Stupid reality.

I was in California last week in the middle of a brutal heat wave, and was going to write a comical little ditty on that, but then I made the mistake of reading the Guardian, and about Karl Rove, and now I'm stuck thinking about him. They say that when you hate someone, or feel anger at him, he controls you. I agree with this, but Rove, in many ways already does control our lives.

As of yet, I have never once mentioned Karl Rove’s name to someone without the person responding with some sort of “who?” type question. Arguably the most powerful person in the country, and no one knows who he is. Now, as he is being attacked for revealing the name of the undercover CIA agent to the press to punish her husband for speaking out against the war, people only have a vague sense of somebody being attacked for this. And, invariably, the Democrats are going to labeled as zealots.

The thing is, going after Rove over this is about opportunity, rather than gravity of offense. It’s like Elliott Ness arresting Al Capone for income-tax evasion. Of Rove’s many, many terrible crimes and sins, this is not especially notable, but the administration has left him vulnerable. Because he is so behind the scenes and never leaves paper trails, there is never much opportunity to take him down. But now, Bush has said (oddly, since there can be no doubt that he knew everything) that if the person responsible for the act was connected to the White House, this person would be fired, the Democrats see an opportunity to take down the most dangerous man in the country. It’s unfortunate that it has to be a situation where there is no real legal case to make (it’s only a crime to blow an agent’s cover if it’s done with the intention of causing the agent harm – a very difficult thing to prove, and almost certainly not the case here, anyway), only a political one. And Rove has been practically the single-handed molder of the American political landscape for almost twenty years without any official political position – what is really to be accomplished by stripping him of it?

If you are reading this, and don’t know who Rove is, you have obligation to learn. If you believe that Texas is, and always has been, a conservative state, you need to learn who Karl Rove is. If you either think Kerry’s Vietnam War record is questionable, or can’t figure out why that was such a big deal in the election, you need to learn about Karl Rove. If you want to know why gay marriage is a big topic in politics right now...if you want to know why Christian hard-liners align themselves with the Republican Party, a party almost totally at odds with Christian ideals...if you can’t figure out how someone as dumb and unqualified as GW Bush can be president...

There’s an excellent article on him in the Atlantic Monthly a few months back, and a documentary called “Bush’s Brain” which are just two resources to look into.

Two examples from Rove’s career – “how did they turn the election into a question about Kerry’s military history, when Bush not only avoided Vietnam through family connections, but deserted the military, which is a federal crime?” It has long been standard practice to attack your opponent’s weaknesses. Rove teaches to attack their greatest strengths, if it has to be through innuendo and vague assertions, fine. If they’re proven to be untrue? Irrelevant. Once damage is done in the public mind, it’s done. One State Supreme Court race in Alabama that Rove was managing was against a man who had devoted his life to children’s causes. He had been a family court judge for many years, and the things he had seen done to children had prompted him to start several charities and homes. Rove instigated a whisper campaign. How these work is you send some people to college-campuses to spread rumors. College campuses are inhabited with people who A) are forming strong opinions and B) come from all reaches of the area and will take their new opinions home with them to spread there. This campaign was that the opponent was a pedophile. Totally unfounded rumor. It spread quickly, with no official link to Rove and his guy, then was as quickly dismissed as absurd (including by Rove and gang, who publicly decried such a despicable rumor). But now, every time someone saw an ad for this judge, with a child on his lap, or holding hands with kids, the association became slightly disturbing. He lost the race, charities soon distanced themselves from him. He was ruined, and countless needy and abused children were ruined in the wake.

“People say the 2000 election was rigged, but wouldn’t that be an almost impossibly intricate scam to pull?” He’s done it before on smaller scales. Also, I believe, in Alabama, Rove’s candidate lost an election – one of only a couple of elections he’s ever lost. Rove, on seeing that they’d lost, reportedly said, “It’s not over yet. If we can keep this thing alive in the media, I can deliver us the win.” Here’s a couple things they did: during the election, they did similar things as in 2000 - they distributed flyers in predominantly black and liberal neighborhoods reminding them to be sure to get out and vote – but accidentally listing a voting station that didn’t exist, typing the wrong date for voting, or reminding people that if they have any unpaid tickets or outstanding warrants they’ll have to pay those before they can vote (untrue). But then they still lost, so he found ‘outside groups’ to accuse the Democrats of trying to tamper with the results. It was important, though, that it be a slow burn – murmurs of wrongdoing, which grew and grew, tying it up in the supreme court for a while (populated mostly with judges that Rove had gotten in there), so that the public kept hearing and hearing and hearing that the Democrats might have tampered with the votes. When the Democrats came back with accusations against the Republicans, they sounded defensive and desperate. Finally they supreme court decided to hold the election over (there was another one where the court handed the victory to Rove’s guy, like Scalia in 2000, but that’s another story), and – since the Democrats, and by association, the democratic candidate, were now tainted with accusations, they lost.

A while back I was talking politics with some friends. One basically accused me of lying about Rove. Making it up. “If he’s so horrible,” she reasoned, “how come I’ve never heard of him?” Which is exactly what Rove counts on us saying. Which is exactly how he keeps succeeding.