Just when you thought reality-based thinking couldn’t take any more hits and still stand, up pops Karl Rove — like an epoophany — in the middle of the cesspool of clowns called Washington.
When last we saw a semblance of his shit-eating grin, Rove was attempting to steal Obama’s 2012 reelection by calling Ohio officials and advising them on how to dispose of the early voting ballots from the mostly-Democratic Black communities, according to Greg Palast in his new book, How Trump Stole 2020. Rove is even seen making reference to said phone call as he sat with Fox news anchors and scolded them for having just called the Ohio count for Obama (and thus assuring his re-election). No, no, if it was up to Karl, he plausibly suggested, he was going to create reality now, because he’s an Empire of a man. Luckily, for the rest of us reality-fantasists, YouTube caught the moment. Thank you, Google Spy.
Well, Blossom’s re-emergence was given a tiny mention in a recent Times piece that suggested Karl was about to go to work for the truly reality-challenged President Trump. Karl, we’re told, recently attended a meeting with Trump officials to gauge his participation in Trump’s 2020 campaign. Red alarm lights from the NYT? Fuck no. Deeply buried in the bowels of the constipated Times piece was this gem of a graph:
…At a meeting with political advisers this week that included Karl Rove, the top strategist for former President George W. Bush, Mr. Rove warned Mr. Trump that he had fallen behind in the task of damaging Mr. Biden, people familiar with the meeting said.
Wake up, Maggie (Haberman), I think I’ve got something to say to you…
Just like 2004 all over again, when the Times quashed a story by Pulitzer prize-winning staff journalist James Risen (now with The Intercept) right before the election that would have revealed, nine years before Edward Snowden, the Bush administration’s secret and illegal collection of everybody’s communications activity. Rove famously mocked reality-as-we-know-it, and then mocked it’s attribution to him (Ron Susskind, the Times reporter, wouldn’t affirm it was Rove he was quoting) — It was merely ‘plausible deniable conjecture’ (itself a reaming of reality), until his game was recently affirmed by prize-winning journalist Mark Danner (p.555).
Luckily, a ‘fringe’ alternative to the Paper of Record (also an empire-unto-itself), made Rove’s dirty deliberations the headline of a piece a week later. Tony LoBianco’s Business Insider article required no enema: “The mastermind of George W. Bush’s White House victories is advising Trump’s 2020 campaign, focusing on swing-state battlegrounds and Republican voter outreach.” Compare to the NYT’s graph 31 mention of Rove. LoBianco writes,
The longtime GOP operative known as “Bush’s brain” isn’t being paid by the Trump campaign, one Republican familiar with the arrangement said, adding that Rove has an incentive to work for the current commander in chief because it provides an opportunity to keep his name in the mix as the next GOP candidates start looking to staff up their campaigns for 2024.
And there’s more. Check it out for yourself.
Turd Blossom ===> Bush’s Brain ===> Got Trump’s Ear. Are you shitting your pants, too?
You should be worried, because most recently Trump has arranged to have a black rent-a-fence emplaced around the perimeter of the White House. Presumably, his leaked notion of having the 82 Airborne come in and protect his privileged ass and widescreen TV in the situation room, didn’t go over too well with some of his advisors. It’s a bad look, the fence, and maybe even a provocation, given how flimsy and easy-to-knock-over-by-a-sizeable-crowd it looks like. As Marley would say, It remind I of the days in Jericho (since we’re here). But more recently, it recalls Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Sy Hersh’s description of the closing days of the Nixon administration.
In the seething and bristlesome closing days of Tricky Dick’s administration, as Alexander Haig (“I’m in charge.”) and Henry Kissinger (“Why let the voters decide?”) laughingly played ping pong, with Nixon as the ball, while they joked about how they’d play Gerald Ford next, there was talk of Nixon refusing to relinquish the White House. Hersh writes,
In the second volume of his memoirs, Years of Upheaval, Henry Kissinger wrote of a meeting with Haig on August 2: “He told me that Nixon was digging in his heels [in terms of immediate resignation]; it might be necessary to put the 82nd Airborne Division around the White House to protect the President.
Sound familiar? Apparently not so much with MSM. See Hersh’s piece.
There was talk of pardons, including himself, and people all around Nixon were coming “unglued” (except for Haig and Kissinger). Hersh describes the scene:
When the case against Richard Nixon was initially outlined that April to Henry E. Petersen, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, the prosecutor says, Petersen responded by exclaiming, “The government’s going to fall. And then what’s going to happen?”
Nixon had won his reelection in a landslide and was receiving thousands of letters of support from voters who wanted to waive off Watergate.
Nixon wanted to be defiant. He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. It was scary. Answering his own question, Petersen went on,
I’ll tell you what. They’ll run for cover. One third of the country still supports him, and we’re on the verge of civil insurrection. If he told the Joint Chiefs, “I want the troops out and I want to dissolve Congress,” they would have done it.
Well, it’s not a pleasant thought, but more than a third of the country still supports Trump. He may refuse to lose to that “criminal” Biden. It could get uglier.
And speaking of Biden, who may well alienate so many people by November with his goofy gaffes — dogfacedponysoldier, youaintblack, youaintwhite, and his latest, ‘10-15 % of ya just ain’t no good’ — could just be the criminal Trump says he is, but not for the reasons presented so far. You don’t hear much about it in the MSM (onnacounta it’s unaccounted for) but Biden might be criminally culpable for no other reason than his campaign’s association with Larry Summers, who helped give us the 2008 Wall Street Meltdown and its TARP bailout at taxpayer burden and without any accountability for the massive fraud that caused it all.
Summers’ latest evil is his support of Keystone XL pipeline, a Koch brothers cash-cow in the making, that Greg Palast colorfully describes in his latest book as the product of the mind of Bill Koch, “the Goliath of Global Warming.” Palast says of Keystone’s processing that “The Pipeline will bring down from Canada to Texas the gunkiest, most carbon-heavy oil on the planet.” And will leave gunk “piled up on the banks of the Detroit River in a mound bigger than an Egyptian pyramid.” And fuck water tables all along the line, too. (Maybe we can bury the Koch brothers in the pyramid.) Trump recently relaxed EPA regulations for Keystone XL, pleasing his new Koch backers. Eeee-ha time for the pork-snorkelers of capitalism.
Maggie, wake up. Wake up, Maggie. It’s late September every day now.
It’s cold comfort knowing that Turd Blossom’s on board to avert a coup by stealing the next election for Trump. What a thought, right? Pass the bong.
Rove and his shit-eating grin
Okay, let’s forgive ourselves, while we still can.
Technically, we elected him, and we’ve been trying to get rid of him since even before he was inaugurated — Obama spent his lameduck months trying to force future policy against Russia and against Trump’s wishes. (Who knows why he did it — maybe he felt dumped on by Bush and that Wall Street bailout, before he was even inaugurated, and wanted to strut out of office the way he strutted in.)