May, 2006 - Article by: John Schettler

Pardon me if I get a little irreverent this month, but I hate the conniving deception of politics and just about everything associated with it. The superficial distillation of complex and important social conditions into sloganized issues, the pandering of candidates seeking to find that magic median line where they will offend the least number of voters possible, abandoning their integrity and backbone in the process, the pabulum spouted at political speeches, crafted by writers and pollsters with their fingers in the wind of public opinion, the signs that sprout like weeds on corner lots, front lawns and the bumpers of SUVs, the promises made, returning like unwelcome in-laws every election but never fulfilled, the inevitable graft and corruption as big money fills the campaign coffers and expects big results, the lobbying, the media manipulation, the apathy of voters, the despicable “hit piece” tactics intended to smear the character of the opponent, the election day hucksters who manipulate registration rolls, stuff ballot boxes, tinker with electronic counting results, or hanging chad…these are but a few of the many ills that accompany politics.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I feel there must be a special circle of hell reserved for the practitioners of this dirty art, the moguls, pundits, and con men who ply their skills behind the scenes to keep this pot well stirred every few years, and the king of all such political technocrats is none other than the self proclaimed “Bat Man” of the White House himself, Karl Rove.

As a deputy Chief of Staff, top political advisor and chief handler of President Bush, Rove is perhaps more responsible than any one else for the shady election and re-election of the man who will most likely be considered the worst president in American history. His command center office in the White House has been deemed “The Bat Cave” where he monitors election night manipulations, juggling the numbers most politicos carry about in big black binders, the poll data demographics of “persuadables,” lists of wedge issues, talking points and all the rest of the jive. But Rove is no mere technician or political strategist, he is on a level all of his own making. To some he is a magician, a miracle worker, and the most able campaign manager in political history, to others he is a no-good trickster, ever skirting the edge of lawlessness, bending rules of ethics as he goes along to satisfy the urgency of the moment. Indeed, one of his first overt political acts was reportedly an attempt to embarrass a rival candidate in 1970, (Democrat Alan Dixon of Illinois), by stealing his campaign letterhead and using it to invite the homeless riffraff of the inner city to Dixon’s campaign HQ for a free dinner. Such is the “genius” ascribed to this man, though I would more readily describe such behavior as the shoddy schoolboy antics of the shyster.

Be that as it may, Rove is reality. He is the living, breathing black heart of dirty politics in America, the man who has been behind much of the shenanigans of this administration’s rape of the media these last five years. It was undoubtedly Rove who beat down the Kerry challenge, turning his three Purple Hearts in Viet Nam into badges of cowardice with his swift boat smear crews, and then deftly inserting the wedge issues of abortion and gay marriage into the media bitstream, like a few drops of well timed poison to contaminate the election debate. It amazes me, with all that was at stake in the 2004 election, that those issues were stirred into the mix with such fervor. But who can argue with success? The voting public is apparently easily manipulated, and Rove knew just how to energize his base, as they say in the craft, hijacking the political agenda with this incredible distraction and sleight of hand politics. Magician indeed. The very art of magic is to deceive, distract and misinform, and Rove is an undisputed master. The wedge issue appears, sidetracks the debate, and then vanishes, as if it were never important at all, having worked its divisive harm. Where is there any talk now about abortion or gay marriage? Did anything significant happen regarding either issue? Nope, they just went quietly back into the dirty tricks box, waiting for the next election to pop out once more.

 Rove made his bones in Texas when he helped herd the Republican Party into power there, and was behind the surprising upset of then powerful Democratic Governor Ann Richards. Strange things happened that election, like polling calls to voters asking whether they might support Richards if they knew her offices were largely staffed by lesbians. It was classic dirty politics, with a telltale and peculiar smell that has often been associated with Karl Rove. Indeed, President Bush often calls Rove “Turd Blossom,” a Texas flower that blooms from cow dung, and how appropriate, for Rove has produced a string of victories by shoveling the proverbial political crap in election after election.

 But consider the consequences of Rove’s work. Sure, thirty percent of Americans remain delighted. They’re out there oiling their rifles, and working the back hoes to get the trench started on that wall. But for the rest of us, that 70 percent along for the ride Bush has taken us on, consider what America has become. We are now a nation with a stated policy of pre-emptive war. We will attack any perceived rival we deem a threat, and have done so twice in the last five years, with a third war brewing by all accounts. We are now a nation that has abandoned the Geneva conventions to sanction torture, and when we get caught, we re-fashion the word into “renditions,” the movement of undesirable captives to a network of hidden facilities secreted about the globe. We are a nation that has swept aside our own prized constitution and bill of rights because of our fear, and now our government wiretaps U.S. citizens without warrants, and collects all their phone records. The U.S. Army has been working for Exxon/Mobil, and securing the world’s oil fields for America, but look what has happened to the price of gasoline? In 1998 oil was less than $20 per barrel, last week it topped $75., but you can bet that the oil companies don’t pay that price. Exxon now produces more oil from its wells each day than Kuwait! But the only thing flowing is the profit money, and you can thank men like Rove for things like that as well.

Oddly, Bush has been stomping about this week saying he will just not tolerate the gouging of the American consumer. In politics this is called “getting out in front of the issue.” The high gas prices were going to do nothing but hurt Bush and the battered Republican party even more. Now he’s going about with this false sense of outrage, as if Bushco has only been about the business of helping out the little guy these last five years. Amazing that the bellweather mark of gasoline over $3.00 has suddenly made Bush a believer in alternative energy. But handsome is as handsome does. My bet is that Bush will take no significant action to break the stranglehold Big Oil has on government, or do anything that will really threaten the hegemony of petroleum. It would just be too painful, even though that is what must happen to this nation if we are to survive. Ralph Nader called for vigorous anti-trust action against the oil giants, who ring up record corporate profits, and write checks for $400 million to their CEO. Don’t hold your breath. But watch inventories tighten and gas prices rise again as we kick off the summer driving season this Memorial Day. How sad that a day we set aside to honor our soldiers for their service is now associated with oil company market manipulation.

So… While the cost of gasoline spirals ever upward, gouging the president’s shredded approval numbers as it gouges low income family budgets, a strange thing happened. Instead of serious, sustained national debate on our energy future, and a clear plan for what we must now do as a nation to survive, the issue we get national media and citizen mobilization about is…immigration. How very curious. It’s almost as if someone out there saw that the citizenry was getting riled up, and thought it best to get that anger focused elsewhere, using one part fear, and one part good old fashioned American bigotry to create this new brew out of thin air. And this is just the beginning. The election season really hasn’t built up a head of steam yet. Just you wait.

In fact, Senator Arlen Specter is now sending a bill to the senate to amend the constitution to define marriage as exclusively between a man and woman. So after a two year rest, gay marriage is back again to rile up the Christian conservatives before the 2006 congressional elections. It would ban gay marriages, and be the first provision of our constitution to deny a civil right. Where will they put that one, in the new “Bill of Oppression?” And along with it, we will see an English only law, and another debate on a law prohibiting the burning of the American flag. Add these to the newly seething broth of immigration and you get a recipe that seems tailor made by strategists like Rove and his ilk. By all means, let’s not talk about energy, health care, education, the war in Iraq, the explosive national debt, the erosion of civil liberties--let’s all argue over petty moral peeves: gay people, the flag, Mexicans trying to create a new province here called “Aztlan.” I’m willing to bet we will hear about abortion before November of 2006 as well.

Who knows what else will emerge in the slush of the national debate stream as we get closer to that important date in November when the voters have a chance, yet again, to break the lock step Republican hold on government that has virtually ruined this nation the last five years. They put assault guns back on the streets, railroaded the “Patriot Act” over our Bill of Rights without even reading it, cemented a massive $107 billion dollar tax break for the rich while preventing the little guy from filing bankruptcy, steamrolled environmental protections, bankrolled the oil industry with incentives, tax breaks and credits, insisted on the President’s war, piled up massive national debt while filling the coffers of their corporate friends. Now let’s talk about those illegal immigrants.

Have you noticed how, out of seeming ether, the issue of immigration has suddenly blown through the media like bad weather? (Thank you, Lou Dobbs). We go for years and years with no public discussion whatsoever of an issue like this, and then all of the sudden there are kids walking out of high schools, demonstrations, minutemen patrolling our borders and drawing up plans for our very own version of the Berlin wall, and all this deftly tied to things like homeland security, and fomented by a threatening tape or two from Osama. And this is just after yet another of those endless acts of outrage had been perpetrated by Bush, the revelation that he was the man who deliberately declassified intelligence so that it could be leaked to the media to harm a critic of his war plan. On top of the Dubai Ports flap and the Alberto Gonzales sanctioned spying and wiretapping of American citizens, (3500 to date according to the FBI), a nice little wedge issue like immigration is just the thing to stir up the conservative base and reorient the media, leading them off the scent of the President’s lawless trail. It was as effective as the Aruba story or the nicely overblown college gang rape story that has been dominating the news lately. The reporters who broke the stories about the Bush wiretaps and security finagling leaks both got Pulitzer Prizes, but card-carrying Neocon Bill Bennett was quick to suggest they should have been arrested for sedition instead. That’s the way things are done in this mindset—round them up, arrest them, get them up against that wall.

I don’t know about you, but I smell Rove.

It’s election year in congress, and at stake is the very fate of the Bush administration itself. Bush has about 1000 more days in office, and he will either spend them in a continuation of his imperial presidency, circumventing laws with signing statements, trashing international accords, pursuing his unilateral plans to democratize the oil states by slamming nuclear tipped cruise missiles into Tehran, and thumbing his nose at the hapless protests of a few outraged Democrats in congress — or — he will be hounded and hunted by Democratic subpoena power arising from their control of key committees should they win back a majority in either the House or Senate.

So yes, I smell Rove. The machinery of the Bat Cave, indolently dormant after that second term victory, is now cranking up to try and reverse the most severe decline in credibility and support since the fall of Richard Nixon. Seven of every ten Americans now see Bush as the bumbling, inarticulate, puppet he has been all these years, but a puppet who has become dangerously self absorbed with his own legacy and historical image, a self-righteous crusader with the strange notion that he is “the decider,” and public opinion be damned. And to make sure Bush doesn’t lose that clueless 30% that keeps hanging on in places like Wyoming and Utah and Montana (where coincidentally we have the lowest gasoline prices in the nation), we get the sudden apparition of immigration thrown onto the political table, and by Jove, (or I should say by Rove), the argument has started! FOX News panders to its myopic, intransigent conservative audience by interviewing the Minutemen, showing their plans for a two layered wall, with anti-vehicle trenches and barbed wire. And the divisive ugliness of bigotry has reared its head again, wrapped in the flag of course, “wrapped in the flag and carrying a Bible.”

On the May 1st “Day Without an Immigrant,” FOX trotted out a commentator who exclaimed that the protests were rife with “Islamist radicals and socialists,” and bearing images of “Osama, Mexican Flags and the Hammer & Sickle.” Strange how Mexican flags got sandwiched like that. She went on to stress how the growing “strain on public services and increasing crime” were all to be laid at the doorstep of the immigrants, (overlooking that the national crime rate is way down). All our ills can be blamed on those sneaky illegals who are out to undermine America, quietly in league with the ex-commies and Islamic radicals. Lord, where do these notions come from? Earth to FOX: this nation was built, and is now almost 99% comprised of, immigrants! (My own family migrated from Germany in the mid 1800s and became innkeepers in Pennsylvania before the Civil War. So I am the fourth or fifth generation of my clan, born here in the US, but with family roots that hail from Germany.) Yes, aside from the tiny remnant of native Indian peoples that survived the genocide the immigrants inflicted upon them, everyone else, and I mean everyone else in this country is a member of an immigrant family, all part of the great American melting pot society that has been the very source of our success as a nation. America is a diverse mix of Europeans, Central Americans, African and Asians, so this whole question of immigration as being something undesirable is simply a matter of those who got to the theater first complaining about the latecomers.

But to a man like Karl Rove, it is a perfect “wedge issue,” and one that is sure to rile up and solidify the conservative base around the manic obsession for national security. You know them, the folks who have pickup trucks with gun racks, a secret fetish for the Confederate flag, NASCAR loving Americans all, but immigrant families as well. They would prefer that we stopped the influx of tired and poor people, yearning to be free, but yet they insist that we must go to places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran to set these very same Islamic masses free over there. Go figure. Yes, it fits right in with the President’s logic. We have to set them free over there so we won’t have to set them free over here. Now they want to build a 2000 mile barrier, the first bastion out wall of “Festung America.” Perhaps it will go nicely with the new “detention centers” Halliburton subsidiary KBR has been contracted to build to the tune of a sweetheart $385 million dollar deal. No, they are not being built in Iraq, but right here in the United States, and the reason given was that they were being readied “in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S or to support the rapid development of new programs.” Emergency influx of immigrants? New programs? One cannot help but wonder just what new programs will require massive detention facilities here in the US.

Something about that contract just festers, doesn’t it? The Vice President’s old oil company is now building detention camps for FEMA. Perhaps, caught off guard by Hurricane Katrina and the disaster at New Orleans, FEMA has decided to be ready with our very own American Gulags should future events cause the dislocation of …immigrants. But the immigrants they are really talking about are those that have been in this country for years, generations even, quietly forming the strong foundation of the worker pyramid. You know them, and see them every day at their low wage jobs. They work long hours, scrimping by to make ends meet, with little in the way of a financial safety net beneath them should anything bad happen. They don’t have investment portfolios, passive income, rental properties, credit cards, a 401K plan or IRA. They don’t buy gold from Monex or trade in stocks and bonds. They just run America, at its most basic and fundamental level, though there is a mindset among the wealthy conservatives that these people are a kind of infestation. When Katrina came along, it revealed the awful nest of impoverished citizens without even so much as a car to let them evacuate New Orleans. And we have seen what not having a car means in a crunch, with no rapid transit or rail system to speak of in this country—the Super Dome fiasco. FEMA ended up footing an expensive motel bill for these hapless folks, and the detention camps seem like a much better idea, neh?

It stinks, as does this whole flap over immigration that has suddenly appeared from nowhere. It doesn’t take much to start an argument in this country. But I’m still scratching my head and wondering why this immigration story suddenly gets such national magnification, when the issue has really been with us throughout my entire lifetime. In fact, I live in California, a state where my white, German face is a decided minority. I grew up with Latinos, going to school with them, working and living with them as my friends, customers and associates. They are as “American” to me as my mother was, and there has been harmony and good relations in our communities all my life. So what’s all this hullabaloo about immigration? Now the spark of border watch fear has ignited quite a reaction against all those supposedly undocumented illegals out there. And then we hear about the Halliburton/KBR detention camp contract.

Well, my European countrymen know only too well where the building of detention camps leads. What amazes me, however, is that there is still a view in the upper echelons of this government where the notion of “round up undesirables” is alive and well. And to think that a poor Colorado Social Studies teacher was vilified by FOX News because he said the Bush administration was saying and doing things reminiscent of Hitler.

Yes, I smell politics, perhaps even the workings of old “Turd Blossom” himself. He knows how to get a good distracting and divisive argument going. He knows better than anyone how to bring out the very worst aspects of the American character, the fear, the bigotry, the me first attitude that leads to protectionism, sealed borders, detention camps built by oil companies.

Just after 9/11, when people were casting the cold light of suspicion on just about any foreign looking person, I wrote: “In conversing with others over these events, (9/11), the first hint of that specter of fear and inhumanity presented itself—the first twisting whiskers of the wolf began to sprout. In her anger and resentment over what had happened in New York, a woman made the simple suggestion that all foreign nationals entering our land from “suspect” countries should now be forced to wear a locked bracelet embedded with a digital tracking device. “That would solve the problem,” she exclaimed, yet I could not help but recall the Stars of David sewn and painted on the backs of the Jews by their enemies, the tattooed serial numbers branded on their arms in the ghastly camps of death…The footprint of the Werewolf was plain for all to see. This is our real challenge. We must never let our fear consume us to the point where we compromise our values in the interest of safety. This “round ‘em up and wipe them out” attitude must be tightly reined—lest we become the very evil we claim to war against. In truth, there are those that proclaim we already have become this evil . We must never prove them right.”

Article by: John Schettler, May 1, 2006

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