I don’t really want to travel down the Rove indictment line. There is plenty of great commentary on the Fitzgerald, Leopold, Luskin thread.
What fascinates me is that Karl Rove is seen, universally, as the creator of politically effective lies. That is his job, to be the dishonest trench fighter of the Bush administration.
It is a job for which he either hailed or vilified, depending on your political persuasion, but is never treated as an irrelevance.
Now most of us would claim to be the mythical, piano player in a brothel, before we would admit to be an institutional cheat and liar. Not our Karl and his supporters, they are quite candid about this otherwise disreputable role.
The fact is, give the man’s reputation, there should simply be no place for him near the top of the International power house.
What kind of men and women are these elected representatives who would sit with and be persuaded on policy by such a man? Where are their ethical considerations?
What of those who claim to be Christian leaders, who so readily see virtue in the man where no definable Christian virtue exists?
What of the national leader, the President? What kind of man is he that he would even allow the likes of Rove into the District of Columbia, let alone into his confidence?
Karl Rove seems to me, no matter how guilty or otherwise on one specific issue, to represent the malaise which is bringing the US and her close allies into disrepute internationally.
Washington has been described, back in Lincoln’s time, as a fetid, stinking swamp. For all the surface charm, that description seems just as true today. Why just indict Rove, he is just one man. Even without him loathsome power games will continue.
Postmodernism
2 weeks ago
6 comments:
Think about all the outwardly pious guys who lie, cheat, and steal for a living? there's George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Jack Abramoff, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell...
There's a line in Hannah and Her Sisters where one character says, "If Jesus ever came back and saw what was going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up."
That says it all.
Okay, I agree that Rove is a lying cheating bastard, but the indictment, to me, doesn't just symbolize the taking down of this sleazy political operative. It represents a strike against the Bush administration's general dishonesty and callousness as they DESTROY the people who oppose them.
It resonates to me the inhuman coldness towards the victims of Katrina and the people of Iraq. Karl Rove is the man that came up with and managed the gaybashing that masqueraded as the gay marriage debate, and now he's doing it to mexicans. This is the group who swiftboated Karry and made triple amputee war hero MaxCleland unpatriotic.
So, to me, although not directly, this represents a comeuppance for the general political tactics of detroying people of which Rove is the main embodiment.
Sure he's not being tried for what I think are his worst crimes, but the outing of Plame is symptomatic of the larger tactic.
(I think a lot of other people view this as some sort of repudiation over the pre Iraq intel which this also involves.)
That's my theory.
Mike
Hopefully this thing will not end with Rove. Maybe they will at least paritally "drain the swamp." A man can dream, can't he?
Okay, let us say Rove is ‘emblematic’, among a number of other unsavory descriptions. He is not the problem; he is just part of the problem, even if the obviously sleazy part.
Take the recently resuscitated house ethics committee. To their eternal shame, this balance bi-partisan committee could not reach an agreement on their terms of reference. Rather than attack unethical practices of Congress they became part of the sleaze.
Now they have come to life because there is an opportunity, with Rep Jefferson, a Democrat, to balance Ney, a Republican.
They are cherry-bloody-picking issues to come before them. That is a bi-partisan display of the ethical failure in US politics. Not that I can single out the US lawmakers, which is perhaps my point. Getting Rove won’t fix the entrenched dishonesty which seems to have become totally acceptable in political life.
I like the image of "draining the swamp" when talking about rooting out the current corruption and lack of true ethics and morality in the political cutlure today. That image has a certain Southern Gothic appeal to me - like Faulkner or the Drive-By Truckers!
I think we can credit Gore Vidal for that jaundiced mental image. Thinking about it now, he did rather labor the metaphor.
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