Now that Karl Rove has been superannuated and left to fill up his empty days with WSJ columns and take-out pastrami, he’s channeling this Eminem groove:
“I created a monster,
‘Cause nobody wants to see Marshall no more,
They want Shady, I’m chopped liver.”
Replace Shady with Tea Party, and Marshall with Karl, and you have Rove’s gloomy existential condition.
That’s right, only now at the end does Rove, the retired Turd Blossom of Bush’s mighty days of yore, realize that he created the monster of the Tea Party, along with its sister Harpies, Palin and Bachmann, followed by the cirque du Trumpé, the New and Improved Reality TV “Birther Donald.” Rove is desperately trying to put the goofy jinn back in the Budweiser bottle before it wishes the Republican Party into extinction. Sadly he must know that he has no more chance of succeeding than Bill O’Reilly has of graduating summa cum laude from charm school.
The irony is sweet. Like a bipolar alchemist, Rove spent a career furiously rendering the golden know-nothing memes of the cheap labor conservative movement: low taxes for Paris Hilton, deregulation of kryptonite, demonization of unions (and France). In the 2004 election, he amazingly transformed Bush’s lost years as a bar fly in the Texas National Guard into martial heroism – the son of privilege defending the Gulf Coast from Charlie.
Of course Rove never took any of this seriously. He laughed all the way to the ballot box. All he ever really wanted was to win elections; i.e., to garner more and more money and power for the GOP class by converting the United States into a third world economy. Immoral? Yes. But comprehensible and as American as a frozen Sarah Lee apple pie.
But now that he doesn’t have AWOL George to chew the fat with anymore, Rove has apparently realized (perhaps while softly humming to himself the Bee Gees’ “I Started a Joke”), that he was too successful by half. The subliterate rightwing myrmidons have actually taken his memes seriously. Even Rove didn’t think they were that stupid. The result is that Palin appeared like the Wicked Witch of the West in a puff of red smoke, and the Tea Party was born.
Aghast at the Golem he himself lovingly molded, Rove has tried to redeem himself with a series of attacks against the Tea Party’s student-body-president-like leadership. Palin lacked “gravitas,” he warned, showing he had enough gravitas to use the word “gravitas,” which I’m sure Palin then looked up. Arguably this was the most obvious political observation since Reagan joshed that mistakes were made when he sold weapons to Iran. Then Rove took on Christine O’Donnell, who assured the American public that she was not a witch, calling her instead a “nut”(which was the next most obvious political statement in American history). His business unfinished, Rove turned his Porky Pig visage against a rising Michele Bachmann and her “virtual absence of leadership experience” (for which he got the famous Bachmann gaze across the airwaves, likely cursing him forever). Now it’s Trump, whom Rove recently called “a joke,” which Trump may have taken as a compliment.
Like the Ancient Mariner, Rove seems doomed to repeat the tale of GOP respectability to an unlistening audience of Tea Party devotees, while the Right-Wing Noise Machine he let loose upon American politics inevitably does exactly what he designed it to do – grind up every moderate Republican on the planet for not being as nutty as Christine O’Donnell. This, apparently, is the just punishment crafted for him by whatever evil god of politics he sacrificed chickens to in order to become the formidable, triumphant Turd Blossom. Now, he’s the Tea Party’s exiled Trotsky. It doesn’t get any lower, and it does not get any better.
Crossposted at leftwingnoisemachine.com