Thank God You Are Not Karl Rove

OK, I'm completely pimping Mark Morford's column in today's San Francisco Chronicle because it has the best one sentence description of Karl Rove I've ever read.

Morford starts out acknowledging that we've all done bad things:

Yep, you've done some horrible things in your life. Embarrassing things. Stupid. Mean. Violent, even. Eaten dirt. Smacked a baby. Kicked a kitten. Stomped some flowers. Stole. Lied. Cheated. Beat up a tree. Spit instead of swallowed. Drank bad wine. Voted Republican. Shared a needle. Promised to call and then didn't. You know, the usual.

(personally, I never drink bad wine)

Continuing:

But then, something happens. In the midst of all this consciousness review and energy sifting, you pause. You take a karmic time-out. You lift your head from the hardscrabble tumult of your cosmic computations and look around, maybe read the papers and take in the recent headlines and suddenly it hits you like a dominatrix spanks her evangelical preacher in the hot fetish dungeon of cosmic irony: The stuff you've done? That horrible little army of things you think are so dire and awful and mean? Child's play. Trifles. Piddly little nothingness of who-the-hell-cares, barely registering on the Richter scale of pain and injustice and true human misprision.

leading up to the money quote:

Because now perhaps you are reading up on the rise and fall and much-desirable end of this one particular man, this dank, sweaty, adipose embodiment of a sad political caricature, this shockingly powerful force of darkness and cruelty and pure, unfiltered iniquity known to the world as Karl Rove.

OMG.  Sadly, I had to look up a few of those words (see below, and damn that public school education) but I have never read a better description of Karl Rove.  

Read the whole article.

Vocabulary help:

adipose:  fatty; consisting of, resembling, or relating to fat
iniquity: gross injustice or wickedness.

•  tips for pimping Mark Morford and

  the vocabulary lesson (am I the only one who had never heard "adipose" used in a sentence?)

  by dave1042 on Fri Aug 17, 2007 at 10:11:43 AM PDT

  •  Voting Republican/Sharing Needles, Aren't They

    the same thing?  

    by leonard145b on Fri Aug 17, 2007 at 10:29:12 AM PDT

  •  I think adipocere is an even better word

    to describe Rove

    insoluble fatty acids left as residue from pre-existing fats from decomposing material such as a human cadaver

    Kinda captures the whole man in one word, doesn't it?

    by yellowdog on Fri Aug 17, 2007 at 11:40:34 AM PDT

•  Great diary dave1042. Here's mine re: Rove...

  ...a little self-pimpage, for a diary about how the New York Times has dismantled Rove's attacks on Hillary earlier this week:

  http://www.dailykos.com/...

  by Berkeley Vox on Fri Aug 17, 2007 at 10:18:58 AM PDT

•  Because if you WERE Karl Rove

  you'd be a dick.

  by xxdr zombiexx on Fri Aug 17, 2007 at 10:39:13 AM PDT

•  When Karl Rove Dies

  Do you think he'll saponificate?

  by episty on Fri Aug 17, 2007 at 10:42:20 AM PDT

•  Don't feel bad Dave...

  about not knowing the meaning of adipose. I learned it a few years back when my company was doing a brochure for a scientific group.

  We applied their copy to the layout and I was reviewing it with several of the brainiacs--and pointed to the word and said "we have a typo here where it says 'adipose test,' does anyone know what this is supposed to be?"

  They laugh so hard their nerd glasses were falling off. I'll bet they tell that story at conventions.

  Toxologists don't find much funny--but I sure tripped their wire.

  by The Eyewitness Muse on Fri Aug 17, 2007 at 10:47:02 AM PDT

  •  Thank you Eyewiteness Muse

    That's a very funny visual ("Nerd glasses were falling off")  :-)

    by dave1042 on Fri Aug 17, 2007 at 11:03:35 AM PDT

•  "darkness and cruelty"

  I most definitely agree with the above description of that pudgy little man.

  What makes me agree is reading about the people he has harmed, in Alabama, 1994 for example. From Rove in a Corner

  But ten years later, the man in question is still shaken over the attack.

  He talked about the viciousness of the "slash-and-burn" campaign, and how Rove appealed to the worst elements of human nature.
  [...]
  Kennedy seemed most bothered by the personal nature of the attacks, which, in addition to the usual anti-trial-lawyer litany, had included charges that he was mingling campaign funds with those of a nonprofit children's foundation he was involved with.

  Some of Kennedy's campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. "We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. "It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information," the staffer went on. "That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. "What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship.

  So far, the above is one of Rove's acts that disgusts me the most.
  Karl Rove: The Damage Done
  The Rove Presidency
  It started in Texas
  Some of Rove's dirty tricks

  Keep your eyes on the Don Sielgelman case in Alabama. Rove is involved there too.

  by Agathena on Fri Aug 17, 2007 at 10:58:35 AM PDT

•  Succint

  Well done!
  The fact that this satyr is still lauded in the MSM and misunderstood by most of the populace just blows me away.
  He came away from Jeb Magruder's school of dirty tricks
  with grand ideas of his own about how easy it could be to magnify the capacity to steamroll the downtrodden with computer technology at his disposal.
  The hagiographic review of Rove's career in the L.A. Times at the beginning of the week mentioned none of this in the highlights of his movements in the underworld.  His "effectiveness" was all that was considered. Indeed, this is usually the only yardstick used to measure his "success" as a politico.  
  How nice to have a publication connecting to daylight on the realities, instead.  Dandy article, here.

  by 714day on Fri Aug 17, 2007 at 11:27:25 AM PDT

•  On adipose tissues. Cute story, but semi-OT

  When I was a little boy, growing up in Florida, my mother (born of Georgia farms) used to threaten to spank my adispostitious. I never thought much about it. I knew she meant she was going to spank my butt.

  It wasn't until many years later I learned the derivation of the word, adispostitious. I was living with a biology teacher and made some lewd comment about her adispostitious. She asked me what that was, so I told her about my mother's use of the word.

  She burst out laughing and explained to me that adipose tissue is the extra layer of fat everyone has on their buttocks. Heh.

  So, Mark Morford called Karl Rove the fat-assed (adipose - adispostitious) embodiment of a sad political caricature.

  by EclecticFloridian on Fri Aug 17, 2007 at 12:12:37 PM PDT