservative Dominionist disease has hag-ridden our beloved country ever since.
We have, almost since our nation’s inception, fought wars – cold and hot – with and among ourselves because of that evil legacy.
From time to time there arise leaders who use every means at their disposal – religious, political, economic, rhetorical -- to try and close and cleanse the wound. To drag what is dark about America into the light by demanding that we do no more or less than live up to our own pretty words.
And then, more often, there arise other leaders. Ones who picnic on this wound like a staph infection. Who, for partisan gain, use every means at their disposal – religious, political, economic, rhetorical -- to try and widen and deepen the wound. To spike the fever. To rip new holes in the body politic and swab the lesions with shit and hate.
Rove proudly serves the latter group, and here, from across the dial, are a few of the little, hardened owl pellets he horked up on his way out of town:
Q; Why are you doing this “farewell tour”?
Rove: I vas ordered to.
Rove: I don’t accept the idea that I “play to the Base”.
Rove: You cannot win an election like we won on 2000 or 2004 by “playing to the Base”.
Rove: The Leader of the Senate stands up and calls the Preznit a liar and then wonders why we can’t work together.
driftglass: Uh, because the President is a liar?
Rove: This Preznit wants to be a Unifier. But some Evil Democrats never accepted his legitimacy. Some Evil Democrats saw their political fortunes in obstructing him no matter what.
Rove: Max Cleland was blocking the whims of my Lord and Master. Therefore, by the transitive properties of Republicanism, he was a Bad American who deserved to be destroyed my any means necessary.
Q: Now Democrats are far from blameless…but haven’t you gone too far.
Rove: Democrats routinely call the Preznit a liar, but whether its Dick Durbin calling soldiers Nazis (which he never did) or conflating one ad by MoveOn.org into representing every Democrat everywhere, we Tell The Truth about the Evil Liberals who want to Kill Your Children.
Q: What about your polarizing politics?
Rove: I don’t accept that we didn’t build coalitions.
Q: But…but…there was a shitload of opposition from inside your own Party?
Rove: It was “inexplicable opposition” on the part of Democrats that was responsible for every problem. “Democrat” leaders have told me, face-to-face that they love me and wanted to work with me, but Michael Moore and George Soros refused to let them be good Americans and get down on their knees and fellate me.
Rove: I refuse to testify under oath and with a transcript because of my gweat, gweat love of the Constitution of the United States. Imagine if we could drag Supreme Court clerks and force them to testify about court decisions!
driftglass: Yes. Just imagine what an awful, awful world it would be if a Supreme Court clerk were using his office to, say, deal heroin. Or fence stolen rims. Or rig elections. And some despicable soul exercised his or her Constitutional authority in to make this criminal betrayer of the public trust A) stop eviscerating the very laws they swore to uphold and, B) pay for their crimes.
Yes, truly that would be a Hell on Earth.
Q: But this isn’t a court or Congress. It’s bad teevee, and we wuuuuvs you Karl. So howzabout telling us why you had those US Attorneys fired?
Rove: Fuck you; my every boil and bowel movement is protected from on high by the Prince of Drunkness by Executive Privilege.
Rove: I am the Constitution’s Greatest Luvah!
Q: You’re famous for turning people’s strengths into weaknesses. How do you do that?
driftglass: By lying. Repeatedly. Also having a Base with a median IQ of 43 is incredibly helpful.
Rove is not a genius; he is a sociopath with a good head for figures.
He is what you get when you surgically remove a CPA’s conscience, cross-pollinate him with back alley dogfight breeder, and tell the resulting mound of giggly meat to go forth and win elections at any cost.
In any normal community he’d be on every watch list; parents would warn their children to blow their Rove Whistle with all their might and run like hell whenever they caught sight of him.
But in Punditland he is an admired village elder, and if his reek of sulfur, rotting flesh and old blood is whiffable a full five minutes before he enters a room, a quick swab of the nostrils with triply-rectified Aqua Velva is enough to keep the press corps from vomiting.
However I (mercifully) do not live in Punditland, and unless he was going on the air to announce his intention to commit honorable .38 caliber seppuku to atone for the firestorm of lies and slander and fraud he rained on America for the last seven years for the sole purpose of getting the Worst President in History “elected” and then “re-elected”, what Fat Karl has to say about anything is of zero interest to me.
End Part 1 of 2.
17 comments:
Rove's towering misrepresentations are so ridiculous it's almost a waste of caloric effort to type a rebuttal. He's worse than a bad political advisor: he's a lying, slanderous joke.
He also utterly lacks charisma. He kept retorting with a snarky "nice try" and refusing to answer questions when he wasn't living in dreamland. The only way he'll learn a lesson is if he's put in jail, and probably not even then.
Good bye and good riddance, you wormy, doughy, viperous shitbag.
That "self-inflected wound" stuff was a disturbing series of images, but necessarily so.
But I've come to think that what is now the USA is actually four countries. The USA proper is in the northeastern quadrant, the northern border of Old Dixie (which includes Virginia and Kentucky) is its southern border, and it stretches from the Atlantic to the western borders of the Great Plains states. It includes Maryland and Delaware, even if these last two states are a bit "Dixie-ish". Missouri is also part of America proper but also has a lot of Dixie influence.
Dixie is, well, Dixie. 'Nuff said.
In the northwestern quadrant is Cascadia, which consists of Washington, Oregon, the northern half of California as where most of the population lives, and the Rocky Mountain states too.
The southwestern quadrant is basically the part of this country we stole by force from Mexico. It consists of the southern half of California and also New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. Oklahoma could just as easily be part of Dixie, but I would make Oklahama part of "Mexamerica" or "Texical" just so that you have four nice even divisions. Clark County, NV, in which Las Vegas is situated, is part of Nevada which is in Cascadia, but the southern tip of Nevada is really part of the southwest. If you extend the Arizona northern border westward into Nevada, it ends up slicing off that little tip of Nevada when it meets California's eastern border.
My point is that if what is now the USA were allowed to split up into the four "natural" (for lack of a better word) countries it is, each country could govern itself as it saw fit without all these conflicts that arise trying to force four countries to be one country. The USA and Cascadia would probably have a national health-care system. The CSA, of course, would not just because it's the damn CSA. (It's okay, they'll just pray when they get sick. Or have someone pray for them if they're too sick to even pray.) Texical probably wouldn't because that would mean giving health care benefits to the Hispanic population too, but that could change if the Hispanic population became seriously politically motivated. The people of Spanish-speaking cultures and subcultures are not easily deterred once they've decided that they want to get something done.
Sorry, I just felt like rambling today.
loveandlight,
The Biden Plan for America :-)
Well, I suppose even a stopped clock is right twice a day. ;-)
Drifty, forgive me, I was getting impatient for new content. But the insightful writing you delivered is well worth the wait. Thank you.
L & L- We might have to negitiate some of those borders, but you basic premise is correct.
U.S. Blues:
I tried to avoid splitting any states, but with California, there was just no other choice.
Of course with the CSA, they're going to have to have either twelve or thirteen states total so that the Battle Flag won't lack for stars to put in the arms of the St. Andrew's Cross. For sure, wanting that design for a national flag wouldn't be much of an improvement over saluting the Jolly Roger, but once it's the flag of somebody else's country, I don't suppose it's any business of mine.
"This country, like the Fisher King, has always been afflicted with a marrow-deep wound; in our case it was self-inflicted, arising from our Original Sin of trying to build a temple of Democracy on a foundation of Slavery."
True dat!
I've said it before, but the worst thing in this country's history was not the Civil War. It was the decades leading up to it, when northern politicians, for God only knows what reasons, made one shameful compromise after another with the slave states in order to keep them in the union. At the first threat of secession, the free states should have said; "GO, and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out". Eventually, the CSA would have collapsed under the weight of its moral rot, slavery would have ended peacefully (as it was ending throughout the rest of the world), or at least without 675,000 dead, and who knows...some of the former slave states might have agreed to come back to the union. Todays Democrats are like their Northern forebears in the early 1800's. For years, they did backflips trying to, if not please the Right, then at least accommodate it. They seem not to have learned that there is no pleasing them, and no way to compromise. L&L may be right...after Iraq flies apart in partition, we may be next.
I don't like that division plan. Most of the missile silos are in the kook-ball west. I don't want to be subjected to nuclear blackmail by the King of Montana. As a Floridian, I also don't look forward to the car bombs of the Florida Libre separatists.
drift
when i started reading you, i couldn't imagine back then that there would be a day when Rove resigned. imagine how that would have lit things up.
now, it's the whimper and not the bang, laced w/ a strong dose of other-shoe-may-yet-fall.
love the adios to Karl although we know he is ever lurking and plotting.
i hope they are all brought to trial as international war criminals.
glad to see the glass cuts as sharply as ever.
thanks from Cascadia, aka Ecotopia in a book of the same name. published in the '70's...?
Drifty, and LL, you got my groove on so just a thanks from this Larue . .
LOVE this part:
"This country, like the Fisher King, has always been afflicted with a marrow-deep wound; in our case it was self-inflicted, arising from our Original Sin of trying to build a temple of Democracy on a foundation of Slavery."
It's the stuff of doctorates. And it's SO true . . . and this country and its citizens STILL miss opportunity to make ameds for positive change.
Maybe the next brass ring that comes by . . .
Drifty, and LL, you got my groove on so just a thanks from this Larue . .
LOVE this part:
"This country, like the Fisher King, has always been afflicted with a marrow-deep wound; in our case it was self-inflicted, arising from our Original Sin of trying to build a temple of Democracy on a foundation of Slavery."
It's the stuff of doctorates. And it's SO true . . . and this country and its citizens STILL miss opportunity to make ameds for positive change.
Maybe the next brass ring that comes by . . .
US Blues,
Happy to oblige as/when possible, but the hours are filling way, way these days.
larue/ dave,
I take hope in that each generation gets a little better. I'd love a Big Breakthrough change -- and a sudden outbreak of Steely Pine Syndrome among the Democrats -- but apparently that is not the way this universe works.
Organic Mechanic,
You're welcome.
L&L,
don't ferfet, Eugene to Willits will still be the Peoples Republic of Jefferson ;-)
And Orygun has got to stop selling off all its assets for a quick buck before I'll defend her against pirates. Except for the Blazers. They can have the Blazers. Fuck the fucking Blazers. I'd rather watch the Ducks anyday.
-skunqesh
No one so far has mentioned the OTHER great original sin: the fact that we got this country by murdering the natives and stealing their land.
Also, if this partition plan were to go through, would there be some programs to get people like me who don't really belong in the CSA [despite, in my case, being born, raised, and having lived all my life in the CSA region] out of it?
IBW:
Just follow the North Star, and when you get to Ohio, tell them that you're gay and you were outed in your hometown. That should work. :-)
I'm way late to this thread, but I just have to thank IBW for FINALLY bringing up the genocide upon which this country was founded.
I was only just able this evening (Wed. 8/22) to read Driftglass' post and the following thread, and -- up until Ivory Bill Woodpecker's comment -- was really starting to feel mindblown that NO ONE was seeing fit to mention the ultimate ORIGINAL SIN committed here.
This is not to make some sorry contest out of which caused the most suffering: genocide or slavery (itself a product of ethnic cleansing by the African slave dealers). It is merely to point out that before slaves were ever brought here, there was a foreign invasion of an inhabited land.
The wound of the Fisher King goes much deeper than slavery -- that's just one manifestation of the wound's effect, not the whole of the wound.
No, the fundamental wound is the assumption made by one group of humans that they have an inherent right to take ownership of whatever they desire, and to destroy whoever and whatever stands in their way.
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