The Above Visual Metaphor Worked. The One Karl Rove Cited This Morning? Um. No. Never. And What The Fuck?
As it's hot as hell today with Summer officially on, let's just dive on into the deep end of the cool pool of GOP crazy, shall we?
Rove: Obama's the Guy at the Country Club Holding a Martini Making Snide Comments About Everyone Else
June 23, 2008 1:36 PM
ABC News' Christianne Klein reports that at a breakfast with Republican insiders at the Capitol Hill Club this morning, former White House senior aide Karl Rove referred to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, as “coolly arrogant.”
“Even if you never met him, you know this guy,” Rove said, per Christianne Klein. “He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”
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Interesting that Mr. Rove would use a country club metaphor to describe the first major party African-American presidential candidate, whom I'm sure wouldn't be admitted into many country clubs that members of the Capitol Hill Club frequent.
But the picture Rove paints is interesting. Who, pray tell, is Rove at this country club?
The guy telling funny stories near the band?
The charming president of the club's philanthropic arm?
The brainy guy with all the sports scores?
Or the guy who vandalizes your car and blames it on the kitchen staff?
I'll wait while you feel around for your eyes on the floor seeing as how they popped out of your head a few seconds ago.
Washed 'em off? Got 'em back in? Good! Let's make short work of this Tacoma Narrows Bridge of “reasoning” on Rove's part.
First of all, you should take note that Karl Rove been damn near out of his mind with his every loopy pronouncement since the fall of 2006, when he screeched about how he had “The Math”(favorable to the Republicans) immediately prior to the mid-term elections he bollixed up so badly for the GOP. He's managed to make the ramblings of an end-stage syphilitic like Al Capone (“The Bolsheviks! The God-damn Bolsheviks!”) sound like homespun folk-wisdom in comparison.
Perhaps sympathetically, like the person he's championing to replace his boss, he's utterly “lost his bearings” on reality. That's the truly crazy part of his “Country Club” statement—in likening someone who looks like Barack Obama to a pink-cheeked, millionaire swell sippin' Rob Roys at “The Nineteenth Hole” or somethin'. How out of your mind do you have to be in America to make that kind of rhetorical leap?
Let's spell out that leap:
Yeah. It's the Black dude whose father booked up on him, leavin' his White mom to raise him alone, who stilll managed to excel academically, and in spite of that—came back to the South Side of Chicago to work in the 'hood' with his 'peeps', instead of taking the stoopid-money Wall Street jobs...who's the arrogant guy at the country club. Not the guy who married into millions, took part in a Savings and Loan scam, ripping off even mo' millions, and...owns like eight houses in choice locales all over the country. Mmm-kay?
I mean...this is a land where a well-to-do Black Lawyer went undercover a decade ago as a busboy at an exclusive Country Club in Connecticut (as that was the only way he could get in the place) to find out first-hand what down-their-nose White folks really thought of Blacks when they felt they didn't have to hold their tongues around them out of concerns for propriety. There are places where my Black ass would be hauled away and arrested “The Dude” style just for lingering too close to the Goddamned shrubbery at the gate, and Rove somehow sees Barack Obama—who the last time I checked, doesn't sign his name as “Biff”, “Chip” or fucking “Cadwallader” as the “the Guy at the Country Club Holding a Martini Making Snide Comments About Everyone Else.”?
There are too many of these clubs in America where if Obama showed up unannounced with a “member”, all of a sudden there'd be a full course and no room to play—but hey, there's always room in the back for another n*gger to scrub bits of Cobb Salad off the dishes and whatnot, eh?
So, color me wet sand-trap brown, but I'm just not getting this analogy of Rove's with Obama as the swell and... I guess his boy McCain as the scrappy outsider. Is Rove's issue with his inability thus far to elicit the desired “response” from the senator from Illinois? The desired “Angry Black Thug” angle he's so desperate to exploit—whether its rooted in an actual statement or rebuttal from Obama or not? “How dare he seem above the bullshit I'm trying to run! That arrogant S.O.B.! He won't get 'ghetto' like he's supposed to!”
That just may be it.
That...and the whole “Tiger Woods” comparison redux. We first noted this a couple of months ago when a lesser McCain surrogate ham-fistedly made the comparison of Obama to the hated Tiger Woods in pumping up the sad spectacle of the GOP's “champion”...
You see, the usage of Woods as a slang shorthand for Barack Obama speaks to a certain racial paranoia of the part of folks like Bellavia. I was in Augusta, Georgia the weekend that Tiger Woods officially burst onto golf's lily-white scene in 1997. I wasn't there for the tournament mind you, but rather, I was visiting a significant other who was performing in town. I found myself at trip's end at Bush Field, the city's airport waiting for my flight home, aimlessly walking from my gate to the oddly crowded bar and back. I finally stopped at the bar's fringe—I couldn't get in it from the huge crowd packing the place—and noticed what everyone was looking at, namely the final round of the Masters tournament just a stone's throw away in which first-year PGA pro Tiger Woods was ripping through the course like Caddyshack's Ty Webb on a fast-drip adrenaline and espresso I.V.. There was a 99% White crowd in that airport bar, and all you could hear over the hushed announcer tones from the TV were grunted “God-damns”, “Fucks”, and an almost percussive slamming down of beer bottles and cheap glass tumblers at every dead-solid-perfect drive and seemingly magnetically-guided putt.
No slurs...just a palpable displeasure with what was transpiring. There was a lot of head-shaking and napkin-tossing. And I must say, more than a few almost hissed “Unbelievable. Fucking unbelievables”. I intentionally lingered there amongst that grumpy assemblage, maybe courting trouble, but mostly getting a secondary visual dig in at that unreasonably angry bunch. There were two Black people within thirty feet of that ball of anger. Me, and a guy I thought was an airport employee as he had a uniform-ish-looking outfit on and was leaned against a trash bin. He and I made eye contact for a moment and there was a knowing smile. He was lingering too, a fellow “chip in the cookie” like me. He shook his head with a silent laugh as Woods trod the green grass back to the clubhouse, post-massacre, and the man pulled his wheeled bag hidden by the bin and walked down to his gate...with a big “Callaway Golf” logo on the back of his windbreaker. Golf fan? Duffer? I don't know what he was exactly, but he was getting as much enjoyment out of the first wave of the “sea change” we had just witnessed. I turned back to the crowd and couldn't help but notice their noticing us. There was an odd silence amongst them as they looked on. An almost collective audible and visual sigh from them looking at us, clearly translating as an exasperated “Oh great...we'll have to hear about this shit from 'them' forever about this.”
Woods' win there and his subsequent hyper-dominance and revolutionizing of the game is something that many look at with a level of awe...and a lot of others scowl at with barely-concealed disgust. He effectively took a game—golf—away from the demographic group that pretty much owned it outright since its inception 600 years ago.
He's in the process of re-writing the record book, and doing so at a younger age and with a more punishing dominance than his predecessors. Those facts have upset many of his peers, with requests that courses be “Tiger-proofed” with new and more challenging layouts, spiteful talk of how the game's popularity is in jeopardy due to Woods' “Colossus amongst men” skewing of the sport's talent curve (“If no one else is gonna win—why watch?”), and even outright verbal denigration from...well, there's no other word to use but “haters”
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But the underlying zing from the mumbling, GOP-backing sergeant is that aforementioned fear-and jealousy based dissing that Tiger Woods is the constant recipient of. When you think about it, Bellavia's stuttering blather smacks of that same “How dare you enter and rule my last bastion of power?”-speak—I mean, this is the Presidency we're talking about here—not too many last bastions beyond there. And as Woods' emergence represented some serious applecart upsetting, just the consideration of an Obama's ascending to the Presidency flips the whole damned orchard upside-down.
'Oh no. This is the one thing you will not take take from us. not this. NOT the fucking Presidency'.
It was a punk-ass scream for help that he thought was a silent dog whistle.
Well...woof-woof, mother-fucker..
Thus, it's Obama/Woods all over again. I liked the “beautiful date” part of it this time, though. The whole equating the statuesque Michelle Obama with Tiger's Swedish ex-model wife Elim Nordegren. Can you feel the hate, kiddies? Grrrrrrrr! Spinning the senator as the casually victorious, “arrogant” king of all he touches, as some sort of passive-aggressive “poor-mouthing” of the scrappy, l'il McCain's candidacy.
“Outta nowhere. A former greenskeeper, now, about to become the Masters champion...”
Oh...fucking...please, Karl. Really? That's the talking point, now? Seriously? Even ABC's Jake Tapper is clowning your ass mightily with your unfortunate bit of drama-queenery from this morning, noting Rove's obvious familiarity with the “Country Club Types”. Again:
But the picture Rove paints is interesting. Who, pray tell, is Rove at this country club?
The guy telling funny stories near the band?
The charming president of the club's philanthropic arm?
The brainy guy with all the sports scores?
Or the guy who vandalizes your car and blames it on the kitchen staff?
Who is Rove in this setting? None of the above.
He's this guy.
The fuck-up scion of the man in charge...lucky because of where he is, but not who he is. Never called on his bullshit, and given enough rope to hang ten men. The mean, spoiled, and classless in spite of his being “To the Manor Born” Spaulding-fucking-Smails from “Caddyshack”. He's the “kid who can do no wrong” because he'll always get another chance, and everybody around him gets the fist upside the head as punishment. He's right twice a day, just like a broken clock and that's been his “get over” for years.
But...if you look at his record—especially lately, he's still...a...fuck-up. Just like his boss. Can you spell “transference”, kids. I bet you could.
All that's left is for him to do is to drunkenly puke his guts out into the sunroof of an expensive car at this point.
I'm hoping it's a Texas-bound limousine pulling out of the White House driveway on January 20th 2009.
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