Friday, December 9, 2016

Fantasy of a has-been that is no more

Karl Rove is a has-been whose glory days are behind him. He was of the people during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, a crucial time in the political transformation of the United States. But those days are gone, and he failed to catch up with the changing times.

His was a time when the American culture was imbued with religiosity brought about by the televangelists who used the airwaves more effectively than the Oriental gurus were able to infiltrate the youth culture on the college campuses, and make waves two decades earlier. The gurus were still a force to be reckoned with when Karl Rove came on the scene, but he had the chance to see how the Christians were able to push them to the side, take control of the spiritual space and fill it with their gospel.

The televangelists who called themselves pastors suddenly became political and turned their flocks into a new class of voters that came to be known as Evangelicals. But while Evangel refers to the Christian gospel of attaining salvation through love, humility and forgiveness, the Jewish owners of the American media from where the Christians preached, blackmailed the men of the cloth and forced them to turn reality on its head.

Handing them the oxymoron they named Judeo-Christian, the Jewish leaders ordered the Christian pastors to pollute the airwaves with all the noise they could make using that idea. The televangelists responded by conflating the two religions, making the blood-soaked Judaism sound like the Christian motto: love thy neighbor.

The pastors went around preaching to their flocks that salvation will come not through the Christian teachings they grew up with, but through the acceptance of Jewish supremacy. And this happened to be the sort of cultural rot that the newly formed neocons were looking for. They embraced the trend like a spiritual manna, and they fed on it like the flies that feed on rotting organisms.

Armed with these realities and knowing how to use them, Karl Rove joined the George W. Bush campaign, doing a masterful job at getting the rank-and-file Evangelicals to vote for his boss. The result was that Bush won the presidency, and took eight years to make a mess of America's economy, its politics and its diplomacy. By the time the Bush era had come to an end, things in America were as murky as the muddied waters that the Jewish leaders and their Christian disciples were able to make them.

The era of Barack Obama followed that of Bush-Rove. Now, eight years later, the Donald Trump era is about to start. Sixteen years since the time that Karl Rove was of the people, he is trying to get back in the saddle, apparently unaware that the world has changed. Remodeled by the Washington Beltway, he wrote an article that came under the title: “Keith Ellison Will Help Republicans” and the subtitle: “The candidate to run for the Democratic Party backed Farrakhan and always votes left.” It was published on December 8, 2016 in the Wall Street Journal.

What is Karl Rove saying? Nothing much really. In fact a more pertinent question would be: What is he trying to do? And the answer is that as a Republican, he could not give the Democrats a friendly advice with regard to whom they should vote when choosing a chair for their National Committee. And so, he pretends to conduct an analysis that would be consistent with a dispassionate observer.

He recommends the rejection of Representative Keith Ellison for two reasons. The first is that Ellison is too much of a left-winger, he says. The second is that the man was at one time too close to Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam.

Knowing how popular the message of arch left-winger Bernie Sanders was during the last campaign, Karl Rove does not make much of Ellison's left leanings. Instead, he concentrates on the candidate's past association which he characterizes as poisonous. But here too, Rove does not concentrate on the person of Farrakhan as much as he does on Islam, the man's religion.

At the core of Rove's preoccupation are Israel and the Jews. Here is what he says: “A transcript surfaced in which he [Ellison] said the U.S. 'can't allow another country to treat us like we're their ATM.' He also complained that America's Middle East policy 'is governed by what is good or bad through a country of seven million people.' This would further strain the Democratic Party's relationship with the Jewish community”.

As can be seen in that passage, Karl Rove lives in a bubble where they believe it is possible to promote the interests of Israel and the Jews by denigrating someone else. If this were true, half a century of throwing insults at the Arabs would have prevented the rise of a movement that's not shy to call America, not U.S.A., but Jew.S.A.

That's real; it is out there getting louder in the heartland of America, and getting more menacing because people like Karl Rove are pushing the wrong buttons to achieve unreasonable goals.