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.