August 14, 2007 by lonbud
As The Turd Turns
Karl Rove gave President Bush his two week notice on Monday. After August 31, the liberal media, and the moonbat blogosphere, and the netroots won’t have him to kick around anymore.
His slipping out the side-door seems anticlimactic after all the hubbub he raised over the past six and a half years, when reasonable, clear-thinking people were apoplectic over his election campaign strategies and his political usurpation of actual departments of the federal government, after the brief fantasy he might one day be frog-marched from the White House in handcuffs over his roles in both the Valerie Plame affair and the firings of U.S. Attorneys, not to mention his selling of the war in Iraq.
Despite the protestations of Patrick Leahy and other members of congress that the game is not yet up — even Mr. Rove himself boasted today that “I’m Moby Dick and we’ve got three or four members of Congress who are trying to cast themselves in the part of Captain Ahab” — odds are he will recede into lucrative semi-anonymity while the rest of the country and the successor government to the Bush administration struggles to cope with the shitstorm of bad juju the Republican party and its neocon pitchmen will have left behind after the 2008 general election.
Salon’s Sidney Blumenthal describes Mr. Rove’s poisonous effects even among early, fervent supporters of the so-called Bush agenda, quoting one of the first people to depart from the administration — John DiIulio, the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives — who said, famously, “What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”
The final analysis will mark Mr. Rove’s great ideas, to create a permanent Republican majority and solidify the notion of a “unitary executive,” failed. It seems clear, even at this early juncture, neither mega-billionaire Mitt Romney, psycho-mayor Rudolph Giuliani, comedy-preacher Mike Huckabee, nor avuncular, undeclared candidate Fred Thompson has a prayer of beating anyone the Democrats might field next November.
Real Republicans, actual thinking conservatives, understand the degree to which the Bush administration has failed their ideals of small government, balanced budgets, and reduced spending. Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush leave them twisting in the wind by a devalued currency, a bankrupt Treasury, and the security of a nation mortgaged on tax cuts for the most wealthy of us, exacerbated by off-the-books allocations for an endless war that cannot ever be won.
Karl Rove is just another rat jumping a sinking ship, and if you looked closely on Monday, you would have seen the desperation with which the nominative captain hugged him on his way down the plank in the Rose Garden.
jeannie b. bright - August 15, 2007 @ 8:17 am
Lonnie, Lonnie, Lonnie won’t you sacrafice yourself and throw your body and mind on the pyre of a run for Public Office? It would be worth moving to California for. Most memorable line, “after the brief fantasy that he might one day be frog marched from the White House in handcuffs…” Whew! Now I can’t get that image out of my mind.
JB
Paul Burke - August 15, 2007 @ 11:50 am
Amen – well stated – Karl will try and latch on somewhere else – he reminds me of the unpopular high school kid who fared no better in college and joined the Young Republicans with all the other delusional, misfits bent on world domination to prove their self worth, combat their self loathing and seek their revenge on those of us who just tried to ignore them or even felt sorry for them while we were out having fun.
bubbles - August 16, 2007 @ 11:42 am
To quote a far better wordsmith. “It was the epoch of belief it was the age of incredulity”. I think we’re also seeing that one belief gone awry after another can eventually wear thin the psychological fabric of financial markets. I’ve always thought lawlessness committed by governments ultimately extracts an extremely high financial cost.
Tam O’Tellico - August 16, 2007 @ 2:33 pm
In case you haven’t seen it, Rove should be hung — and I mean that literally — for his part in the conspiracy to bring us a war that this gang of thieves knew would turn out exactly the way it did. My proof of that assertion?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YENbElb5-xY#
See it and weep.
harshmoon - August 17, 2007 @ 12:33 pm
Oh now, don’t plame Rove. Hee.
lonbud - August 19, 2007 @ 7:44 am
That’s the problem with the current junta and its enablers — no one willing to assign or accept accountability for anything.
The American people’s failure to demand the heads of Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Gonzales (among many deserving candidates) on pikes atop the stairs of the U.S. Capitol building will haunt generations of citizens yet to come.
Tam O’Tellico - August 22, 2007 @ 6:44 am
R.I.P. Karl Rove
Rest in Purgatory, Karl Rove. To the surprise of almost everyone, Bush’s chief political gangsta and dough-boy rapper recently left his post at the White House. Rove slinked away with little fanfare – though at some point Bush may well pin a medal on him just as he did George Tennant and Don Rumsfeld. Good job, Turdblossom!
(For those who may not be aware, Turdblossom is Bush’s “affectionate” nickname for Rove – I think it has a nice ring to it!)
But Bush may have to give Rove a pardon instead. There are strong suspicions Rove’s sudden departure may be related to stuff that is about to hit the fan.
Those on the rabid right have considered Rove a savior, those in the middle a Mayberry Machiavelli, and those on the left a Satan, but all seemed to agree that he was a genius. Frankly, I’ve never been that impressed. Granted, by using every dirty trick in the book, he managed to get a total incompetent elected President of the United States, but is that really something you want on your resume?
And if Rove really was Bush’s Brain, given the President’s miserable performance, maybe Bush should have held out for another donor.
But bad as Rove has been for Bush, he’s been even worse for the Republican Party. His “leadership” has led to partricide, that is, “the killing of one’s own party. The elections of 2006 and the spate of recent retirements by long-time Republican politicians are all the proof anyone should need of that assessment.
So how did the genius become the goat? Rove and his ilk – including the sainted Ronald Reagan — all made the same mistake. They believed a complex modern society can be run like a small-town village where grocery stores and garages compete fair and square for the townfolk’s dollars. Someone needs to inform these dreamers that the corner grocery and Joe’s garage went out of business decades ago, and that the power and greed of multi- national corporations have made laissez-faire a laissez-fairy-tale.
What this political philosophy expects us to believe is that if we just get government out of the way, Microsoft, GE, and Halliburton are just waiting to give us all a fair shake. And these guys have the gall to call Liberals idealists!
Free-Marketers apologists like Rove share something else with modern corporations – the organization and operation of an enterprise to maximize short-term gains. Downsizing, outsourcing and all the other “efficiencies” promoted by Newthink leads to the same dire consequences – expediency destroys stability, cronyism destroys loyalty, and mediocrity destroys morale. This is true whether these “efficiencies” are applied to the corporation, the military, the CIA, or the DOJ. Anyone who thinks outsourcing is of long-time benefit doesn’t understand the critical difference between managing the work of an employee and that of a subcontractor.
One reason those presently in power don’t understand the true nature of competition or how to run a business for the long-term is that most of these government-haters have spent a large portion of their lives feeding at the public trough. Take Dick Cheney – please! When he wasn’t drawing a government check, he worked for Halliburton, a business that fed primarily from the government trough. Take George W. Bush – please! W failed at every business he put his hand to until he found one that fed at the public trough – the Texas Rangers. Keep in mind this was a failing franchise until the city of Arlington ponied-up a publicly-financed stadium. That sweetheart deal made Bush a rich man, but it left Arlington holding the bag, a bag filled with huge public debt.
Perhaps their own robber-baron proclivities made these men such government-haters. Certainly, they understand the evils of big government, since they have been part of that evil. Certainly, they have made a career and a fortune out of manipulating government for their personal benefit.
But is the answer to government inefficiency and criminality to gut government – or as the worst of this breed likes to put it “drain the swamp”? How do we promote food safety by reducing FDA testing labs from 13 to 6? How do we restore respect for our legal system by removing effective prosecutors with a modicum of independence in favor of incompetent toadies? How do we improve foreign relations by choosing a U.N. representative who thinks the U.N. should be destroyed? How do we make our country safer by over-extending and under-equipping our military?
Such “efficiencies” may help win an election, but in the long run, these actions guarantee that government becomes less efficient and less effective. Some suggest this is precisely the aim of this new breed of so-called Conservatives. Some suggest their aim is to make government so terrible; no one will have any use for it. If that is true, there is nothing conservative about their aims. If that is true, it will lead not to the death of government, but to the death of the Republican Party. By all appearances, it may have already.
If the Republican Party is dead, there is blame enough to go ‘round. But one man more than any other is responsible, the man so many saw as a savior of the party. Karl Rove had a talent for winning elections by any means necessary, but he and those he helped get elected hadn’t a clue about how to govern.
Karl Rove the man is still very much alive, but Karl Rove the “political guru” has passed on to his just reward – ignominy. May he and his Politics of Division rot in Hell.
©2007 Tom Cordle