Jane says that Marcy says that any one of three different investigations could be behind Rove’s sudden decision to step down. Admittedly, Rove’ sudden resignation fits the pattern of Bush administration officials resigning two steps ahead of arrest, indictment, or embarrassment. (Makes it easier to claim that no one in the Bush administration as been indicted or arrested … at least not while they were actually part of the administration. The resignations of Claude Allen and Randall Tobias come to mind, and they’re just small parts of a much longer body count.
That’s why I think there might be more to Rove’s decision to step down. Like the two above, it may be that Rove is stepping down for reasons other than the run of the mill political scandal. Why hasn’t anyone considered the possibility that Rove literally got caught with his, or someone else’s, pants down?
Look, we should all have seen enough by now to know that there’s some pretty sexy stuff hiding behind those carefully, straight-laced, upstanding conservative facades. Have we learned nothing from Randall Tobias and David Vitter? Or Michael Flory and Glenn Murphy? Or Ted Haggard and Mark Foley? Or the lesbian-leaning literary efforts of Lynne Cheney? Or Bill O’Reilly’s bad sex writing and bad behavior? Or the bestiality references in Scooter Libby’s novel? How could anyone forget this?
Other sex scenes are less conventional. Where his Republican predecessors can seem embarrassingly awkward — the written equivalent of trying to cop a feel while pinning on a corsage — Libby is unabashed:
At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.
And, finally:He asked if they should fuck the deer.
The answer, reader, is yes.
No, no, boys and girls. If anything brought down Bush’s Brain, it’s as likely to be sex as it is politics. Given the rampant psychological repression in this group, when it comes to sex, neurosis is an unavoidable Achilles’ heel.
And this gang is loaded with it. Especially Rove, which is why I think Sexual Intelligence is on to something.
Karl Rove has built his career on terrifying people. An equal-opportunity offender, he has directed our government’s successful attempts to panic Americans about terrorism, international diplomacy, taxation, mainstream media, and the judicial system.
And homosexuality, stem cell research, promiscuity, pornography, teen sexuality, and naughty words on TV.
Karl Rove has reminded us that very little can motivate people more than fear. Those of us who believe in sexuality—and democracy, reason, and science—haven’t found a reliable alternative yet.
Karl Rove conceived the brilliant strategy of putting “gay marriage” initiatives on state ballots to drive conservative voters to the polls — who then voted for conservative candidates as well. Karl Rove took two-bit self-described “ex-porn addict” Phil Burress and elevated him to a political force in Ohio — who now directs the multi-million dollar effort to eliminate strip clubs and pay-per-view hotel-room porn from the state.
Karl Rove not only “Swift-boated”John Kerry. He “Swift-boated” gays (dangerous to your marriage), adult entertainment (a gateway drug leading to child porn), family planning (undermines families and morality), and sex education (leads to “promiscuity” and pregnancy). He helped turn science and the Constitution into opinions — which everyone is entitled to have, of course — alongside other opinions, like creationism, the Rapture, and gays-seduce-straights.
And suddenly, it becomes clear to me what else may have draw Bush and Rove together. You’ll recall that Karl Rove had a gay dad, who divorced his wife (Carl’s mom) and later came out. Karl reportedly loved his dad. His stepfather, actually, but the only but the only father he’d ever known, and one he thought was his biological father for a while when he was growing up.
Remembering that, in the context of the above, make it easy to think that Rove might be working out some “father issues.” So, then it’s natural that he’d end up serving a president with father issues of his own, and which manifest themselves in ways similar to Karl’s, as Dr. Justin Frank wrote in Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. (This passage alone is worth quoting just for the opening sentence.)
The young phallic narcissist, who locates his power in his penis, will understand his father’s power in similar terms, misrepresenting a desire for his father’s love with a desire for his father’s penis. The two are not the same of course, but the confusion can be alarming, especially to an individual already struggling with shame. A figure misunderstands his longing in such terms, tellingly, would be likely to locate his degraded view of himself in homosexual men — men who are able to give and take love from other men. He develops contempt for these reflections of a split-off part of himself, and expresses his contempt by attacking others.
George W. Bush’s record suggests that he finds homosexuality extremely threatening … So great is Bush’s discomfort with homosexual behavior that he advocates a constitutional amendment whose goal is to stigmatize and limit the basic human rights of gay people.
And we can hardly go there without going here. When I started thinking about Rove’s reasons for leaving, I remembered that right after ABC News said there was no one interesting in the D.C. Madam’s phone records, Randall Tobias and David Vitter turned up on the list. Then there was Deborah Jean Palfrey’s attorney claiming that Cheney “isn’t not on the list.” I’ve never heard whether he was or not, and we probably never will, though at least one working girl says he used somebody’s services, if not Palfrey’s. But it’s what she said about Bush that really caught my eye. (If I were a praying man, I’d be saying a quick prayer that it’s not so.)
From 1981 to 1984, I had Roy Cohn in with the worst of the worst in the BDSM community — that was until I had the misfortune to meet [then] Vice President of the United States, George H.W. Bush’s eldest son, George W. Bush, in 1984. He and Roy were two of a kind, cut from identical cloth. As it would turn out a decade later, as governor of Texas, he [George] too was also born to end lives, and talented indeed — then and now. There were worse and more troubled people, both male and female, in the BDSM community, but very few (at that time I was aware of) were people who came from silver spoon origins as they both had. The BDSM community was large but some things were like living in a goldfish bowl, they just couldn’t stay contained — people like Roy and Bush stood out when they behaved badly. The mainstream media has known of George Bush’s actions since forever, but as a favor to his father, and others, they set about systematically pressing the erase button to cover his tracks. I was first approached and asked if I knew him [Bush] while he was still governor of Texas by a guy who claimed to be a former staffer for the Al Gore camp during his senatorial run in 1984 who had media connections, who later offered to sell me photos of myself and Victor Ashe walking together with George Bush in the background. Why would I want to buy a photo of some dark, morose asshole that got on my nerves the first time I met him? Just because that same dark, morose asshole became governor of Texas? He didn’t need me to use them, they never would have saw the light of day in the Texas MSM anyway.
Of course it’s her word against, well, his. But if you take the distant father and the overbearing mother (dubbed “the enforcer” by family members and “the nutcracker” by her sons) and apply the usual right wing “logic,’ what do you get?
Larry Flynt did say he had 30 more names to reveal.
I’m not saying that Rove’s name is on Flynt’s list or that it turned up in Flynt’s investigation.
But how many previous investigations got this kind of response out of Rove?
Just something to think about.
Crossposted from The Republic of T.
