ADIEU, KARL ROVE- ALMOST

COMMENTARY

There appears to be something of a political law that bourgeois ideologues, venal as many of them are, do not retire but merely move on to greener pastures. At least that appears to be the case with one Karl Rove who until this past September served as President George W. Bush’s ‘brain’. No sooner had we seen him off to the rolling hills of East Texas the he pops up on the “Charlie Rose Show”. And his purpose? To muddy the waters about who and who did not act impulsively in the lead up to the ill-fated Iraq War. Rove is retailing the notion that the legislative branch, in this case, the august ‘slumbering giant’ United States Senate ‘bushwhacked’ the Administration into a rush to judgment. Okay, Karl have it your way. That, however, is not the real point here. The nefarious Mr. Rove is just getting a jump-start on history by influencing what the first drafts will look like. Oh, well. But mark this, some ‘objective’ historian writing about the Iraq War and the slow demise of the American Empire in fifty or one hundred years will, in order to give all sides their due, cite Mr. Rove’s remarks as good coin. Nice move, Karl. But know this also; there is no truth to be found in the man. Nevertheless, as I noted previously in the commentary reposted below written as a ‘tearful’ farewell to a departed foe in September here is savage class warrior.


COMMENTARY

A SAVAGE CLASS WARRIOR LEAVES BUSH TO HIS OWN DEVICES

Well by now everyone among the ‘chattering classes’ knows that Republican President George Bush’s ‘evil counselor’, one Karl Rove, has like so many in the recent past abandoned the sinking ship U.S.S. Bush and gone off to seek greener pastures in the hills of Texas. However, unlike most of the Bush ilk, the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to a name a couple, I will miss Karl Rove as a target. Why? I will make a confession based on a very long experience in politics- I get along better with and better understand right wing ideologues than the usual mushy ‘consultant’ types who populate today’s political scene. The ‘band aid guys’ and the ‘scotch tape gals’ whose political program is a small grab bag of ‘nice’ things to tweak the capitalist system while leaving it intact and that solve nothing leave me cold. One only needs to mention the name of the apparently recently retired Democratic Party consultant and perennially ‘loser’ Robert Schrum to bring this point home.

Give me the hardball players, the real bourgeois class warriors, any day. They know there is a class struggle going on as well as I do and know and that, in the final analysis, it is a fight to the finish. And who will dare say that Karl Rove was not the hell-bent king of that crowd. Anyone who could get a genuine dolt like George Bush elected twice Governor of Texas and twice President of the United States without flinching knows his business. Imagine if Rove had had a real political street fighter like Richard Nixon for a client. Yes, I know in the end Mr. Rove and I will be shooting from different sides of the barricades but Karl was a real evil genius and I will miss that big target.

Karl Rove honed two basic propositions that Marxists can appreciate, even if only from an adversarial position. One was the above-mentioned sense of the vagaries of the class struggle for the bourgeois class that he has so faithfully represented. How he was able to grab the dirt poor and against the wall farmers of places like Kansas and the desperately poor of the small towns of the ‘Rust Belt’ as cannon fodder voters for a party that has not represented plebian interests since at least the 1870’s is worthy of study. The second was his notion, parliamentary-centered to be sure, of a ‘vanguard’ party. What? Karl Rove as some kind of closet Leninist? No. However, his proposition that the Republican party should cater to its social conservative base and drag whoever it could in their wake is a piece of political wisdom that leftists should think through more. That is a much better political approach than to rely on the current dominant ‘popular front’ strategy of organizing on the basis of the lowest common denominator issues whittled down to a meaningless point just to avoid antagonizing the Democrats instead of fighting for what is necessary. Yes, one can sometimes learn something from one’s political adversaries- Adieu, Karl.