Reading Armando's front pager
Rove Back In The Saddle? (BTW: a most unfortunate double-entendre/visual if there ever was one, whether or not you love horses!) ... and having had an awful week so far, causing my usual contrariness to go into overdrive ... I had the most amazing reaction to the news that Karl was (ick!) "back in the saddle" ...
Reading the latest spin, I suddenly realized that my mother has been sneaking out in "male drag" and ... is ... Karl Rove!
And all that contrariness spelled (much like Rolaids) "Relief"! All that negative energy that oozed from the very pores of my mother's being has found a career path. Hallelujah! Maybe she'll leave her children alone!
Visit me on the flip ...
He's just so-oooo good at it! Taking the very things Americans are so unhappy about with the machinations of the radical wing of the GOP (is there any other wing of the GOP in the "aughts"?) and positing that the very policies that they actively promote, the very traits Americans hate most in the current political climate under the current GOP beltway hegemony are problems that are caused by
everyone but the GOP.
And that was made me realize that Karl Rove is my Mother!
To wit, my comment in Armando's frontpager:
Forgive me but my cynicism meter is at an all time high this week, only partly because of politics and the news. And all this reminded me of a personal story. Skip the rest of this if personal stories annoy you (that means you too Armando) ...
But, cynically speaking, I gotta hand it to Rove. He turned the very thing that has always driven me bonkers about my now octagenarian mother into a career path!
My mother was extremely talented in only one way as a parent and one way only: she able to turn her failings into talking points about the failings of her children. It took me till I was in my twenties to figure out her ruse but I was a hero to my five brothers and sisters who were a good decade to two decades older and on their way to completely cutting her out of their lives since she was so nuts.
As a "for instance": my mother loved to pit each of us against each other by telling us in private how brilliant, thoughtful, and accomplished our siblings were ... if only we could be like them. Since I was not of their "sibling rivalry generation" my brothers and sisters hated each other but adored me since I was the "afterthought". Of course, meanwhile, because of the same game from my mother I thought I could never live up to my older brothers and sisters.
She'd also ... since we are one of those traditional Irish Catholic East Coast families ... speak admiringly at family gatherings of the Kennedys and how well they worked together. And since she read Stephen Birmingham's "Our Crowd" she began to opine out loud at public gatherings how that "even the Jewish families" supported each other. Why couldn't her children do the same? (Yes, she's always been a real charmer and so open minded!)
It wasn't until, in a fit of probably alcohol-induced Irish Catholic honesty with my oldest sister when I was in my early-twenties that I blurted out how intimidated I was by them ... how much my mother admired them, especially my oldest sister and how I was a miserable failure. My sister, who was approaching 40 at the time was shocked. She had never heard anything but ridicule and disparagement about herself from my mother and how brilliant the others were and how I was the creative genius of the family.
We both were in shock and immediately called the four others to relay this news. One after the other, the ripples of surprise and shock and the exchanged anecdotes came out. At first we were in a state of shock, then we all got really angry. But a few days later we started to laugh about the whole thing.
She controlled us not only by disparaging us but by projecting on each of us her "major failing": her inability to support the people she loved emotionally.
We began to notice that she did this on many, many other topics.
And, because we now knew what she was doing, she lost her ability to manipulate us.
She lost her potency ... I remember using the old "Wizard of Oz" line in a fit of pique with her in my late twenties. She knew she had somehow lost her influence on her children's psyches.
While my mother did this subconsciously, Rove does this exact ruse purposefully and for a very lucrative living. If only my mother could have used her talents to help my father support the family. We would have lived in grand style! And maybe she could have done it to others and not her children.
So we need someone to drop a figurative house on Rove so that we can tell the WWOTW (i.e. Chenney) that "You have no power here. Now begone, before somebody drops a house on you!"
It became to damned clear to me. And I have to admire that he very obviously understands that this is an easy and very guilt- and confusion-inducing ploy.
But let's call the ploy just that. It's a 180o turn of the blame. Brilliant!
Once it is recognized and called out on a daily basis ... well call me "Bizarro Karl Rove" ... we can make every criticism of anyone made by this administration or its GOP spin machine immediately suspect as a "one-eighty" on intransigent GOP problems ... as a deflection of the GOP's failures onto everyone else.
"The terra-ists hate us for our freedom" becomes "the GOP hates the freedom that the average American has". I'm just throwing that one out as the first card in the "GOP One-Eighty Game"
Any others? Democratic spin machine anyone?