Hal Crowther on the Dough-Face Nation

An outstanding essay by Hal Crowther from the Independent Weekly. Go and read.

The doughface will always be with us; in a democracy he's the dead weight the rest of us will always be obliged to carry. But in times of civic peril and critical decision--the 1850s, certainly, and the first decade of the 21st century--doughface inertia becomes a millstone so heavy it can crush a nation's heart. A doughface crisis approaches when public servants commit spectacular outrages that seem to outrage no one; when unbearable truths are evident but widely ignored or rejected; and not coincidentally, when public figures who appear to be imbeciles grin from every wall and page and screen.

And here's the chilling conclusion:

But any pogrom must be orchestrated by the White House Rasputin, Karl Rove, whose portfolio is power-maintenance in all its forms. His fingerprints will eventually be found on the Swift Boat smear of John Kerry, and probably on the dubious document that brought down Rather, Mapes and the better half of CBS News. Rove is a professional assassin, a Texas version of Chucky the Devil Doll. Now that he reigns supreme, no one mentions that George H.W. Bush fired him from the campaign in 1992 for going feral and firing a political bullet at Robert Mosbacher, the president's friend and chief fundraiser. John Diulio, recently a White House domestic policy advisor, claims he overheard Rove screaming "We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him." Diulio never caught the name of the victim-to-be.

In the past, Rove specialized in character and career assassinations. But I took a chill from the cause of death--apparent suicide--when I read an obituary for Gary Webb, 49, the prize-winning investigative reporter who accused the CIA of funding Nicaragua's contra death squads through a cocaine cartel in San Francisco. Once shunned, the bloodstained old contra crowd--including the new security chief, John Negroponte--rides high again in Karl Rove's Washington.