Rove

Ah, can you feel the sun on your face even when indoors? Can you hear the sound of children laughing whilst on a subway train? Well that's probably because Karl Rove has finally quit.

 

Rove sets just about everyone's teeth on edge not because he is a Spin Doctor, not because he looks a bit like a Hitler toady, not even because he has been perceived to be the brains and, some say, ventriloquist for Bush but because he has done virtually nothing else his entire life but run (dirty) campaigns for Republicans. What I mean is he has, since he just left short pants, been playing Machiavelli behind the scenes of local and national politics. He has never been a politician but he has backed up and, indeed, crushed them consistently for his entire working life. What sort of person does that? And that's why he gets such an instinctively negative reaction from virtually everyone.

 

We think of him as a sort of bullied nerd getting is own back in a nerdy way. As a nerd who uses the swaggering jocks, like Bush, who probably used to goose him and trip him up in corridors to "beat up" other jocks that use words the middle classes automatically grimace at such as "social justice" and "pro-choice". He seems like a self-satisfied proxy-bully, if you will.

 

His conduct in political battles has been bruising and gloves-off his whole career and yet the god damn American public (or, at least enough of them) bought it all and voted for his man. The sheer breath-taking success of his strategies to shape debates and even vocabulary to his aims using the, let's face it, not-exactly-resistant media truly is a modern wonder.

 

A couple of examples:

 

"Tax relief": - Rove got Bush talking about "Relieving the tax burden" and coining the term "tax relief". Why? Because that meant journalists could ask Democrats, "Are you against tax relief?" Now who would say "no" to that and want to win elections? By painting taxes as fundamentally evil without caveat and then describing tax cuts for the rich as tax relief, it makes it sound like the solution to a problem. Everyone got suckered into it. Very clever.

 

"The surge":- This little piece of spin has worked internationally even if journalists choose to precede the word surge with "so-called" as if to excuse them for peddling it. The increase, basically escalation, of troop numbers is open-ended and the extension of the presence of these troops is being continually pushed by the White House so how is this a "surge"? The use of the word "surge" suggests a temporary increase, a short-term spike. This is simply not the case with this tactic. Troop numbers are simply being increased to nearly invasion levels and doing their best to strangle the insurgent-fostered civil war. They're just send more men in. It's not a surge as there's simply no date set for these numbers to lower. Would another increase in numbers be termed another "surge"?

 

So he's been effective and for that he gets objective kudos but then, so might the architects of the holocaust for so efficiently building such a monstrously efficient genocidal infrastructure. The purpose and motives of their "inspiration" is far too wrong for us to contemplate really praising the git. Merely getting Bush elected (speech marks should be added to that word for the 2000 election, of course) should be enough for him to be damned to Hades.