The Rove Roll

If Republicans thought they were walking headfirst into a November woodchipper, their prognosis is turning more saturnine. Being shredded into nookshotten chips sounds like a pleasant death compared to the euthansistic bolt just administered.

Karl Rove, the famed operator who puts the cheese-poof in poohbah, has foresworn the party he’s long kept curled ‘round his bursitic finger.

Wait. Mercy please, for our Zoomer readers, or should I say Zoomer Read Alouders. (Gen-Z is notoriously illiterate.) Who is Karl Rove, the reader born after 1998 may ask? The humpty-dumpty who cracked up on live television after Ohio was called for Obama? The waddling Brandt lookalike who drunkenly hops to awkward applause at Beltway roisters?

Not quite. Mr. Rove is no cue-balled pundit. He’s Master of the Universe, in his own bloviating estimation. (Here you thought Donald Trump was high on his own egotistical supply.) “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…[w]e’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do,” Rove infamously puffed to journalist Ron Suskind. Such hubris, at the time of its belching, almost seemed justified. Months prior, the Rovian White House black-bagged Saddam Hussein. Uncle Sam was beginning to mold Mesopotamia in its own eagle-cawwing, Big Mac-gorging, gas-guzzling image.

Rove was vindicated, after a fashion. Bushie neocons succeeded in crafting a new reality: second Great Depression, Democratic supermajority, corpora-state health care, a MAGA/woke dialectic that makes compassionate conservatism seem as dated as the women’s temperance movement. The Middle East may not have been bombed and rebuilt into New Nebraska, but a dispensation was birthed nonetheless. Somewhere, the monkey paw retracts another finger.

History’s Mover isn’t done. From his writerly perch at the Wall Street Journal, Rove once again works his thaumaturgy, not on an ethnically Balkanized country, but his pachydermic peers. Should be a cinch compared to toppling a frail, sand-crusted dictator! Republicans aren’t hoarding irradiating weapons of mass destruction; their offense is much worse. The Party of Lincoln has, to the loyal functionary’s quivering horror, become the Party of Bull Connor.

In “Why I’m Voting for a Texas Democrat,” Rove recounts how, after the Texas Longhorns’ heartstopping win over the Ohio State Buckeyes, Railroad Commissioner candidate Bo French committed the most obscene crime in America: he noticed.

What hooked French’s focus? That many whooping U.T. students didn’t resemble the precious sons of the Real Housewives of Midland. The stands were chockablock with what looked like a mix of H-1B visa holders and busboys. French then did what any normal citizen with public-office aspirations does: voyeuristically snap a photo of unsuspecting undergrads. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” he tweeted in accompaniment, in the understated way one uses when edging into wrongthink.

Note the emphasis: not “worse,” but qualitatively “far worse.” Not different; not unrecognizable; a deontological decline. Rove won’t truck with such racialism: “Mr. French’s not-so-subtle claim that UT has too many Hispanics and South Asians—he later said his issue is too many ‘foreigners’—is raw, uncut bigotry.”

Yes, yes, the Party of Reconstruction can’t have anything to do with badmouthing Hispanics. Can you imagine the bloodbath courted by any Republican hopeful who smears Mexicans as parasitical rapists? Such an incorrigible xenophobe might… win the popular vote and the Electoral College.

More to the point, Rove knows that Republicans can only curry favor with globo-south migrants using one tried-and-true approach. Respect? Acknowledgement? High-flown rhetoric about citizenship and responsibility? Pssshaww. The bait is artificially suppressed interest rates to induce homebuying. The economy may overheat, causing a worldwide fiat meltdown. But at least nobody will red-label you “racist.”

To respectable Rovians, fleecing unsuspecting berry-pickers and day-laborers into buying half-a-million-dollar homes with zero cash down and an A.R.M. is respectable politicking, even noble. The American Dream has never been about owning a white-picketed plat. Normative materialism must be backstopped by the full faith and clownishly easy credit of the humming republic. Cracking apart the global piggy bank to extend minority mortgages earns you warm New York Times profiles, a cushioned seat on ABC’s “This Week,” and a handsome book deal at one of the Big Five.

After duping Dominicans into taking out unaffordable loans, invading an ancient civilization with nary a sense as to its theological distinctions, and trying to recodify Hawaii natives into American Indians as a ballot boon, Rove is disgusted by the notion of playing politics like demographic Yahtzee.

At long last, twenty-five years after passage of the Patriot Act, a Bushsciple takes issue with seeing something, and saying something.