Hamid and Karl
Two more for ROLLING STONE’s ‘National Affairs’ section. The Karzai piece, written by Robert Dreyfuss, examined this very difficult character in our efforts in Afghanistan from the standpoint that his intention is to stay in power after we have left and in order to do so, as all good survivors do, he’ll do what is best for himself, even if that means cutting deals with the very groups intending to kill him. It sets up a conflict of game plans between Karzai and the US. It was not unsympathetic to Karzai’s game plan for survival. What it did was put it into different perspective.
“Rove Rides Again”, written by Tim Dickinson, essentially connects the dots and makes the case clear that this odious Pillsbury Doughboy has deftly worked his way around the crumbling RNC, still led by the truly incompetent, and scandal ridden, Michael Steele, creating new fronts for huge collections of donations to “the cause”, all the while keeping his name off the mastheads. Essentially he’s running the show again. The traditional RNC is losing vital blood via lost campaign contributions (which also solves the problem of strangling Steele without making it look racially motivated) while Rove’s shadow operations amass their war chests for what they see as their chance to pull Republican victories in 2010 and in 2012. As far as I’m concerned, Karl Rove is a warning lesson about what happens to all those weird looking, creepy, socially awkward, and secretly rage filled kids, boys in particular, that sat in your high school class and just radiated bad energy. They grow up to enter the world of politics, where they make up for all those school year rejections by grasping and finagling, as amorally as possible, for as much power as can be attained. And sometimes that power attained is pretty impressive. It’s not a good thing. It’s just impressive.