Karl Rove, according to Susie Bright's most recent blog entry (h/t Salon's Critics' Picks), is an atheist. Susie cites this 2007 piece, which marshals some reasonably strong evidence -- certainly enough to sustain a jury finding.
The information doesn't surprise me; it embarrasses me. I should have sussed this out a long time ago, and posted it somewhere, so that I could cite it now to prove my insight and perspicacity. Of course Rove does not believe in God. Rove does not believe in anything, even himself. Rove is a walking addiction, and what he is addicted to is power, and to him power means destruction.
What does surprise me, at first, is Rove's refusal to lie about this fact. But on reflection I realize that this is entirely consistent with the view of Rove that has been slowly solidifying in my mind over the past few years. Rove is a complex and fascinating person, by far the most interesting to emerge from the Bush ascendancy. It is easy to look at him as the masterful gamesman, wholly focused on the final score, utterly immune from any consideration off the field -- an election-winning machine. But he is human, and seems to be sane, and any good trial lawyer will tell you that every sane witness has something he won't lie about. In Rove's case it was apparently important to draw a line between himself and those he exploited, as if to leave a mark, for whoever could read it, that he was no fool.
Like most sociopaths he imagines that his cleverness will somehow make up for his malice. In this he is sadly mistaken and unclever, for no matter what happens, the name of Karl Rove will not be favorably recorded in whatever annals remain to be written. He will always be a villain in the minds of the vast majority of people who remember him at all. And of course the saddest thing of all is that none of it had to be this way. Karl Rove, like anybody else, might have been loved. Instead he chose the darkest of all paths and will live, rightfully, in infamy, for whatever time remains to his memory.
Like him I do not believe in anything remotely resembling a patriarchal, Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. If I did, I would exhort the Almighty to heal his poor broken soul.
Saturday, September 06, 2008
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Party Without Honor
Perhaps it is time for the Democrats to talk about a concept that has all but disappeared from American life: honor.
Can there be any question that the Republican Party of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney has driven every semblance of honor from the halls of power? By their nakedly dishonorable conduct, the Bushies have inflicted upon the national honor a stain at least as dark and lasting as any left by any other administration, ever.
That Bush himself is not an honorable man would seem to go without saying. An honorable man does not rely on family connections to avoid combat and then shirk even the duty to report for the cushy billet thus secured. He does not mock a woman he has sent to her death. Indeed, honorable men do not launch unjust wars, consign legions of innocents to needless death, torture other human beings, or imprison children without recourse to law. An honorable man, having taken a solemn oath to defend and protect the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, does not denounce it as "just a goddamned piece of paper," or -- what is obviously far worse -- treat it like one.
But I am sure that Bush at least imagines, in the flickering light of his fading intellect, that he is a honorable, or at least righteous, man. With his cohorts Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, the question of honor can hardly even arise. Both have made clear by their actions that they acknowledge no constraint on their wills other than failure. Both seem to revel in the power to act dishonorably, as if it somehow confirms their freedom from all earthly impediments. And indeed, in their contempt for principle they embody the worst characteristics of the Greek and Roman gods -- having their way with lesser beings because they feel like it, and because they can.
The essence of honor, of course, is self-restraint, scruples, ethical principles that transcend expediency and advantage. The Republicans under Bush have traduced the very concept of honor and replaced it with the sodden fuzz of "values" which, reduced to essentials, means little more than "prejudices." Honor is an unwavering guide for one's own right conduct; "values" are an excuse to make others conform to conceptions (often debatable) of what is permissible or proper.
Some Republicans may continue to behave honorably in their own lives, but those who do can hardly help but be corrupted by their support for a leadership whose rank hostility to any kind of moral compunction is a constant betrayal of their own real "values."
The corruption goes deeper than that. By nurturing a politics of unreasoning fear and hatred, the Bush administration has been subliminally training Americans to dishonorable habits of thought, undermining the very notions of civilized interaction and of ethical principle as a basis for self-governance on both a collective and individual scale. The Republicans have been teaching Americans to think like children, to acknowledge only the law of the playground, the tribe. If some brown people bomb us, they are "evildoers" and not only they and their supporters, but anybody who gets in the way, or who even looks like them. or for that matter who symbolizes them in some vague way, is a fair object of our fearful vengeance. This is worse than the law of the playground; it is the law of the barnyard dog who, frustrated in his efforts to catch a flea in his teeth, bites the cat. It is insanity. Such excesses, such errors, are part of what honor is supposed to guard against. But no correction, no hindrance of any kind, is to be brooked here, for with the Republicans of George W. Bush, it is all about power.
I suspect a large part of John McCain's appeal as a party leader is that, as a military man and, by consensus reality at least, a war hero, he is presumptively a man of honor. I will not say he is not a man of honor; I do not know, and I suspect his weaknesses make it irrelevant, because even an honorable man may act without honor in a fit of temper, or of lust for power, and McCain has a demonstrated susceptibility to both. I do know that over the last six years, we have seen many examples of more obviously honorable people, in and out of the military -- people who have sacrificed careers, and more than careers, rather than succumb to the tide of dishonor pouring down from above.
Can there be any question that the Republican Party of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney has driven every semblance of honor from the halls of power? By their nakedly dishonorable conduct, the Bushies have inflicted upon the national honor a stain at least as dark and lasting as any left by any other administration, ever.
That Bush himself is not an honorable man would seem to go without saying. An honorable man does not rely on family connections to avoid combat and then shirk even the duty to report for the cushy billet thus secured. He does not mock a woman he has sent to her death. Indeed, honorable men do not launch unjust wars, consign legions of innocents to needless death, torture other human beings, or imprison children without recourse to law. An honorable man, having taken a solemn oath to defend and protect the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, does not denounce it as "just a goddamned piece of paper," or -- what is obviously far worse -- treat it like one.
But I am sure that Bush at least imagines, in the flickering light of his fading intellect, that he is a honorable, or at least righteous, man. With his cohorts Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, the question of honor can hardly even arise. Both have made clear by their actions that they acknowledge no constraint on their wills other than failure. Both seem to revel in the power to act dishonorably, as if it somehow confirms their freedom from all earthly impediments. And indeed, in their contempt for principle they embody the worst characteristics of the Greek and Roman gods -- having their way with lesser beings because they feel like it, and because they can.
The essence of honor, of course, is self-restraint, scruples, ethical principles that transcend expediency and advantage. The Republicans under Bush have traduced the very concept of honor and replaced it with the sodden fuzz of "values" which, reduced to essentials, means little more than "prejudices." Honor is an unwavering guide for one's own right conduct; "values" are an excuse to make others conform to conceptions (often debatable) of what is permissible or proper.
Some Republicans may continue to behave honorably in their own lives, but those who do can hardly help but be corrupted by their support for a leadership whose rank hostility to any kind of moral compunction is a constant betrayal of their own real "values."
The corruption goes deeper than that. By nurturing a politics of unreasoning fear and hatred, the Bush administration has been subliminally training Americans to dishonorable habits of thought, undermining the very notions of civilized interaction and of ethical principle as a basis for self-governance on both a collective and individual scale. The Republicans have been teaching Americans to think like children, to acknowledge only the law of the playground, the tribe. If some brown people bomb us, they are "evildoers" and not only they and their supporters, but anybody who gets in the way, or who even looks like them. or for that matter who symbolizes them in some vague way, is a fair object of our fearful vengeance. This is worse than the law of the playground; it is the law of the barnyard dog who, frustrated in his efforts to catch a flea in his teeth, bites the cat. It is insanity. Such excesses, such errors, are part of what honor is supposed to guard against. But no correction, no hindrance of any kind, is to be brooked here, for with the Republicans of George W. Bush, it is all about power.
I suspect a large part of John McCain's appeal as a party leader is that, as a military man and, by consensus reality at least, a war hero, he is presumptively a man of honor. I will not say he is not a man of honor; I do not know, and I suspect his weaknesses make it irrelevant, because even an honorable man may act without honor in a fit of temper, or of lust for power, and McCain has a demonstrated susceptibility to both. I do know that over the last six years, we have seen many examples of more obviously honorable people, in and out of the military -- people who have sacrificed careers, and more than careers, rather than succumb to the tide of dishonor pouring down from above.
Stirring the Ordure for Fun and Profit
Say what you like about the Shrubbites, they are certainly the most fascinatingly bad bunch of people to occupy the White House in my lifetime. If they have any rivals in the history of the Republic, I can't think who it would be.
Karl Rove, in particular, is endlessly intriguing. He is quoted today as describing John McCain's vice presidential pick as "brilliant." But all early indications are that it was a blunder unequaled in electoral politics since George Senior tapped Dan Quayle as his running mate. I think there's a good chance Palin will hurt McCain even more than Quayle hurt Bush, because if Quayle was a notorious lightweight, Palin is something more sinister and unsavory. It's hard to see how even the Republican spin machine can plaster over all her negatives, which seem designed to alienate just about everybody, including even the Republican base -- all except, perhaps, the numbest of the Christian Right numbskulls, who care only about what's in a candidate's "heart." And even there some of the more extravagant claims of her favorite preacher (such as that Jesus tells him secrets, Ouija-like, about complete strangers) may not sit well.
Having Palin on the ticket has stripped away McCain's ability to attack Obama for inexperience. She has a tax-and-spending record that will make any fiscal conservative cringe. In the first days of her campaign she threw her own daughter under the bus by committing her to a marriage that is almost certainly doomed. She will even diminish the effect of McCain's unmentionable advantage, the votes he could otherwise expect from those old-fashioned bigots who simply cannot bring themselves to cast their ballots for a black man. A high percentage of those voters--not half, presumably, but perhaps a quarter--won't be able to vote for a woman either. And arching over all these problems is the single most glaring one: How can McCain's seemingly precipitous choice of this highly problematical running mate help but reinforce the image of him as Half-Cocked Jack, the seat-of-the-pants hothead so devastatingly depicted by W himself in 2000?
So when Karl Rove proclaims this choice as "brilliant" one has to wonder what the hell is going on. Has Karl finally flipped his lid, or is he just whistling as loud as he can past the graveyard? I want to offer a different hypothesis altogether: that Rove is saying this, as he says a lot of things, for the sheer hell of it, because he is, at his core, a compulsive s**t-disturber.
To put this theory in context one has to conceive of Rove as a man deeply alienated from himself and projecting the resulting conflict into the world. This is not at all difficult to believe. After all, who would choose to inhabit Karl Rove's person? He belongs to that group of hormonally arrested prepubescents who make up a great part of the right-wing punditry--including Bill Kristol, Fred Kagan, Glenn Reynolds, and John Podhoretz. I mean, have these guys' testicles descended yet? No wonder they're all bluster and fight-talk; they have a lot to compensate for. And in Rove's case there may be a further question whether he's saddled with a sexual preference he wishes he didn't have, or at least haunted by one he wishes his father hadn't had.
I have known someone of similar type professionally. Upon meeting him I was immediately in doubt about his sexual orientation--though he was supposedly happily married--and a gay colleague referred to him as a "closet queen." Certainly there seemed to be something phony about him, and it seemed to go hand in hand with a certain tendency toward what I might call social vandalism--sowing discord and dissension for no apparent reason other than to admire the results. I came to think of him as Iago, the arch-villain in Othello, whose poison tongue preys expertly on the hero's weaknesses to bring about the tragedy of that tale.
Rove too strikes me as a social vandal, an Iago writ large. I think if he were given a choice between winning an election honorably and winning through mendacity and deviousness he would choose the latter every time, not only because it vindicates his cleverness and, in a weird way, his masculinity, but also because it expresses his contempt for the fools around him. Indeed, if I were writing a tragedy about the Bush administration it would have Rove in precisely that Iago-like role, engineering the downfall of his own master -- for the crime of not returning his servant's love, yes, but also for the even worse crime of daring to be happy.
Is there somewhere in Karl Rove a secret agent of destruction who has been planting mines in the very bridge he has so lovingly built over these past two decades? That may be going too far. But if so, it may be only because real life has a way of interfering even with tragedy.
Karl Rove, in particular, is endlessly intriguing. He is quoted today as describing John McCain's vice presidential pick as "brilliant." But all early indications are that it was a blunder unequaled in electoral politics since George Senior tapped Dan Quayle as his running mate. I think there's a good chance Palin will hurt McCain even more than Quayle hurt Bush, because if Quayle was a notorious lightweight, Palin is something more sinister and unsavory. It's hard to see how even the Republican spin machine can plaster over all her negatives, which seem designed to alienate just about everybody, including even the Republican base -- all except, perhaps, the numbest of the Christian Right numbskulls, who care only about what's in a candidate's "heart." And even there some of the more extravagant claims of her favorite preacher (such as that Jesus tells him secrets, Ouija-like, about complete strangers) may not sit well.
Having Palin on the ticket has stripped away McCain's ability to attack Obama for inexperience. She has a tax-and-spending record that will make any fiscal conservative cringe. In the first days of her campaign she threw her own daughter under the bus by committing her to a marriage that is almost certainly doomed. She will even diminish the effect of McCain's unmentionable advantage, the votes he could otherwise expect from those old-fashioned bigots who simply cannot bring themselves to cast their ballots for a black man. A high percentage of those voters--not half, presumably, but perhaps a quarter--won't be able to vote for a woman either. And arching over all these problems is the single most glaring one: How can McCain's seemingly precipitous choice of this highly problematical running mate help but reinforce the image of him as Half-Cocked Jack, the seat-of-the-pants hothead so devastatingly depicted by W himself in 2000?
So when Karl Rove proclaims this choice as "brilliant" one has to wonder what the hell is going on. Has Karl finally flipped his lid, or is he just whistling as loud as he can past the graveyard? I want to offer a different hypothesis altogether: that Rove is saying this, as he says a lot of things, for the sheer hell of it, because he is, at his core, a compulsive s**t-disturber.
To put this theory in context one has to conceive of Rove as a man deeply alienated from himself and projecting the resulting conflict into the world. This is not at all difficult to believe. After all, who would choose to inhabit Karl Rove's person? He belongs to that group of hormonally arrested prepubescents who make up a great part of the right-wing punditry--including Bill Kristol, Fred Kagan, Glenn Reynolds, and John Podhoretz. I mean, have these guys' testicles descended yet? No wonder they're all bluster and fight-talk; they have a lot to compensate for. And in Rove's case there may be a further question whether he's saddled with a sexual preference he wishes he didn't have, or at least haunted by one he wishes his father hadn't had.
I have known someone of similar type professionally. Upon meeting him I was immediately in doubt about his sexual orientation--though he was supposedly happily married--and a gay colleague referred to him as a "closet queen." Certainly there seemed to be something phony about him, and it seemed to go hand in hand with a certain tendency toward what I might call social vandalism--sowing discord and dissension for no apparent reason other than to admire the results. I came to think of him as Iago, the arch-villain in Othello, whose poison tongue preys expertly on the hero's weaknesses to bring about the tragedy of that tale.
Rove too strikes me as a social vandal, an Iago writ large. I think if he were given a choice between winning an election honorably and winning through mendacity and deviousness he would choose the latter every time, not only because it vindicates his cleverness and, in a weird way, his masculinity, but also because it expresses his contempt for the fools around him. Indeed, if I were writing a tragedy about the Bush administration it would have Rove in precisely that Iago-like role, engineering the downfall of his own master -- for the crime of not returning his servant's love, yes, but also for the even worse crime of daring to be happy.
Is there somewhere in Karl Rove a secret agent of destruction who has been planting mines in the very bridge he has so lovingly built over these past two decades? That may be going too far. But if so, it may be only because real life has a way of interfering even with tragedy.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Republican Family Values on Parade Yet Again
A day or two ago we learned that the 17-year old daughter of the GOP's new vice presidential candidate is in a family way. Almost immediately the campaign announced -- mark that, the campaign announced -- that the daughter would soon be marrying the child's father.
How's that for throwing your kid under a train? Other "pro-life" families might have allowed the expectant mother to decide whether to keep the child or put it up for adoption, and surely nobody with an ounce of horse sense would have decreed an old-fashioned "forced marriage." But that's just what we're going to see -- the mother of all shotgun weddings.
Never mind that the marriage doesn't have an Alaska snowball's chance in hell. There's a campaign to be won and "values" voters to be wooed. If they fall for this stunt, which I fully expect them to do, we will see depicted in this one episode the whole sorry tragedy of current electoral politics: The cynically hypocritical pandering to the willfully ignorant by harping about sizzle while throwing the steak to the dogs.
There is some hope that this might yet blow up in their faces. The supposed husband-to-be appears (from his MySpace page) to be a foulmouthed shallow thug whose favorite pastime, other than hockey, is to "hang out with the boys." Maybe he'll just say no. But you know what? The folks who want McCain to win have more money in their front pockets than it takes to buy some high-school aged punk -- and, if need be, his whole family. In the end, the victim will be the girl -- another poster child for Republican "values."
How's that for throwing your kid under a train? Other "pro-life" families might have allowed the expectant mother to decide whether to keep the child or put it up for adoption, and surely nobody with an ounce of horse sense would have decreed an old-fashioned "forced marriage." But that's just what we're going to see -- the mother of all shotgun weddings.
Never mind that the marriage doesn't have an Alaska snowball's chance in hell. There's a campaign to be won and "values" voters to be wooed. If they fall for this stunt, which I fully expect them to do, we will see depicted in this one episode the whole sorry tragedy of current electoral politics: The cynically hypocritical pandering to the willfully ignorant by harping about sizzle while throwing the steak to the dogs.
There is some hope that this might yet blow up in their faces. The supposed husband-to-be appears (from his MySpace page) to be a foulmouthed shallow thug whose favorite pastime, other than hockey, is to "hang out with the boys." Maybe he'll just say no. But you know what? The folks who want McCain to win have more money in their front pockets than it takes to buy some high-school aged punk -- and, if need be, his whole family. In the end, the victim will be the girl -- another poster child for Republican "values."
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