On the evening of Sunday, March 9th 2008 Karl Rove, former advisor to GW Bush, came to Iowa City at the invitation of the UI Lecture Committee. The afternoon was filled with protest and song, leading up to the event itself. There was a mock trial condemning Mr. Rove of war crimes. The Radical Cheerleaders gave cheers. The newly formed Johnson County chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War came, holding protest signs. Women For Peace Iowa had a display of 1000 miniture coffins set up in the lobby. Street theater set a circus-like tone for the event.
The audience was boisterous, even heckling the MC whose job was to introduce the featured speaker. When Mr. Rove took the stage, a group of students stood on their chairs with their back to him, while several audience members picked up their chairs and turned them around, sitting with their backs to the stage for the duration of the event. Mr Rove stared, amazed, at the backs of the students, who were wearing t-shirts stained with blood for the occasion. Those standing were eventually persuaded to sit down. Then Mona Shaw stood and recited something, and although she was shouting, I could not make out the words. When she was lead away, another person picked up where she had left off until he too was lead away. I read in the papers that they were attempting to make a citizen’s arrest. After those brief departures, we got back to the agenda, which was an interview conducted by a very brave professor of journalism. The professor asked Rove if he was always received like this. “Not everywhere,” said Rove. “Not when I go to the grocery store.” After noting that Keith Oberman had called Karl Rove the “worst ever”, “Worse than Hitler? Worse than Mussolini? Worse than the guy who invented aluminum bats?”
The professor proceeded to tell Mr. Rove about a phone call he had received from a very distraught woman who objected to the event. He gathered that her son had been a soldier killed in the war in Iraq. What do you say about that?
Rove told a story about a family who met with Bush after their son had been killed in the war. This family had lost one son, was shipping out another, the mother was wonderfully patriotic, and the father asked that he, at 61 years old, be allowed to enlist and serve the Marines as well. I wasn’t sure if the father was being patriotic or suicidal, but I know what Rove wanted me to think.
When asked about the lies on which the war in Iraq was based, Mr. Rove denied that they were lies. What about the hundreds of citations? Oh, that’s just the liberal media. The professor stared at him, dumbfounded, as Rove went on to insist that there was all this evidence to support the war. I hadn’t heard this rhetoric for several years now, and here it was as if it were fresh and had never been debunked. He accused Joseph Wilson of lying and withholding evidence of Iraq’s intentions towards nuclear weapons. He went on and on about how President Clinton had been concerned about Saddam.
What about shredding the constitution and Habeas Corpus? That was one prisoner of war, yes, an American citizen, but captured on the battlefield, thus forfeiting his rights. He called the Guantanamo detainees “prisoners of war” three times before catching himself and switching the Bush rhetoric of “illegal combatants”.
What about the administration’s obsession with secrecy? What secrecy – All Rove’s records will someday be on display in some library somewhere for the world to see.
The unofficial email accounts? Well, there are rules, you need to keep your official work separate from your political work, so you have a separate email account for politicking.
Repression of free speech? Just look at all the free speech we have right here.
He was constantly interrupted by shouts from the audience. He had loyal supporters there too, who stood and cheered whenever they felt their guy had scored a point.
The professor asked hypothetically, if the president would have paid more attention to the news, perhaps FEMA could have found New Orleans more quickly after the devastation of Katrina. Rove was indignant at the suggestion that FEMA had not been there, insisting that they had done something (I’m not clear exactly what), and it was slanderous to say otherwise. He then laid the blame on the Louisiana state government for not following some formal procedure for requesting assistance and initiating the evacuation.
The program went very quickly, and then we went to the question and answer period.
When asked about how many Iraqis had been killed in the war, in his estimation, Rove was indignant again, calling it slanderous to suggest that our brave fighting men might have targeted innocent civilians.
When pressed on the issue, well, but Saddam had killed a lot more. “That doesn’t make it right” shouted an audience member. He asked her to repeat herself. “That doesn’t make it right.” Apparently this was a new insight for him.
What did Iraq have to do with 9-11? “Nothing, directly”, admitted Rove. But went on to defend the attack anyway.
What about this quote about empire, attributed to Rove, which Ron Suskind reported in the New York Times, October 17, 2004 : ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors.. and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ - Ron Suskind made it up. Just made it up. (Ah to be so creative)
There were a bunch more questions, but you get the jist. Here’s man whose reality is in serious conflict with what the rest of us know to be true. I left with the kind of splitting headache that results when world-views collide. A lesson if you will, on how gullible we all are – how hard we will try to make sense of nonsense. Mr.Rove has a reputation as a man of high intellect, a genius even. I went expecting to see signs of genius. I come away with the impression that he is more of a bamboozler.
2 Comments
March 13, 2008 at 12:29 pm
This reminds me of something Paul Fussel said when writing about WWI: “Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.” This whole encounter strikes me as simultaneously hilarious and horrific and illustrates the absurdity of the war (and the continual repetition of arguments we have long since challenged, debunked, and rejected).
March 13, 2008 at 12:30 pm
(Fussel, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975)