Dissecting the Joker
After reading my friend Khalid’s review of the Joker character in the Dark Knight movie and thinking about it, I started to think of Karl Rove. Most of us know what happened: Karl Rove indoctrinated W, made him the president and with the help of Dick Cheney ran the show for eight years. And all of us who are old enough, know what they did. Was Karl Rove the Joker who wanted to create as much havoc as possible? Was he a nihilist? And if he was, did a nihilist actually run the most powerful country in history for eight years? And if the answer to all of the above is yes, my next question is to Republicans: how did you let this happen to you?
In a sense, the past seven and a half years were Karl Rove and Dick Cheney’s shot at running this country through W. And what we saw of that show was not pretty. It was classless, crude, careless and arrogant. How could half this country let this happen?
My way of making sense out of all of this is to focus on powers of deception. How the “economy of mind” leads to intellectual laziness and becoming prone to deception. Why Americans are so intense on “economy of mind”? It’s just an observation that I have found out that it is easier to find someone help me move than to find someone to spend the same amount of time to help me go through a problem. Call me crazy, but I think this has to do with the Grand Jihad which is to work on the inside as opposed to the Minor Jihad which is to defend yourself on the outside.
| 2.5 |
July 25th, 2008 at 2:01 am
You know, the actual feedback I get from Republicans is that you need a Rove type guy to get you in office. I think that is a bit brash. Dirty campaigning often translates to dirty politics and what does that say about the candidate who allows it? Do I really want a tool for a president that basically has others to do thinking for him? No.
What gets to me most about this guy is that there was really little coverage about his nefarious policy making. We only got to see the results, not the intricate awful manner in which he carried out careless foreign and economic policy.
Why did this happen?
2 reasons that are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Fear. Televangelists and our current government have this in common. Make the public feel there is a lot of uncertainty and danger in the world and you’ll get their attention.
Image games. I notice that a lot of conservative voters have this maverick image idea of themselves. That individual accountability and strong military often alludes to such an image. Dick, Karl, and Bush often make a big deal about their bs hunting escapades, ranch, and tough swinging dick attitude. People bought into that because the contrasting image is a liberal douche whose values are cultural relativism and big government- lets call them hippies. So they think “I am not a hippy liberal culturally relative douche, I want to be a maverick.”
Notice, they are doing the same with McCain now.
July 25th, 2008 at 7:01 am
I found this on Wikipedia:
In December 1969, the man Rove had known as his father left the family, and divorced Rove’s mother soon afterward; it later became known he was homosexual. After his parents’ separation, Rove learned from his aunt and uncle that the man who had raised him was not his biological father; both he and his older brother Eric were the children of another man. Rove has expressed great love and admiration for his adoptive father and for “how selfless” his love had been. In 1981 Rove’s mother committed suicide in Reno, Nevada.
July 25th, 2008 at 11:44 am
so he’s literally bi-pedar-maadar!