The passing of the Rove

Thanks to the arrival of the Atlantic Monthly late last week, my disgust with the Bush administration has resurged to the point where it’s been hard to think of anything else. So my emotions are decidedly mixed with today’s top story of Karl Rove resigning from the White House staff. Of course, I immediately thought about the whole rat leaving sinking ship metaphor, and the whole door hitting him in the ass thing (I sincerely hope it does), but that all seems inadequate when confronted with the legacy of someone as despicable as Rove. This timely article does a good job providing an outline of what exactly Rove did to succeed so well at campaign politics, and how he was such a spectacular fuckup at helping run a functional government.

But what’s missing from that piece is the outrage, the deep personal sense of fury I feel at what has been done to my government and my country for the last seven years. By treating every minute of every day as part of a political campaign, Rove managed to strip all vestiges of competence out of the government. Spurred by his scorched-earth attitude and monomania of securing a permanent Republican majority, the executive branch abrogated its responsibility to govern. Instead of competent people, we got political hacks put in charge of things like FEMA and managing post-Saddam Iraq. And not surprisingly, they blindly and stupidly steered the bus into the ditch. People have fucking died because of these idiots: victims of Katrina, soldiers, American civilians, and a staggering number of Iraqi civilians in Iraq. Am I a godless liberal brainwashee to notice that? Meanwhile, Rove didn’t even want Bush to land the plane from which he surveyed the Katrina damage, and we are forever stuck with the image of President Chimpface standing under a banner that declared “Mission Accomplished.”

Along with the competence, we also lost any shred of civility in political life. Considering how tenuous Bush’s claim to the presidency has been (and I’m being charitable there, please recognize) in both elections, it didn’t seem like too much to hope for that he really would try to be a uniter rather than a divider. But instead Bush managed to alienate even his own party in Congress, not to mention those of us who never cast a vote for him but still live under his management. And the mainstream media has been cowed to the point where they publish unvarnished partisan propaganda without question or analysis lest someone scream about their “liberal bias” or they lose access to the spin-controlled crumbs the administration throws them. Believe me, it’s hard to take the prez seriously when he seems more interested in whether foreign aid might lead to someone buying a condom than whether his casus belli for Iraq was actually legitimate.

So Rove is finally resigning. Well, the cynic in me can ruefully say, he’s certainly done enough damage such that he deserves a nice break. And I get no joy out of the resignation, considering how many years it’s going to take before all the mistakes of the Bush administration are rectified—assuming that someone still remembers how to actually run the government in this country. It’s definitely not going to be easy to explain to the next generation how we let this happen.