

Field marshal Rove?

The leader of the Tea Party Patriots organization issued an apology on Tuesday to Karl Rove after the group sent out a fundraising email with a doctored photo depicting the GOP adviser in a Nazi uniform.

Wait a minute? Republicans calling other Republicans Nazis??? Whoa! This means the Tea party blockheads are beginning to hate Rove with the same sort of bile these characters normally reserve for Obama? How very, very fascinating!

The solicitation was titled, “Wipe the Smirk Off Karl Rove’s Face” and read:

“Karl Rove believes he can raise hundreds of millions of dollars, crush the Tea Party movement and protect the big-government status quo in Washington from millions of freedom loving Americans.”

Hilarious, but all too predictable. There is nothing, I repeat nothing, that gives me more joy than to see the country’s DUMBEST voting block splintering into angry, impotent… hate cults. To watch the disciplined Republican Party devolve into fractious groups that utterly despise each other—in real time, yet—is such a deeply pleasurable thing.

From all appearances, the GOP still cannot fathom the demographic tidal wave that hit them in the ass on Election day. Forget about all this talk of “rebranding.” I mean, these guys are fucked—fuckity fuck fuck fucked—and the smartest ones in their ranks have figured this out. They’ve got an insurmountable problem on their hands called their own voters!

How can you cater to the lowest IQ buffoons, racists, gun nuts, women haters, Creationist lunatics and cranky old people for decades and then try to turn that barge of fools around on a dime, all the while losing elections and presenting your biggest donors with NOTHING for the return on their (huge) investments? It can’t be done and I think the younger Republicans realize the brand is now so badly tainted and beyond repair that they’re starting to think “Why bother with these dipshits?”

The savvy old hands like Newt Gingrich know this. When he waged his notoriously vicious scorched earth campaign against Mitt Romney in the GOP primaries last year, it quite obviously got to the point where Gingrich just didn’t give a fuck anymore. He wasn’t in it for the good of his party (if he was he never would have considered running in the first place), he was only in it for himself. Even longtime Gingrich watchers were shocked by the hardcore nature of his attacks. Republicans aren’t supposed to speak ill of their fellow Republicans. Haven’t they heard of Reagan’s 11th Commandment? Newt pissed on Romney with gleeful abandon.

Turns out that might’ve been Newt just clearing his throat for his latest scheme…

Gingrich was left badly in debt by his ill-fated Presidential candidacy. One of his think tanks was forced into bankruptcy last Spring and he was reportedly nearly $6 million in debt by June. Say what you want about Newt, he’s got a pretty astute sense of what the most numbnuts conservative punter really cares about. If “Newt Inc.” (as Gingrich calls his various enterprises) is faltering, what’s (newly) poor Newt gonna do? It’s reinvention time.

If the party’s fucked anyway, I predict that Gingrich is going to make a new career out of what he previewed last year, and that is vilifying “the Republican establishment” for fun and profit. I’m pretty sure he looks at the carcass of the GOP like a vulture would, as something to be picked clean. I can’t say I blame him.

Even if the Republican Party moving forward from 2013 is relegated to a mere shadow of its former self, a diminishing and rapidly dying-off fiefdom of free market/Fox News/Christianist idiocy, what’s left of the GOP will still be an awful lot of people. Newt can be the leader of that club. He’ll never, ever get near the White House, but there are tens of millions of dollars in it for him to wrest a good portion of the GOP and divert it into his own personal cash cow. Newt can do that demonizing Karl Rove as the personification of the establishment and setting himself up as the “anti-Rove.”

I think it could happen. If there is one thing the Tea partiers love, it’s a mean cuss. Who’s meaner than Newt Gingrich? I can’t see their allegiance going readily to other GOP figures. And look how visible he’s been lately. Newt has adroitly sniffed the fart of populist rage that the GOP’s rank and file feel towards the party’s establishment. There’s a cheap and cheerful way for him to capitalize on it and that is to pile on Karl Rove.

What’s hilarious to me, though, is how Gingrich manages to keep a straight face while saying shit like this, as he wrote in Human Affairs:

I am unalterably opposed to a bunch of billionaires financing a boss to pick candidates in 50 states. This is the opposite of the Republican tradition of freedom and grassroots small town conservatism.

So wrote the man whose entire run at the nomination was funded by ONE billionaire, Sheldon Adelson!

Obviously Gingrich believes Republicans have the memory of goldfish, but you can see how he’s positioning himself and it’s clever. If you have Rove leading the establishment Republican charge and the Newtster setting himself up to profit from the appearance of combating Rovers influence, well, grab some popcorn, this is going to get good.