Stirring the Ordure -- Update

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.