Suffering from Rove Rage

You know, it's strange. I spent twenty-one years in the military. I've had three kids (two of them are twenty and technically adults; one is sixteen and technically a pain in the ass). It takes a lot to make me angry. I've been yelled at by experts. I've been lied to, in my face, by both experts and complete amateurs. I've hunkered down in fox holes, wondering if the next bomb would drop just a little bit too close. I've watched inexperienced, uncaring idiots try to destroy the country that gave me life.

And I'm pretty placid.

I know about the morons wandering through America. I can even rail against them. But, for the most part, I don't really get carried away with my feelings. It takes a lot to make me really angry. I see the morons, I wonder at their ability to ignore simple logic, but it's been years since I've felt the heat rising to my face, felt my blood pressure rising, and been unable to control my anger over the injustices being perpetrated by an uncaring government.

On the other hand, I left the Air Force because George Bush got reelected.

For entirely logical reasons, of course. I felt that it was time to get out of the military. I'd been to Iraq, and I hadn't had to kill anyone. And I didn't want to take the chance that I would end up going back and killing an Iraqi, who would be attacking people invading his country - in other words, doing for his country exactly what I'd be trying to do for mine if our situations were reversed.

(Yes, I understand that there are outside forces at work in Iraq. But there are also people born in Iraq, who see Americans as the evil bastards who attacked them, destroyed their country, and started torturing and killing innocent Iraqi people. And those are the people I wouldn't want to shoot.)

However, just like everybody else, I'm a prisoner of my upbringing. My father was a career Army officer: a West Point graduate, from a time when they were still able to instill ethics in their officers. And then I became a non-commissioned officer myself, with a certain inherited sense of history and ethics.

So you might (or might not) understand that I hate to be lied to. It’s a flaw in my character, but one that I can't really control that well. Liars and hypocrites bother me, and I find myself automatically disliking them.

When you couple that minor quirk in my personality with a barely-perceptible pride in my military background, and you end up with a convergence of attitudes that, to be honest, rarely intrudes on my life.

Until Karl Roves stands up and talks.

The man is bad enough when he stays behind the scenes. He's one of those lower life forms that do well in politics. He likes to play his little games, lying about people and setting up his little tricks. And he seems to be pretty good at it, until he starts to make speeches.

Karl Rove's entire career has been built around dirty politics. Any history of his career mentions him sneaking in to the headquarters of Illinois Democrat Alan Dixon, stealing some official letterhead, and sending out a thousand invitations to a party at the Democrat's headquarters, promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing." (This was in 1970, before home computers and printers, when "letterhead stationary" meant a lot more than it does today.)

Or in 1986, Rove was working for Republican Bill Clements. Right before a debate between Clements and Democrat Mark White, Rove told reporters that the Democrats had bugged his office. Oddly enough, the battery in the bug was so small that it needed to be changed every few hours, and it had just been changed out before Rove showed it to the press. The police and FBI dropped the investigation. But White's reputation was shot, and he subsequently lost the election.

With just a little bit of research, you start to see that Karl Rove has a long history of dishonesty and double-dealing. But let's look at more recent news.

Rove gave a speech in New Hampshire a week ago, where he accused Democrats of being cowards.

(Nor is this the first time that he crawled out from under his rock and called Democrats cowards and traitors. Odd how that works: if you disagree with Bush's policies, there's no way that you could just have a difference of opinion. You must immediately be labeled a traitor. Or a Nazi. Strange, that...)

Let's consider the words of that brave leader of men, Karl Rove.

"When it gets tough, they fall back on that party's old platform of cutting and running," he said. "They may be with you for the first few bullets but they won't be there for the last tough battles."

But strangely enough, despite his strong words about patriotism and bravery, when Karl Rove had the opportunity to go to war himself, he ran away.

While my father, a man with a wife and three children, was spending two tours in Vietnam, Karl Rove was dodging the draft. He took student deferments when he wasn't a full-time student. He moved and didn't notify the draft board.

Of course, he isn't the only one. George Bush has never been able to document his time in the National Guard. Dick Cheney took five deferments to get out of Vietnam. Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz - even the Republican's unelected spokesman, Rush Limbaugh, avoided the draft because of a boil on his butt (OK, technically a pilonidal cyst, but I'm too busy resisting any "pain in the ass" jokes to make a medical diagnosis).

And that's where my problem with lying starts to kick in. If a pasty-faced coward like Karl Rove is going to stand up there and talk about bravery, maybe he should reach down and see if he has testicles of his own.

Karl Rove didn't have the courage to stand up for his country for "the first few bullets," much less "the last tough battles." It's time for him to shut the hell up.