Shock and Awe

"It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself. The oil revenue of that country could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We're dealing with a country that could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

Maybe you heard Paul Wolfowitz's words to Congress on the Daily Show 5 years ago when George Bush decided to pawn him off on the World Bank and everyone was laughing at the ridiculous bastard and e-mailing the clip to their friends.

Maybe the video of Karl Rove saying that what happened never happened will make the same rounds. Rove has always been able to rely on the gullibility of strangers -- and of course their defective and selective memories. Whether we write such things off to psychotic partisanship or bald stupidity or plain old evil is anyone's call but here's Karl on Meet The Press Yesterday saying the Bush Administration didn't say what the Bush administration said and even though you were an enthusiastic patriot for believing it then, you're a liar for believing it now.

"Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds."

wrote Frank Rich the day before. He hadn't yet had the joy of hearing this latest jewel of denial.

Of course you know I'm not an optimist. I've won many bets by gambling that the American public will make the most ridiculously inappropriate choices in public policy and my money is on the prediction that before long the Bush administration will never have said the war will be over in weeks, that we will be greeted as liberators, that there will be almost no casualties, that reconstruction will be swift and cheap, that there were al Qaeda training camps, mobile chemical weapons factories, nuclear facilities only weeks away from making deliverable bombs and that "freedom" will burst out all over the Middle East and the silly Liberal losers who doubt it are flirting with treason for doubting it.

Truth having caught up with the men who murdered America, they're forced to retreat into an imaginary world where they never said what they said, or did what they did and where a minimalist government presided over 8 prosperous years of freedom and peace - just like the theory says. Too bad we can't lock the door behind them.

Good ol' boy in Gucchi loafers

As much as I like living in small towns - and I do live in one - I must be out of touch with small town America; at least insofar as Karl Rove is being honest and genuine. (feel free to snicker.)

Karl has taken it upon himself, as a true man of the people and judge of patriots, to point out to a meeting of the National Rifle Association yesterday, that Barak Obama is out of touch with the people one needs to be in touch with in order to be the chief executive of the United States, Commander in Chief of the armed forces and representative of our country to the world at large. I must be out of touch because I am, given the chance, going to vote for Barak Obama. I own a number of firearms and learned to shoot when I was 10. I'm an outdoorsman who once had a farm, doesn't drive imported cars or drink Zima and is often seen dining with the local fisherman and bikers at the local tavern. I'm a Democrat. I'm educated. I don't support the NRA. I don't believe in faith.

Rove, whose neck is only red when he ventures out of his burrow, lives in a brand new palatial home in Florida and has spent most of his life promoting the interests of the very powerful to the detriment of truth, justice and what we'd like to call the American Way -- as well as to the detriment of the interests of the people he is now pandering and condescending to by insisting that Barak Obama is a panderer.

Convoluted? Sure, but that's Karl Rove. Karl, whose name has become synonymous with mean, ugly and dirty politics recently advised Obama

"Americans want to see you scrapping and fighting for the job, not in a mean or ugly way but in a forceful and straightforward way."

One has to wonder at the twisted and hidden paths Rove sees as the high road.

Karl, of course isn't exactly the hunting, shooting outdoorsman he was condescending to at the National Rifle Association Convention, and much less is he the God, Guns and Guts kind of a guy I'm familiar with in rural Florida. His face isn't tanned. I'm sure he doesn't wear camo boxer shorts or drink Budweiser or shoot pool with the boys after he punches out for the day. I'm sure he doesn't drive a 'pickemup' with Jesus stickers or gripe about them Jews driving up the price of gas or the Mexicans stealing his livelihood or the mill he works for shipping jobs to India. So it's a bit hard to see him as anything other than the manipulative, propagandizing, phony, lying, condescending, pandering bastard who has been sucking up to the power elite since he had hair.

By suggesting that the political opinions of what he calls "small town Americans" are what is and should be the policies of the United States, he's suggesting the kind of dictatorship of the proletariat that would have him screaming Marxism like a crazed parakeet if any Democrat had said it, and by categorizing the vast majority of us who live in urban or metropolitan areas as unAmerican by virtue of education and affluence he proves himself to be little more than an opportunist looking to rise above the masses by standing on their backs.

The Empire retires?

There's a new kind of darkness come to the Sunshine State. Karl Rove, whose bald pate is sometimes described as looking like a shaved testicle, has bought himself a house in a small development on the gulf coast in the western half of the Florida panhandle. You may have a hard time finding it on the map. It's quite a way from any place with a name you might recognize; the kind of place that gets hurt really, really bad by the hurricanes that scream through now and then. The mangroves and the vegetation that used to protect the dunes are now gone to be replaced by condos and beach houses and the country types who used to inhabit the area have been replaced by more economically upscale and in this case at least, a morally bankrupt politician.

I could imagine all sorts of reasons that Karl would choose to spend at least part of his time in a remote area, even if locals aren't particularly likely to admire him any more than I do, but it seems to interest Raw Story to a degree I find amusing. The stereotype of the typical "liberal" often is someone of limited means with a jealous grudge against those with less limited means. It's not true, but of course one will find examples.

The story focuses on how large and expensive is his abode as though to provide a very unneeded reason to dislike Rove. It has to make a Floridian smile. Perhaps to a rust belt city dweller a 2500 square foot house is big and a million dollars for a seaside property is expensive, but Welcome to Florida. Even in the midst of a real estate slump a 50,000 square foot house was completed last month, just a few miles up the coast from me. A big chunk of the people who live here don't need mortgages and a million buys a rather average house if it's within sight of the water. Did anyone think a high level king maker like Rove couldn't afford it - regardless of his party affiliation? I'm actually surprised at how modest it is compared to the palatial Rush Limbaugh seaside estate in Palm Beach.

The real surprise though, is that the real base of the Republican party, and I don't mean the money people, the influential people, but the guy whose house has wheels, the small businessman resentful of taxes, the retired military lovers of authority who always vote Republican, the Religious right; that such people support Rove and Rumsfeld and Bush and Cheney even now is what amazes me. That they think the Party represents them, is on their side and is lead by struggling people just like them, is beyond understanding. But let's not do so much to further the false image of Democrats that serves the Republicans so well. Let's not make demons of anyone with money when it's those who get rich by lying, cheating and stealing; those who use economic power to subvert politics to nefarious ends who are our opponents. Karl Rove isn't evil because he made a few bucks, but because he made it the way he did.

Receding Rove

It's to spend time with his family, dummy. Why would you think Karl Rove's blessed departure from the Administration would have anything to do with avoiding further scrutiny and embarrassment for the White house over the firing of those obviously incompetent attorneys? He needs now, for the first time in his life, to spend more time with his family.

"I know they'll say that," Rove told the Wall Street Journal, "But I'm not going to stay or leave based on whether it pleases the mob."

The mob of course, being the vast majority of the American people to whom sovereignty allegedly still belongs. With the word mob, Rove gives us a sharp insight into the administration, its loathing for democracy, its aristocratic presumption and its disdain for the people for whom it works. Well, of course it does please the mob and it must please George Bush who has evidently given the bastard two week's notice to be rid of Turd Blossom, the likelihood of his prosecution and all his stink.

Good riddance.