Karl Rove has resigned and will be gone at the end of August. President Bush's brain blows. The architect folds. The chief strategist sashays out the bunker off into the sunset. Another bloated rat abandons the sewer clogged with corruption.
What despair departure must be for Rove from his dear W., (watch video) whom he has devotedly served off and on since the 1970s. How could Karl help himself when he met W.? Listen:
"I can literally remember what he was wearing: an Air National Guard flight jacket, cowboy boots, complete with the - in Texas you see it a lot - one of the back pockets will have a circle worn in the pocket from where you carry your tin of snuff, your tin of tobacco. He was exuding more charisma than any one individual should be allowed to have,"
gushed the macho man who would later mastermind the GOP's anti gay strategy but whose description of first seeing Bush's rear pockets sounds right off Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Sweet, sweet, Turdblossom, as Bush tagged his wowed admirer: just like a flower that blooms in bullshit.
"complete nerd. I had the briefcase. I had the pocket protector. I wore Hush Puppies when they were not cool. I was the thin, scrawny little guy. I was definitely uncool."
Just how much of a nerd wimp was Rove as a child? When he was age nine in 1960, Karl got into his first political fight when
"a little girl across the street who was Catholic . . . found out I was for Nixon, and she was avidly for Kennedy. She put me down on the pavement and whaled on me and gave me a bloody nose."
Besides being more likely to beat a little girl in a fight, Bush also had something Rove didn't have: a solid, traditional family. When he came home for Christmas from his first semester at the University of Utah, Karl found out his 300 lb. father was really his stepfather and that he was leaving Karl's mother. Big Louie, as his father was known, moved to Los Angeles, came way out of the closet and became part of an elder gay group known as the "Old Farts." Rove's mother later committed suicide.
None of that is acceptable in a proper conservative pedigree mandatory for a candidate to play on the public stage under the lights. The most Karl could have ever prayed for was to be the brains behind a front man, to be the ventriloquist calling the shots from the sideline shadows while his puppet took the bows for his brilliance.
One could say that with W. that Rove got his prayers answered beyond belief except for one minor detail: Rove is an agnostic and agnostics are not renowned for fervent prayers.
Yet Rove was the genius who developed Bush's powerful strategy of being God's man in order to energize the religious right. Rove was so skillful that he, an unbeliever, was able to help convince Bush that God anoints Bush. What more can be asked of Rove than to have taken Bush, someone with no skills whatsoever other than that of over confident cheerleader, and have patsy W. convince most of the nation that agnostic Rove's agenda was the very will of God?
But Rove recognized no Divine principles. And Rove is not one to put any principles before winning. As Dick Cheney put it:
"Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose."
Fear of losing is why Rove was able to invoke homophobia among conservatives while also claiming to love his stepfather, an open gay, as his own father. That's why Rove was able to sit at a desk with a photo of his loving gay father who stayed in the closet long enough to raise him and for Rove to be able to scheme of his operatives pretending to be pollsters and calling up voters and asking them things like would folks be "more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if [they] knew her staff is dominated by lesbians." That's why Karl could see nothing wrong with the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. All that is important is never to be beaten by a little girl again, whatever it takes.
Even as enabler Rove departs, allow me to predict Bush's chronic cognitive dissonance will continue constipating. Cognitive dissonance is the psychological term referring to a person's difficulty in dealing with evidence contrary to one's beliefs. Cognitive dissonance is seeing what you want to see. I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it with my own mind. And the more and longer we believe it, the more we find to confirm what we want to believe. Nothing is going to shake a true believer's convictions but everything is going to reinforce his beliefs that is doing the right thing even as he is turned upon. W. admitting that he's has been wrong will rank right up there with the second coming of Jesus and the Cubs winning the World Series. (My bet's on Jesus.)
W. has long wanted to believe that he is God's gift to mankind. But now the agnostic who convinced W. that he is God's man is going away, leaving W. to fend off the formicating masses with needles trying their best to pop his bubble. Burst, bubble, burst. Flush, Turdblossom, flush.
