1 Boring Old Man

ROVE: "Well, remember, we removed, as you said, Saddam Hussein in 22 days. But then the enemy, the Al Qaeda extremists, decided to make the central battlefield in the global war on terror. This will be worth that if we win. If we win we will have dealt the enemy a huge blow in a battlefield they chose to confront us on. And it will send a powerful message throughout the Islamic world. I think Bernard Lewis of Princeton is accurate. That the Muslim world is waiting to see who is going to win the conflict. Is it going to be the West or is it going to be Al Qaeda? And by winning, we will send a powerful message that the momentum is on our side. And it will rally the Muslim world to us. It will also create a huge influence in the Middle East. Think about the creation of the democracy in the historic center of the Middle East with the third-largest oil reserves in the world. If we have a functioning democracy in Iraq, that’s an ally in the war on terror, a counterweight to mullahs Iran and to Assad in Syria, this will create a very hopeful center of reform and energy for reform throughout the Middle East."

What’s wrong with their dream is a matter of public record. What’s wrong with their naive execution of their dream is also a matter of public record. But worst of all, what’s wrong with continuing to try to make their naive dream work in the face of their failings is blatantly apparent to all of us. And, by the way, they never said this dream out loud. They told us that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were dangerous to us because he had Weapons of Mass Destruction that he was going to use on us or Israel. They told us that Saddam Hussein was in an alliance with al Qaeda in the 9/11 attack on New York City. Now, Karl Rove is telling us about their real dream as if we’ve known about it all along. But, all along, when we’ve said that they went to war on Iraq with these motives Rove is telling us about, they responded with high minded homilies about Iraqi Freedom.

And why didn’t they just tell us about their dream? Why didn’t they come clean when we said that we knew what they were up to? The same reason that Bill Clinton didn’t tell us about having sex with Monica Lewinski? Clinton, who was under attack for previous sexual dalliances, didn’t want to admit he’d been lying all along. He didn’t want us all to know that he was a guy who had a hole you could drive a truck through in his morality – not just his morality about monogamy and sex, but his morality about telling the truth. He later lamented that he did it because he "could." Bush and Cheney were excited about their dream too. It was just plain sexy if they could pull it off. It was like those heist movies where the loveable and very clever crooks pull off a perfect caper against people who are bad guys themselves anyway – Oceans Eleven, the Sting, etc. But over-the-hill Dick Cheney, never-amounted-to-much George W. Bush, and nasty-awkward-nerd Karl Rove are playing roles written for Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and George Clooney. Only Cheney, Bush, and Rove are not the sexiest men in the world. And this is not a movie.

So when Joseph Wilson called them on their lies about the prewar intelligence, they attacked his beautiful wife [George Clooney would never have done such a thing because real men don’t pick on girls]. And when they couldn’t find the big bad weapons and al Qaeda links, they decided that they just weren’t asking hard enough so they started torturing their captives, hoping for confirmation. And when they got in trouble, they lied and tried to get [more] control over the Justice Department that was after them. Early on, they had ignored al Qaeda. They had the notion, plainly stated, that Clinton was on a wild goose chase with al Qaeda. They were sure it was States like Iraq that were our real enemies. That’s what Israel said. That’s what their pundits said. And Iraq was, after all, "the historic center of the Middle East with the third-largest oil reserves in the world." So, they were under the gun, caught with their pants down in the middle of a previous wrong call, and they chased it with another wrong [wronger] call – still on their original misdirected trajectory. They needed to make a big come-back play [Matt Damon (AKA Jason Bourne) would have seen his previous error and gone after the real bad guys].

And Karl Rove? A psychoanalytic guru [Melanie Klein] once said that the most amazing thing about human beings is that they do the same things over and over again. It’s what "character" really means – persistent patterns of problem solving that get called into play for any and every situation. Karl Rove is a "leaker." He’s made his mark "leaking" information, usually for nefarious reasons. In this week, he’s leaked again. We’ve known it so long that it doesn’t feel like new information, but in his interview with O’Reilly, he "leaked" the real dream Bush and Cheney started with, a dream they have pushed to absurdity – a trillion dollar absurdity, a 4000 American lives and near genocide in Iraq absurdity, a destroyed American influence and power in the world absurdity. Karl Rove didn’t present it as a "leak," he said it as a pundit – but "That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet." This is the first clear statement of their dream. They told us one thing, but enacted another. They were so sure it was a swell idea that they don’t understand why we don’t embrace it. I doubt they even recall that they forgot to tell us. They think we’re in it with them [at least that’s what Bush thinks and says].

Dreams and fantasies are wishes – an alternative reality where things come out like you want them to come out. And what about nightmares? At least one’s fears get expressed and you can wake up and say, "Thank god that was just a dream!" The war in Iraq was not "just a dream." We need to wake up, sure enough, but that’s not going to make it go away. We need to get every actor that’s part of this crazy dreamer mentality out of Washington, but that’s not going to make it go away either.