I don’t know if Hillary Clinton has brain damage. I consider it unlikely and am not sure how a new pair of glasses indicates her gray matter is getting banged up from her previous problem. But I do know something about Karl Rove, who has just made that claim, and I can assure you of this: he is crazy.
Rove is pathological. He long ago lost his ability to discern between reality and the constructed worlds in which he lives with his political confederates. If you doubt this consider his refusal on FOX News during election night returns to accept the fact that Mitt Romney was not going to win Ohio. Rove, almost pathetically, muttered over and over about remote rural boxes that he insisted had bigger numbers that only he had perceived.
But here in the real world, the election was wrapped.
Rove has even, in several conversations in the past, talked about manufactured realities. His Machiavellian game with his candidates and the general public is to design and make believable a set of circumstances and a faux scenario that simply do not exist. But for many years he has managed to convince doubters. In the 2004 reelection of George W. Bush, Rove and his consorts like Mark McKinnon, Karen Hughes, Ken Mehlman, and Matthew Dowd set about trying to convince otherwise moderate conservatives that the marriage of gay people was a threat to the traditional institution.
I’ll go no more a Roving
Of course, that assertion, like much of what Rove has said through the years, turned out to be more horseshit. The only consequence of the fight against gay marriage is that Rove and his Bushie friends all got rich running one of the most hateful and despicable campaigns ever seen in America. In households and schools all across this country, young people beginning to mature sexually were put in the position of viewing themselves as abnormal, weird, and even an embarrassment or threat. No one knows how many harmed themselves or continue to struggle as developing adults as a result of the Rove right’s disgusting rhetoric.
Rove positioned that entire argument as a defense of marriage, which is more manufactured reality. He couldn’t even protect his own marriage, which ended in dissolution after he had run around the country talking about the institution as the foundation upon which our entire culture is constructed. Rove ignored the fact that the GOP party chairman, Ken Mehlman, who was helping him push the anti-gay amendment, was a closeted gay who later came out and apologized. Of course, by then, the harm had been done.
Karl Rove’s own father, the man who raised him, was gay. Rove kept that a secret, undoubtedly to mitigate any damage to his anti-gay policies, until I wrote about it in my second book, The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power. Louis Rove announced he was leaving his family on Christmas Eve, the night before Karl was to turn eighteen. His sexual orientation was revealed later to his family. Rove’s mother committed suicide, though there was never any indication of why.
I’ve been writing about Karl Rove since I first met him in Texas in 1978. I’d like to ignore him. I’d like for America to ignore him. I believe he is a tragic and tortured soul who keeps searching in politics for a world that exists only in his psychoses. There is manifest evidence Rove’s brain, not Hillary’s, is damaged; he needs professional help. And until the Republican Party and FOX News separate themselves from Rove’s public self-immolations of ignorance and mindless speculation, they will suffer the damage caused by co-dependency.
Karl Rove is his own special disease. And the American political process needs to take a cure.
