Karl Rove’s assholedom should be self-evident by now. But sometimes even the biggest, most gaping assholes feel the need to reassert their place in the pantheon by forcing themselves into the conversation with hideous-sounding noises and intentionally “provocative” proclamations.And it is with such a proclamation that the former presidential adviser, the guy we called “Bush’s Brain”, started his latest weekly column in the Wall Street Journal with. “President Barack Obama is likely to be defeated in 2012,” Rove said, a statement which he probably thinks sounds like the kind of thing a wise, respected political mind is supposed to say.
Annons
Don’t get me wrong – whether Rove’s assessment is right or wrong is not the issue. Nor is the issue the cherry-picked polling (trolling?) data that he uses to back up his hypothesis. The problem is Rove has no credibility as far as criticising the president for failed policies or the current (distinctly un-awesome) state of the nation is concerned.Sure, unemployment is high, but I don’t recall Rove and his halfwit cronies doing anything to mitigate the shit-storm that was a-brewin’ because of all the nefarious backroom dealings those selfsame cronies were taking part in. All of Rove’s complaining about Obama’s handling of the economy sounds a lot like a homeowner telling the guy who house sits for him, “Hey! Why haven’t you cleaned up that huge mound of festering pus I left in the living room?”Obama has had his struggles, and I’m not going to defend him here, although anybody who thought he’d come into office and actually do half the things he’d promised in his campaign is naive at best and actually missing part of his brain at worst. Far worse than our commander-in-chief is the army of politicians and politicos and pundits getting their rocks off by being cynical naysayers when the government tries to do anything. Rove – whose nickname “The Architect” is ironic, given all the tearing-down he does – pops up on Fox News every now and then with his head that’s shaped like a defective supermarket egg to pontificate on the failures of liberals and the greatness of conservatives, ignoring all the while that the policies he supported during the Bush administration led us straight into the hole we’re still trying to dig our way out of.A quick scan of the catalogue of Rove’s columns in the WSJ reveals he’s basically used it as a platform to denigrate anything the Democrats have tried to do or have done. If there’s anything about Obama that truly pisses me off it’s his willingness to let people like Rove, who pretty much turned the United States government into a nepotistic, boardroom boys club, go free despite the heaping mound of evidence against them. Rove has been implicated in so many Bush-era offences and scams that it’s sort of hard to keep track of them all, and I’m not going to try to list them here.So for all of Rove’s efforts to undermine the US’s position in the world for the benefit of his corporate buddies, for his slimy, opportunistic pessimism, but most of all for his knee-jerk, context-free attacks against his ideological opponents, Karl Rove is this week’s asshole.ZACH PONTZ
