Brainless

If the Bush administration had an official narrator, it would have to be Jerry Reed. Can’t you just imagine hearing Reed’s rich baritone drawl accompanying a new scandal or defection from the ranks? Today we would’ve heard,

“Well, right around this time, Cousin Karl, having fulfilled his contractual obligation to Ole Scratch to make the world an infinitely worse place than he’d found it, packed up his cardboard suitcase and shoved off into the blood-red sunset of democracy.

We’ll never know if it was the tenacious Henry Waxman, he of the million investigations or the equally tenacious and triangulating Patrick Fitzgerald that got ole Turdblossom to thinking’ a year ago to get off the omnibus of the neocon agenda while the gettin’ was good. Who knows what it was?”

Well, I’ll tell you what it wasn’t. I will refuse to believe until my dying day that, Waxman aside, it was the political eunuchs currently doing a 1st grade Halloween dress-up of actual Democrats and the “policy battles” they impotently promised Rove had anything to do with his own defection. After the military spending bill and FISA renewal, Rove will pull out of the White House parking lot in his fat-ass SUV, his middle finger raised high to salute the Capitol rotunda.

Yet another Republican ducking even the improbable hazard of congressional retribution.

In a way, Rove represented at once a rancid yet fresh breath of air in a fiercely partisan executive branch populated by dissemblers, liars and whitewashers. Rove was almost refreshingly candid and honest in his delusions about matters such as the Iraq war, the 2006 mid-term election and even Bush’s poll numbers. According to Rove’s surprise announcement to Paul Gigot of the Wall St. Journal, the surge will work and Bush’s numbers will shoot up higher than a Nazi salute.

Oh, sure. Rove lied like Bush’s prized rug in the Oval Office. Political operatives have to or they wouldn’t last a minute in this game.

Yet when Rove surely outed Valerie Plame back in 2003, he came out and said it without actually taking blame for it. When Rove was about to rig the 2006 election, he came out and admitted it with veiled references to his “October surprise” and telling television talk show hosts who had accurate exit polls close at hand, “You have your math and I have the math.”

Turns out math isn’t Rove’s long suit, which is why he’s been publicly blamed by neocons for losing the GOP’s majority in that election (there were voting irregularities but Rove underestimated the number of liberals and moderates who would go to the polls just as much as Romney overestimated the number of Republican voters who came out for last weekend’s straw polls in Iowa).

Essentially, even though this smirking dung heap wrapped in a Brooks Brothers bolt of cloth did his level-headed best to jeopardize national security by outing a covert agent, her support network of nearly a hundred agents and the front company the CIA had set up to protect them, kept a child-molesting Republican in Congress against his will by using his lobbyist ambitions against him so he could keep the cash flowing and jeopardizing underaged aides in the process, rigged up to four elections, politicized the Justice Department, subverting Bush’s own executive order forbidding White House staff to use non-White House email accounts for official business and a hundred other perfidies of which I’m sure we’re blissfully unaware…

…the White House is losing at the end of this month the only guy who even approaches honesty and transparency in his supreme arrogance and sense of his own invulnerability.

Should we be relieved that Rove’s leaving? Yes and no. It’s always good when a snake in the grass like Rove leaves the White House. However, he won’t be so much in the public eye, which makes him infinitely more dangerous.

Finally, to give you an idea of how much our political landscape resembles the chaotic, topsy-turvy one in Broomhilda, David Corn is saying in The Nation that Bush’s Brain should stay while in my inbox came Rove’s political eulogy from Richard Viguerie, who says good riddance because Rove failed to give the GOP Viguerie’s long-held and completely insane wet dream for a “permanent Republican majority.”

God I love email, perhaps even moreso than Karl Rove.