Karl Rove: Rats Desert the Ship of State

Where in the World is Karl Rove? « NotionsCapital: "Where in the World is Karl Rove?
Where in the World is Karl Rove? That’s the big Blogosphere question tonight. See it here and here and here.

This so needs to be a T-Shirt.

But as hot and topical as this is, I find it difficult to say anything of substance, beyond "aw, fuck, what did you think was going to happen?"

I said difficult. Not impossible.

There's more...

But let's start with some hindsight. I typed "Karl Rove" into my site search. Just mine. I imagine the results would be similar on pretty much any reality-based site, or even, say The New York Times.

The results on this one person blog would choke a goat.

Meet the New Smirk; Same as the old Smirk.

I used to respect John McCain a great deal. But I'm afraid that he's lost his way; while politics is the art of compromise, it is not supposed to be the art of compromising one's principles to the end of gaining power.

He's now forthright for torture and supports the police state tactics that the Bush Cabal desires - most lately endorsing warrantless wiretapping "In this time of war." A "war" will last just as long as needed to justify the "emergency procedures" Karl Rove desires.

Whatever the orthodoxy of the Republican Party thinks, whatever their media machine believes, McCain's actual chance of winning an even somewhat honest election at this point, with the Bush Albatross around his neck and a ringing promise of a hundred more years of war in the middle east if that's what it takes to "win" is that of a urinal puck in a Texas Honky-Tonk.

Pot. Kettle. Rove.

But, thanks to Susie, I was directed to this article on BoingBoing:

"I'm the proud owner of Karl Rove’s father’s solid gold cock ring."

You know, that might well be the most compelling headline of the decade.

Well, now; that explains a lot, don't it? Oh, and Karl was raised in Sparks, Nev, just for that local interest angle.

I've always thought that Karl was a little bit "queer" myself. Not in the way his dad was, but in the sense of being ooozingly, off-puttingly not quite right. In the old sense, before the word came to be a synonym for homosexuality, one connotation was the sort of person that caused you to wipe your hand on your pants-leg after shaking their hand.

And oddly enough, Karl is the exact sort that would like you to confuse those terms, with the sort of pasty phiz you see in sex-offender registries.

Siegelman and Scrushy - Tip of the Iceburg?

The story itself bears so much similarity to so many other stories that it seems almost routine. It took a few of the comments to make me realize that suddenly "Dog bites Man" is genuine news.

The news is that "plausible deniablity" is off the table. We now know that when "Dog bites Man," it's almost always the same goddamn dog - just as we always suspected.

And on, and on and on. Siebel Edwards, Valerie Plaime, Eliot Spitzer, Siegelman and Scrushy are just a few of the names we know, people that for some reason or another would not yield and therefore got "Roved." It surely leads one to wonder who caved in. Nancy Pelosi seems an obvious suspect, as does our own Harry Reid.

But considering what Rove hath wrought upon those whom he has been displeased with, getting full cover from the Justice Department even in acts of outright treason, it's really difficult to gin up any great moral outrage at a failure of courage in such straits.

Hell, consider this:

The Pragmatic Progressive: Puzzling cluster of dead microbiologists.

Consider that all the targets of the Anthrax terror attack were Democrats, and that the agent was a weapons grade strain of anthrax processed to make it go easily airborne that clearly came from our own bio-warfare labs.

A fact, of course, that had to be confirmed by microbiology and genetics.

Hm. Not sayin' there's a direct connection between the two things, of course. But the net impression from this and many hundreds of other hints dropped upon us is that there is no length to which these people will not go. Indeed, they have gone there, and are clearly comfortable with doing it again, harder.

Nor are they even embarrassed to point to what their tactics have achieved - or apparently even conscious of the costs imposed upon us to make their gains. Just ask John McCain's economic advisor, Phil Grahm. He'll tell you:

" 'We have sort of become a nation of whiners,' he said. 'You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline' despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy, he said.

" 'We've never been more dominant; we've never had more natural advantages than we have today,' he said. 'We have benefited greatly' from the globalization of the economy in the last 30 years.

And that is all very true - depending on what your definition of "we" is. It surely does not include me. It almost certainly does not include you. If you happen to be Libral, gay, black, mexican or of middle-eastern, non-Israeli origin., you are specifically dis included. (Jews, of course, need to be kept around so they can be the centerpiece of the great Armageddon Barbecue.)

It's very clear we have a government led by, informed by and beholden to people that consider the citizenry to be of little more importance than serfs, wage-slaves at the vast latifundia of Wal-Mart and the Military-Industrial Complexes scattered about our land.

Those who believe our voices should count get counted out. One way or another and by whatever means are most convenient, without any need to consider ethics, morality or consequences.

Rove - probably THE key figure in all of this - is quite obviously a sociopath. Equally obviously, he depends upon and promotes a network of the gullible, fellow sociopaths, the greedy and the corruptible. He's used by people even more evil than he, for most are probably NOT such pure-strain sociopaths themselves.

Being what he is and knowing what he knows, he's certainly not going to allow his employers to throw him to the mob as a sop to apparent justice, but I'm somewhat surprised that such a trove of information was allowed to slip out of the country. Perhaps he's in a secure, undisclosed location. It would not suprise me (nor, I wager, him) to learn that he's now deceased. But should he actually BE on a "long planned vacation" with the sort of security a man with his official (rather than actual) status has, I'd consider it damnably remiss of any foreign intelligence agency to not explore a kidnap and interrogation operation.

I mean, consider the leverage a few weeks of determined interrogation could produce. The man who knows where all the bodies are buried, because he bought all the shovels? My word.

As lovely as it is to think of, say, MI6 or perhaps some deniable contractors professionally questioning Karl in some atmospherically ancient dungeon, one can learn a great deal simply by looking at all the long-term associates and entanglements with Rove.

Personally, I do not think it would be unreasonable or unwise to presume that those who deal with such a treasonous malevolent bastard as a matter of choice are any better than he, nor would it be wise to think they have any greater concern for the ethics of power.

You can start with Phil Graham, by informing him that when the rats start to desert the Ship of State, it's clear that the gilding above the waterline is hiding some serious structural defects.