The Rove Guru

Gimme your Soul, defend my Legacy and I shall make you Preznit!

During this political season, John McSame has been under Dubya’s arm oftener than a pit-stain

and on-hand with a soothing POTUS reach-around more reliably than Condi Rice.

And why?

Because John McCain really wants to be Preznit.

Really, really, really, really wants to be Preznit.

Unfortunately, unlike his common-law helpmate Joe Lieberman, Senator McSame does not have the luxury of tinkering together a brand-new, one-state, one-time-only political party and then running as its sole candidate.

He is a Republican. If fact, he is now The Republican. Which means he needs the 27%-ers in direct proportion to how much he wants the Big Chair up on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Which is why he, for all the winky, nudgy, faltering denials, McSame absolutely requires the help of the man who holds his political leash -- Commander Guy -- and Commander Guy’s pet character assassin, Don Karleone.

From Mother Jones: (h/t Huffington Post)

Report: Rove Talks "Fairly Regularly" With McCain Camp; Getting Six Figures From Freedom's Watch

In a new National Journal article (not available online), writer Peter Stone dives deep into the conservative establishment and gets campaign staffers, movement operatives, and the ubiquitous "strategists" and "consultants" to talk about Karl Rove's current role in presidential politics. The takeaway? Rove is back. In fact, he probably never left. The campaign that is trying to prove it's not a second coming of George W. Bush is using the President's former chief strategist on a regular basis.

Stone says not to be fooled by Rove's hesitance to be identified with John McCain publicly.

...away from the spotlight, Rove has been busy pitching in by giving informal advice to McCain’s team and spending a considerable amount of time as an outside adviser to Freedom’s Watch, the conservative political group that is expected to spend tens of millions of dollars to help elect House GOP candidates. William Weidner, a Freedom’s Watch board member, recently told National Journal that Rove has offered strategic advice to both the group and its major financial backer, Las Vegas casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson. Weidner, president of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., which Adelson chairs, called Rove "an invaluable asset" to the group....

While the top of McCain's campaign won't admit to extensive conversations with Rove, fearing that Rove is too closely associated with the Bush Administration and its worst scandals, some folks are willing to spill the beans off the record.

…

And Rove is even more deeply involved with Freedom's Watch, the internally troubled right wing group that seeks to make trouble for Democrats throughout the campaign season.

[William] Weidner [a Freedom’s Watch board member] stressed that Rove has been "very generous with his time and ideas. He gives up his time for those things he believes in."

Two GOP strategists said they have heard that Rove has worked out a private consulting deal with Adelson; this arrangement, one strategist reported, pays Rove in the mid-six figures for giving speeches and providing assistance to Freedom’s Watch on labor union issues, a top priority of the group.

This is because McSame doesn’t just need The Base; he needs them on fire.

He needs them whipped into a peak of howling, manic, batshit, fuck-you-let’s-kill-‘em-all, political wilding frenzy.

Which is one helluvan assignment, because while our more reptilian fellow citizens haven’t gotten any more human in the last seven years, the fascist popskull that used to thrill through their veins has largely gone flat.

All the bubbles fizzed away from seven long years of screaming at the top of their chickenhawk lungs about the untrammeled joy of living in the ass crack of Dubya's Fucknozzle Feudalism.

Because these people had been promised things. Weird, scary things.

Sometimes bareback and shrieking and sometimes with a dog-whistle, but the Base was were promised that Commander Guy was gonna deliver cheap gas from his Dear Uncle Saud.

They were promised a permanent wingnut majority. They were promised a savage, worldwide comeuppance to every variety of Scary Brown Persons who haunt the bedwetty dreams of White Rightard Christian Patriots everywhere.

Instead, following the Sacred Conservative Junior Jumble Scrolls with absolute fidelity, Commander Guy destroyed everything he touched; sowing nothing but disaster while making sure his cronies reap obscene profits auctioning off the blood-stained rubble.

While Osama bin Laden sips Virgin Mojitos in our 'allies' backyard and releases more tapes in a year than The Pixies have released in 20, their Bicycle Chief limps around the world one last time, trailing weakness and humiliation like a sick dog butt-scooting across the floor, and leaving behind him an America fast becoming a Hobo Nation.

A terrifying international joke with no punch line in sight.

Where once we were a respected superpower that could broker global agreements with relatively clean hands and intentions, after seven year of Republican rule, Dubya and his Republican Party have vivisected and perverted America into a lethally belligerent extension of their own polluted souls: a power-drunk thug-state that recklessly flashes its nuclear arsenal like a mean drunk brandishing a broken bottle.

And as we watch the Midwest fill up with water, remember that most of it will eventually sluice its way into the Gulf through the splintered corpse of George W. Bush's own Herculaneum -- New Orleans: the great American city that America can't ever seem to get around to rebuilding.

And yet, from the blogs to the pulpits, from local bars to national cable news, from double-wides to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the degenerative democratic disease called “conservatism” that drove us off this cliff is in no way gone; it is merely quiescent.

Tuckered out from all that non-stop crazy, they are waiting for the next aw-shucks demagogue to sweep them off their feet, angry them back up and make them believe one more time that the smoking gun in their hand and the gaping holes blown though their lives are somehow really all the fault of dirty fucking hippies and Bill Clinton’s penis.

Which is why Rove and Bush are not enough.

McSame needs Hagee, and Parsley, and Robertson and their legions of Christopaths.

Hell, he needs

Zombie Jerry Falwell

He needs to go down to the bayou with a sack full of enough Spanish gold for the witch women to reanimate the remains of Lee Atwater, Jerry Fallwell, Father Coughlin, George Wallace, Spiro Agnew and Bull Connor.

Come November, if the GOP Base chooses to remain asleep in their Barca-Loungers dreaming their filthy little Confederate dreams, McCain loses.

And that’s the problem.

McSame is living a comical, modern variation of the ancient myth of Tantalus:

Tantalus' punishment, now proverbial for temptation without satisfaction, was to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches. Whenever he reached for the fruit, the branches raised his intended meal from his grasp. Whenever he bent down to get a drink, the water receded before he could get any. Over his head towers a threatening stone, like that of Sisyphus.

He is stranded between a Base of hardcore, shit-house-rat-crazy thugs who he absolutely must have and who threaten to bolt ever time he comes within a thousand miles of disavowing the Existential Awesomeness of Commander Guy and even whispering anything genuinely bipartisan or reasonable…

(They tolerate his Clinton-supporter wooing for the same reason Hagee’s minions “support” Israel. They view it as a tactical expediency…a necessary toll booth on the road to a glorious future where the True Believers can once-and-for-all annihilate their eternal enemies new BFFs and dance a merry tarantella on their stupid bones.)

…and a block of “independent” voters of unknown size who desperately want McSame to run like Hell away from Commander Guy and start talking in Mavericky bipartisan, reasonable ways. Who are repulsed by the Base and will flee like blind mice from the Farmer’s Wife if they catch McSame in the parking lot handing out foot massages to the 27%-ers.

And that pulverizing limbo between two, imperative-but-mutually-exclusive demographics is where McSame’s political career -- and quite possibly his Party -- will perish.

UPDATE: I removed the graphic of Lieberman from this post because commenter tw33z makes a valid point. While I make no apologies for the Photoshop of Lieberman in its original context, without that context the photo was in poor taste.

Thanks, tw33z.