Turdblossom:

1. In Texas vernacular, a desert wild flower that grows out of a meadow muffin.

2. One of G.W. Bush's nicknames for Karl Rove

(source: Urban Dictionary)

One of the few things George W Bush got right was calling Karl Rove Turdblossom. Looks like this meadow muffin has coughed-up another “flower”.

Thanks to his apoplectic reaction to a Super Bowl ad featuring actor and conservative activist Clint Eastwood, Rove has unintentionally improved the odds of Barack Obama getting re-elected. I’ll save the dissection of Rove for later, since he so richly deserves to be last and least. But first, a break for a commercial.

•        •        •

As the film noir images from the ad began to play across the screen during halftime of the Super Bowl, and that unmistakable ‘gargled with razor blades’ gravelly voice began to intone, I literally shouted at my TV. “No, Clint, no!”, assuming I was about to hear a pitch for one or the other of the wingnut candidates the Republicans keep trying to foist off as fit for the most important job in the world.

I was wrong (see how easy that is, conservatives?). Like a lot viewers at the time, I wasn’t exactly sure what the ad was for; but I suspected it was for Chrysler, since they’d been running a series of similar gritty ads with the “Imported from Detroit” theme. My suspicion has since been confirmed.

But in truth this wasn’t an ad for a car company – and it certainly wasn’t an ad for a politician. It was an ad for America, and for the hard-working men and women who built the cars and the country. That doesn’t seem to be a stance that would strike fear in the hearts of rightwingnuts and be the subject of controversy. Apparently, I was wrong about that, too.

•        •        •

Turdblossom – like most paranoid rightwingnuts – sees danger behind every bush (though not in any Bush) and a leftwing conspiracy in every utterance that deviates in the least from the script. And so it was with this ad.

That he and others saw a conspiracy between Chrysler and Obama, and that Eastwood was somehow involved, is proof of enough of these people’s paranoid delusions. The idea that Chrysler would run an overtly political ad and risk alienating half of their potential customers is utterly absurd.

As for Eastwood, his politics are well-known; he is an outspoken Republican conservative, though like many in Hollywood he is left-leaning on social issues. Thanks to Rove, he may find out what happens to Republicans who don't toe the mark, the Kool-Aid stain that is the Rabid Right Republican base.

If that proves to be the case, I'm pretty sure of his response: "Go ahead, make my day."

•        •        •

Conservatives have a serious problem with collective amnesia, and they seem to have forgotten that Rove promised a Permanent Republican Majority. He also told Bush the Lesser not to worry about the 2006 mid-terms, that the Republicans would remain in control,

Now this putative political genius is fool enough to take to the air and scream about some absurd conspiratorial connection in – of all things – a car commercial. What he apparently doesn’t realize is that by doing so, he has made this a much, much bigger deal than it would otherwise have been.

In the process he has impugned the patriotic message of that ad, and questioned the character of a reliably conservative actor, a rarity in Hollywood. All this is testimony to what I have been saying all along: 

Turdblossom ain't no genius.

•        •        •

Despite his reputation, Rove is politically inept and tone-deaf. Granted, this Mayberry Machiavelli has a "gift" for slimy political machinations – or rat-fucking as it used to be known when Donald Segretti was performing that function for Richard Nixon, but he doesn't know the first thing about politics.

The first thing about politics is that you have to know shit from shinola. That is you can polish a turd, but once you get that turd elected, he has to be capable of governing – at least if you want to come through on that promise of a Permanent Republican Majority.

It should have been obvious to an experienced and truly gifted political operative that Bush the Lesser had no such ability. But that wasn’t obvious to this supposed mastermind, and thus Rove’s Permanent Republican Majority lasted about as long as Hitler's Thousand Year Reich.

What delicious irony, what poetic justice, if Karl Rove has ensured the re-election of Barack Obama. It looks like Turdblossom has stepped in it again.

©2012 Tom Cordle