Karl Rove Fucking Hates You (BR)The political self-destruction of a human worm

There was a time, not too long ago, when Karl Rove was the golden child of the Republican party, the master calculator, President Bush's disembodied, piggly-looking brain. Some may even remember him telling All Things Considered host Robert Siegel -- in a Jonah Goldberg moment -- that in spite of every poll under the sun predicting a Democrat takeover of Congress in November, he was in possession of "The Math;" internal polls which assured him the Republicans would maintain their majorities in both Houses. We all know how that turned out

Until then, most people, even those who depended on Rove, admitted fairly readily -- in so many words -- that the President's current Deputy Chief of Staff was a scum-sucking weasel and an unethical thug, if an apparently brilliant tactician. Now he's been exposed as a mediocre political strategist as well, and, seeing the house he built crumbling around him, he's apparently decided to burn the damn thing to the ground while he can.

In defense of the Bush administration's laissez-faire tack on illegal immigration and border security -- favored by high-ranking officials in both parties -- Rove, in classic form, stated on Thursday: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."

In one masterful stroke, Rove, who is also credited as a main policy architect, has managed to expose the true impetus behind the work he and his bosses have been doing lo these past seven years: A genuine and enduring contempt for physically demanding work and the people who do it for a living.

We make fun of The National Review quite a bit in this forum because their writers are mostly fools and political hacks who have never met an appeal to emotion they didn't like. But today's contribution to The Corner, their blog, by Mark Krikorian is absolutely right and deserving of applause for its brave rebuke of this bipedal pig of a man:

There should be no need to explain why this is an obscene statement ... It's not that I want my kids to make careers of picking tomatoes; Mexican farmworkers don't want that either. But we must inculcate in our children, especially those likely to go on to high-paying occupations, that there is no such thing as work that is beneath them.

If you're a powerful appointee in an allegedly conservative administration, getting a dressing-down from a blogger on NRO, your career is dead in the water.

Krikorian goes on to quote Tocqueville: "In the United States professions are more or less laborious, more or less profitable; but they are never either high or low: every honest calling is honorable[,]" adding himself that "[t]he farther we move from that notion, the closer we come to the idea that the lawyer is somehow better than the parking-lot attendant, undercutting the very foundation of republican government."

This last sentence really cuts at the heart of the matter. Rove, and the people whose interests he is paid to advance, is an aristocrat, and a cynical Darwinist. Rove would actually rather his son be an unemployed leech, a veritable desperate housewife, lounging about daddy's house and surrounded by all the accoutrements of the good life than to roll up his sleeves and do an honest day's work. His belief that wealth is the measure of a man consigns most Americans to a classist dung-heap.

But given the outrageousness and visibility of this latest gaffe, the unwanted scrutiny it has earned him, and the backlash it is likely to inspire among Republicans, Rove himself may just want to start checking the classifieds for post-Bush employment. I'm sure there's a spot in the tomato field with his name on it.