http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Karl_Rove_Killed_Anna_Nicole_Smith.htmlWell, probably not. I mean, maybe he did, for all I know – though I doubt it.
What is clear is that he couldn’t have been more delighted that she died her splashy death. Or that the Super Bowl was all the rage just before that. Or that big snow storms hit just after. Or that Anna Nicole’s body has returned to making headlines in death, just as it did in life.
Anything – anything! – to divert attention from his personal train wreck is just fine with Karl. It is crucial for him that you not be paying attention to the disaster he has created in Iraq and at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue generally. Hence all the recent drum beating on Iran, as well.
Unfortunately for Karl – but luckily for the rest of the planet – it ain’t working. And, the more you know of Rove and his ambitions, the more you realize just how much it ain’t working. This guy had really, really big plans. Like his 19th-century hero, Mark Hanna, he was going to build a Republican majority that would last a generation. He has instead brought the party to ruin, quite possibly destroying it forever.
But Rove was always way overrated, anyhow. And that is true, even taken on his own cynical terms. It is, of course, especially true if one considers such hopelessly idealistic factors like providing for the welfare of the country, improving the quality of our political discourse, or maintaining the semblance of truth that is necessary to sustain democracy. But even if we forget all that good stuff and adopt Rove’s own scorched earth approach to politics, where winning is everything and any means to that end is fair game, he is still a disaster. Only worse – he is a scorched earth disaster.
Bush now has job approval ratings in the low thirties and falling – on a good day. He singlehandedly delivered both houses of Congress to the opposition party in 2006. Serious academic historians are already describing him as the worst president in American history, with a fourth of his presidency still to go. And the chances that he will be impeached rise with each week. Quite an impressive
....MASSIVE, ENTERTAINING SUMMARY AND DIATRIBE! SEE LINK.....
It seems likely in retrospect that the real reason everything they touch fails – Katrina, global warming, North Korea, deficits and more, no less than Iraq – is because they never came to Washington to make any of it succeed. The fact that Bush is the very antithesis of a policy wonk is only partly explained by the same set of characteristics that account for him literally not reading books or newspapers. It’s not just that he famously lacks intellectual curiosity. It’s also that he just doesn’t give a damn about your boring little bourgeois problems, dude. You know, like having a job, educating your kids or accessing quality health care. And why should he? He and his people are taken care of, thank you very much. In this sense, David Kuo’s outing of the administration’s treatment of even its religious conservative allies was paradigmatic. The attitude has been, essentially: “We’ll pretend to care about your pathetic obsessions with embryos and queers and all things sexual just long enough for you freaks and your shock troops to deliver us power at the ballot box. Then we’ll throw the occasional Supreme Court justice your way, but otherwise, shut up already, wouldya? Why don’t you guys go off in the corner and pray or something?”
Bush is over. The only remaining accomplishment possibly within his and Cheney’s grasp would be the miraculous completion of their term. Meanwhile, both the movement of the regressive right and the Republican Party itself might be over, as well, especially if the Jim Webb wing (stones) can wrest the Democratic Party from the Harry Reid wing (sans stones), and start calling things for what they are in this country. It’s the thirteenth round now, and bloodied Democrats have mostly forgotten how to slug their opponent, not having employed that particular technology for about twenty-five years. Republicans, meanwhile, drunk silly on their own hubris, teeter senselessly about the ring, waiting for a mere exhalation from the other guy to knock them over and out.
Americans know they hate Iraq. They know they hate national debt. They’re pissed off about Katrina and global warming. Their children’s schools suck, their healthcare security is crumbling and their income streams feel precarious. And there’s a lot more where all that came from. All that’s missing now is for the Democratic Party having the courage to weave all of this together into an integrated narrative frame. On the day that happens, this sick monster that has haunted America and the world for a quarter-century will crawl back under the rock from which it came. On the day you hear Democrats talking about the failure of conservatism as an ideology – in the same fashion that Republicans have so successfully wrongly articulated a general failure of liberalism – on that day this nightmare will be over.
In any case, the regressive cancer which has been too long ripping apart this country and the world is today just one good framing away from the ash bin of history. If we could just move the genteel and ineffectual Harry Reids of this world gently aside, we could stick a fork in this beast once and for all. I think the public is already there, in pieces (Iraq, debt, Katrina, global warming, etc.). What is lacking now is the unifying narrative to weave together those pieces into the general discourse of a failed ideology.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
