Did The Rooster Call Up the Sun or Did Rove Get the Last Laugh?
The only certainty my grasshoppers is that the cherry blossoms of spring will become the turd blossoms of summerKarl Rove also known as “Turd Blossom” in that colorful native patois spoken by the Texas Chicken hawks announced today that he is leaving the rapidly sinking Scow of State that is the Bush administration effective the end of August.
His reason for leaving, taken verbatim from the official Washington departing rats exit speech is of course, to spend more time with his family.
When asked by one of the fully interchangeable talking heads of the White House press horde if he was being forced out, TB replied, “that sounds like the rooster calling up the sun” which I believe is another expression in that curious Pecos dialect that these birds use among themselves. Only Molly Ivins could decipher and translate the curious Texas Pig Latin these guys speak in private. I miss Molly.
In the weeks ahead there will be endless testimonials to Rove as the master architect of two successive (if not successful) terms in the White House and hundreds of references to his intellect and political genius. Genius, when used to describe any aspect of the Bush administration, in any context, I feel, seriously dilutes the term.
Whether he is departing to spend more time barbecuing, dove hunting and billing and cooing with his Texas Rose while writing his memoirs or scurrying out of town under a cloud of suspicion, subpoenas and potential indictments is open to argument. Perhaps, with all the other foul public relations odors wafting around the White House these days they may have decided to set this particular sack of scent outside the door and some distance downwind before the congressional recess is over.
Either way, August is adieu for Turd Blossom, the administration, today, is publicly mourning his loss while beatifying his holy name and as I listen with half an ear the media “analysis” of his departure drones steadily on in the background, as it probably will for days unless Paris Hilton goes on another toot.
My personal favorite memory of Turd Blossom comes from reports of the White House Correspondents Dinner last April when he recoiled from Sheryl Crow. When she and Laurie David tried to ask him if he might consider taking a fresh look at global warming science in light of the reception of “An Inconvenient Truth,” Rove fled, he fled from Sheryl Crow, I will remember him that way scurrying across the room like Little Miss Muffet, in terror of Sheryl Crow.
Before he leaves town there will of course be a round of going away parties in his honor, and he’ll probably be invited to about half of them but I don’t think he will be absent from Washington long, he leaves behind his shield of executive privilege and I seem to remember that there are a few folks in the House and Senate who really want to talk with him.
In his goodbye photo op on the White House lawn this morning it struck me that Turd Blossom, the boy from the west, born in Denver and raised in Sparks, Nevada, has almost none of the drawl one might expect while the guy next to him, scion of eastern aristocrats, born in Connecticut, product of Skull and Bones, has cultivated a Texas two step drawl so dense you could whet your pocket knife on it.
Bush called Rove his friend, in fact, he said, “you could call him my dear friend.” Rove is if anything, the ultimate Bush loyalist, first as an assistant to GHW Bush after having being investigated as a minor player in the Watergate affair. When he was dispatched by Poppy to deliver car keys to Junior in November of 1973, Turd Blossom reportedly fell in love with the Shrub at first sight (politically speaking). “Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma – you know, wow” he recalled years later.
He’s had his chubby little fingers in everything in the administration for the last seven years without getting seriously burned and may have been the only person that Dick Cheney was wary of. There are many, myself included who would love to see him in handcuffs and that may yet happen but I’m not betting on it.
He’ll be around, there will be subpoenas to fight and a book to write, which I think that he should title “Reality is What You Say It Is” the ultimate Rovism, and I wish I could say,
Thank God and Greyhound he’s gone but I’m afraid that it’s not true, we’re stuck with his legacy, pictured below:
Bob Higgins
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