There are many people hoping the GOP chooses Sarah Palin to run against President Obama and we can finally get a definitive answer to this nagging question of national self-immolation.  I do not believe we will be able to make that choice.  The electorate tends to dance with radicals and buy them drinks but generally lets them go home alone to have more scary dreams. Well, here is another frightening notion to all y’all from your friends down here in Texas: President Rick Perry.

Perry painted the state an even brighter red, in part, because his democratic opponent, former Houston Mayor Bill White, suffered from the heartbreak of ineffectuality.  Nothing he tried inspired and his strongest messages were, “I’m not Rick Perry,” and “Rick Perry has been governor long enough.”  Coyote-killer Rick, however, was taking credit for the state’s geography and climate, which have been essential to job and business growth.  Regardless of what the governor argues, no one is coming here as a result of his or his party’s policies.  Property taxes are the worst in the country and the schools that are funded with that money are overwhelmingly mediocre, which has led to a scandalous charter school program.  Roads are falling apart, state parks are suffering decaying infrastructure, our air is the dirtiest in the country, mass transit is resisted by leadership, and we are ranked 48th or 49th in every government consideration other than raising up unqualified presidential candidates.

Perry might be a little light in his Lucchese’s but he has shown a great facility for ignoring standards and even the law without enduring penalty.  On the same day his reelection filled the column inches and the web site of the Austin paper, there was also a report that the governor was refusing to release a copy of a $4.5 million contract with the state.  The money went to a startup technology company founded by one of Perry’s major donors.  The American Statesman filed a Freedom of Information request but Perry’s office said no and ignored the fact that those millions are tax dollars and the manner in which they are spent is subject to public disclosure.  How money is used and where it comes from makes the kid from Paint Rock a bit nervous, unless, of course, he is the beneficiary.  He has become inexplicably wealthy during his term while earning less than $200,000 annually.

Conversely, he has turned down hundreds of millions in education dollars from the federal government that would have provided improvements to Texas schools because he claimed there were “strings attached.”  There were: good grades.

The red run of Election Day does more good for Perry’s opaque ambition than it does Sarah Palin’s.  As he brags about having the best job in America, the governor begins a national tour for his slim book about being fed up with the feds.  Answers to softball questions will saturate the airwaves from friendly media over the next few weeks and there will be talk of his Texas mandate and it how it compares to the whopping win George W. Bush earned in his race against former Texas Land Commissioner Garry Mauro.  The pretext to begin circulating Perry’s name for a presidential run will be easily established and the Tea Partiers that he energized with his irresponsible talk of secession will slowly turn pragmatic and confront the question of who can win in 2012.

Palin may not have been the personality who sent those Tea Partiers to the polls but she loves them and they have affection for her.  That attraction, however, cannot be consummated because there will never be enough Tea Partiers to elect a president. A compromise is inevitable since the GOP cannot field an electable candidate without energizing the party’s Diaspora, which has tipped way right.  What’s a bad speller to do?  Palin will do well in several early primary states and if the GOP wants to have any chance against President Obama it will have to engineer a ticket.

No matter what either party suggests, American presidential politics is more about viscera than intellect and issues.  Uncertain voters tend to make decisions based upon charisma and aesthetics.  Few people trust political ads and when they are busy trying to pay down credit card debt or keep the mortgage banker at bay they do not have time to read party platforms or study issues on candidate web pages.  Party activists are the only people paying attention to campaigns until the last few weeks.  Which leads us back to Rick Perry.

The GOP is already spending time trying to find a prospect to get Sarah to act a bit more politically demure.  Their options are limited.  Haley Barbour, the well-wired governor of Mississippi (State motto: Thank god for Texas) has the round face and weary drawl of an old school southern pol.  As connected as he is to governors’ mansions and DC insiders, he would have a tough task against Obama if for no other reason than aesthetics.  Mitt Romney is arguably too polished and too Mormon.  Whether they will acknowledge it or not there are millions of Christians in the US that still view Mormonism as a cult and it hurts Romney’s chances.  (The John Kennedy and first Catholic president analogy is not relevant.) Jeb Bush will not be able to help himself and will pursue the White House because he wants to prove he is the “smart one” in his family but there are no more than two dozen voters that want to see another Bush or Clinton on a national ticket.  New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will likely enter the picture as an independent and burn enough money to make E-Bay’s big bucks Meg Whitman look fiscally prudent but he will not travel well in the south; except for Florida.

The compromise ticket will be Perry and Palin.  They will make a lovely camera-ready couple from the union’s two biggest states.  (The Hair Pair?) Team Tea Party has fondness for both of them and the mainstream party machine can convince donors that Sarah will never get her hands on the nuclear launch codes but that she is necessary to elect the ticket.  The only complication is Karl Rove’s role.  He is still ginning up cash and running a big fund-raising operation and he has offended Palin and the Tea Party.  Karl, who does not seem to be able to keep friends, led Perry’s campaign when he won his first statewide office in Texas but there has been an alienation of affection.  Rove supported Sen. Kay Hutchison in her race for governor against Perry in the Republican primary.  Karl will need to be taught to heel but that should not be a problem since he has proven in the past that victory and money are more important than any principle.

So, there you go, America; since you are too busy to get informed we will just turn this into American Idol or maybe Dancing with the Stars.  Nothing to read.  Just use your cell phone or your remote to vote.  Have fun!!!

And we will go ahead and start grooming you another goofball down here in Texas.

“There were other lonely singers in a world turned deaf and blind who were crucified for what they tried to show. And their voices have been scattered by the swirling winds of time but the truth remains and someone wants to know.” – Kristofferson

In the morning dark, he stood in a cold corner at the entrance to the train station up in Michigan.  A young blind man was sitting on a vinyl chair across from him and they had in common their guitar cases.

“Looks like a narrow case ya got there, Dave,” he said.  “Must be electric, huh?”

“Yeah, yeah, it is.”

Dave pulled his white cane closer and tilted his head toward the voice.  A cab driver had dropped him at the station, referred to him by name at the end of his daily routine, and said Dave’s ride to work would be along momentarily.

“How long you been playin’?”

“About ten years.”  Dave had turned his head to face the speaker.

“Yeah, I’ve been at it about 40, myself,” he said.  “I play acoustic.  All I seem to do.  Hours and hours on end.”

When I looked at the guitar man, I was reminded of the fictional conversation between the young Kris Kristofferson and the grayed and wrinkled musician in a Nashville bar.  He sized up Kristofferson and his guitar and said, “It’s a rough life, ain’t it?”  The answer was, “Yeah, I guess so.”  “You ain’t makin’ any money are ya?”  “You been readin’ my mail.”

But this bard was no longer a boy and his chances of becoming Kristofferson had long ago expired.  His hair was strung in tangles from a bald spot on the top rear of his head and a pair of outsized glasses teetered crookedly on his nose.  The profile lacked a chin and his overbite almost hid the lower row of teeth.  A small shoulder pack was on the floor between his feet and it was covered with the kind of dirt and grease smears that come from years of sleeping under bridges and an open sky.  A frayed blue pullover sweatshirt was all that kept him from the cold and I noticed his canvas shoes were an unidentifiable color after the miles and the music.

It's Snowin' on Raton

“What do you play?” Dave asked.

“Only my stuff.  All original.”

“Oh wow.  Hours and hours?”

“Yep.”

When the agent opened the door to the station, he seemed relieved to be indoors and sat quickly on a chair.  He pulled out a thick book from his backpack and it had the kind of clear plastic cover that protects library loaners from wear.  I watched him read and thought that he was consuming words like food but it was only a novel by an unknown author.  He turned away from the pages after a while and kept looking around at people until finally he stood and went to the ticket window.  I was a few feet distant

“Yes, I called on the 800 number last night and made a reservation?”

“What was the name?”

I did not hear the rest of the conversation but the ticket agent stood motionless and patient as he reached into his pocket and delicately removed several twenty-dollar bills.  He held them in front of him for what felt like a long time but I did not know if it was because they were so rare and precious to him or he wanted others in that room to see that he was in possession of money.  I watched him slowly count them off and then slide cash in a neat pile under the window in exchange for a ticket.

Westbound on the Southwest Chief

“I’m going to New Mexico,” he said.  I realized that he had been aware I was watching him make his ticket purchase.

“What’s out there?” I asked.

“Something different than here and it’s warmer.”

His tee shirt was thin and had the name of a painting company in black letters across his chest.  “Meyer Painting, LLC.”  I thought that maybe he had done some work for them to buy his ticket.

“Are you going to sing and play out there?”

“Mister, I’m going to sing and play wherever I am.”

“Yeah, I reckon so.”

He took up his book when he sat down and read for 30 minutes or so and then dug in his pack and took out a pencil stub and a note card.  I thought he might be making notes for lyrics but he quickly finished a scribble and walked back to the ticket window and slid the paper beneath the glass.

“Mam,” he said.  “You were very helpful to me and I just thought I’d give you this web site address.  In case you’re interested, all my music is there.”

She smiled, pleased that he had thought of her and maybe because she felt for a moment like she was doing something more than just the prescribed duties of her job.  When he got back to his seat he put down his pack and his book and picked up the guitar case and held it against his chest with his hands locked by intertwined fingers.

I thought the guitar was the only thing he had ever owned or maybe it was the only thing that had never slipped away.

And now there is Contador.

The Tour de France winner has apparently failed a drug test that was conducted during one of the days he was riding to victory in July.  Contador is reported to have tested positive for a minute amount of a substance named clenbuterol, which is said to reduce fat, increase muscle mass, and assist breathing.  (Where does one apply for a prescription?)

Everything this drug does would be an advantage to someone trying to not only survive but also win the most difficult endurance contest humans have ever devised.  Clenbuterol, given to cattle, also improves the quality of beef.  In a news conference, that’s actually how Contador said he got the banned substance in his blood.  He claims a friend brought steaks over from Spain when the team chef complained about meat at the hotel where the riders were staying.  According to Contador, the clenbuterol must have been in his food.

That would be good if it were true.  But recent Tour history indicates we are heading for another disappointment and a fallen hero.  The names of the deniers are too many to list but they range from Floyd Landis to Tyler Hamilton and the lesser riders that are compelled to seek an advantage to either maintain the 34 mile-per-hour pace or fall behind; hit 70 homers or be just another slugger.

And then there is Lance.

Armstrong’s supporters believe he never, not once, never ever, cheated.  Unfortunately, the behavior of others during Lance’s ascent to the top of the cycling world has made his achievements even more improbable in the rarified world of endurance sports.  The peak of the doping era was from the late 90s into the middle part of the current decade and Lance excelled at a time when cheating was widespread.  Is it fair to question his success?  Can a non-doper beat all of those dope heads?

There is some evidence to suggest Armstrong is a bit of a genetic mutant.  Several reports indicate that his ability to ingest and process oxygen, which is measured through a test called VO2 uptake, is far beyond normal.  His work ethic is also legendary.  Lesser athletes miss workouts, take an unscheduled day off, stay up late, have one beer too many; Armstrong did not have that reputation.  His story is one of singular focus and the science of conditioning.  He and his trainers, especially the e stimable Chris Carmichael, understood exertion, recovery, food, and peaking.  Armstrong’s was the most calculated training program possibly ever designed for an endurance sport.

But is he really so gifted that he is able to outperform other talented and dedicated cyclists even as they are fortifying their own cardiovascular systems with pharmaceuticals?  That is the question that turns Lance Armstrong into a suspect for investigators like Jeff Novitzky, the federal agent who built the case against baseball slugger Barry Bonds.  Whatever his motivation, Novitzky appears good at his job and that is undoubtedly unsettling for Team Livestrong.

The Dogged Investigator Novitzky

Novitzky, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigator, is concentrating partially on an event that is alleged to have occurred in the hospital when Lance was being treated for cancer.  An Armstrong teammate, Frankie Andreu, who does commentary on the Tour de France for the Versus Network, and his wife, Betsy, supposedly heard Lance tell a doctor that he used performance-enhancing drugs.  The question is one that likely would have had to be asked during the course of developing a chemotherapy protocol for a recovering cancer patient.  Armstrong has denied the allegations but Andreu later acknowledged that he doped up when he was riding with Lance on the U.S. Postal Service team. Stories have also recently been published to suggest that there was widespread doping on the Postal team and bikes were sold to pay for drugs, which, if true, turns into the kind of fraud and federal crime that could destroy the reputation and career of Armstrong.  Novitzky also has audiotapes of phone calls made to Betsy Andreu by an Armstrong friend that worked for Oakley sunglasses.  They are surprisingly vitriolic and might have an impact on grand jurors hearing the case in Los Angeles.

These yarns, however, are either little more than internecine squabbles among gifted and jealous athletes or they are the unraveling of one of the greatest sports frauds since the Black Sox baseball scandal in 1919.  No one even seems willing to contemplate the notion that Lance Armstrong might be a fraud.  And what if he is?  Is it necessary, at this point, to take him down and is it worth the tax dollars expended in this investigation?  There ought to be some way to balance the good done by the Livestrong Foundation against whatever might be the outcome of an investigation and a trial.  No one is suggesting we let a cheater be a hero or get away with a sham but where is this taking our culture?

Former Armstrong Teammate Andreu

I met Lance once when I did an interview with him after his first Tour de France win.  He was abrupt and seemed not to want to be bothered with a TV crew, as he got ready to take off on a training ride.  Cordiality and small talk did not seem to be a part of his portfolio.  His answers were matter of fact and he did not appear to have any sense of wonder about what he had just accomplished.  The man was all business.  Lance wanted to ride and we were in his way so we stepped aside

But Jeff Novitzky will not.

“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball.  I’ll tell you what I do.  I stare out the window and wait for spring.”  ~Rogers Hornsby
When I got the news that Ernie Harwell had died, I was, appropriately, at a baseball game.  I looked at the message on my phone and then heard the distracting crack of a bat.  A five foot, ten inch, 215 pound, left-handed, designated hitter for a university team had just gotten the better part of a high and outside fastball.  The baseball appeared to rise into the cloudless evening sky of Central Texas and hang there in the light that shimmers between the ending of a day and the arrival of night. Momentarily, though, the ball rose on a gentle breeze before spinning to the ground in a bullpen beyond the fence in left field. I had no other thought than to contemplate how Mr. Harwell might have described that home run.

Ernie Harwell

If America had a voice, it would sound like Ernie Harwell.  He was resonant and reassuring without being intrusive. Listeners heard confidence and kindliness as a subtext to his descriptions of baseball games. We thought we knew Mr. Harwell but he definitely knew us.  Harwell understood that there was an almost sacred connection between fans and their teams and he always gave us reason to believe in happy outcomes.  If only we got one more runner on and the tying run came to the plate, who knew what might happen?  This was the optimism with which he lived his life and it is narrative he told so well in Michigan, a place where hope can be a transient thing.  He spoke the story of America in the metaphor of baseball.  Learn to lose with grace and win with humility and never stop trying.

Mostly, though, the Tiger’s legendary broadcaster sounded like summer and when I heard him describe a bounding ball to second there were visions of watermelons and picnics and the lake in front of my eyes, almost dancing over the melting Michigan snow banks.  Mr. Harwell’s voice on the radio meant that the sun was moving northward across the equator and all the rhythms of the world were swinging sweetly to a song of vacation and ninth inning walk off homeruns. As soon as I heard him broadcasting each spring, I became convinced I had seen my last snowfall of the winter.  Mr. Harwell was the boy eternal who never quit loving his childhood game and refused to think there was anything more important than being a kid excited about stolen bases and strikeouts and the beautiful line made by a well-struck ball.  Who can say he was wrong?

We lived among the southern families come up from Dixie to work in Michigan’s car plants and there was an overgrown field on the edge of our neighborhood we turned into a diamond.  Our worn out baseball was covered with electrician’s tape and our wooden bats were usually taped and tacked where the handles had been broken. We shared a few gloves and when we played the game we dreamed of making the clutch hit or the diving catch in the big leagues, usually for the Tigers, and always with Ernie Harwell describing our great achievements.  On days that there were little league games, we would play catch near the radio, which had been placed next to a back door, and we listened to Mr. Harwell call the Tiger games until it was time to leave for our own contest.

Ernie Harwell’s voice was the mood music to those lovely Michigan days when cottony clouds drifted overhead, dandelions bloomed on lawns, and almost anyone who wanted to work had a job.  He was the texture to a world where cars were coming off of assembly lines and families were buying homes and people from California were trying to get to the Midwest to be a part of Motown.  The jobs and the technology and the music were all being made in that magical place and the Tigers were leading the Yankees in the chase for the pennant.  Al Kaline and Norm Cash were giants but Ernie Harwell sent them out to live in our houses and cars and made us feel a part of a rush to greatness.

I do not recall a summer day of my youth where I did not hear the voice of that good and gentle man.  I never knew Mr. Harwell but I had heard that he was moral and humble and always had time for the fans that loved him as much as they loved the players.  On my visits back to Michigan as an adult, when I heard him on the radio, I was able to close my eyes and go back instantly to the days when I dreamed of replacing Rocky Colavito in left field for Detroit.  I believed in the place that was implicit in the sound of Ernie Harwell’s voice and it was hopeful and responded to effort and led to success.  As a homesick professional broadcaster living on the Texas border, I once wrote a letter to Mr. Harwell and told him how I aspired to become the Tiger play-by-play man when he retired.  Predictably, he sent back a gracious note wishing me well and thanking me for being an unfaltering fan.

The year Detroit caught fire with race and riots the only voice that I thought was informed by reason was Mr. Harwell’s.  In 1967, when Americans were fighting with each other over differences in skin pigmentation, I hid in baseball and was comforted by the constancy of the game.  Tiger baseball brought us back together and Mr. Harwell’s voice stitched us into a single city.  The next year we triumphed when the hometown team won the pennant and the World Series in the last year of division play.  I was beside a radio and can still recall the description by Mr. Harwell.  “Swung on and there’s a line drive base hit to left field.  Wert is rounding third; he’ll score and the Tigers will win the pennant.  Let’s listen to the bedlam in Tiger Stadium.”

I choose to believe there is a place where baseball is always being played; the sun shines perpetually, there is a gentle breeze to left field, and the players are eternally young and strong.  The stadium is filled with fans and excitement and there is a gentle voice on the radio telling everyone who is not there to, “Come on out to the ballpark.  There’s still a lot of great baseball to be enjoyed.” Those of us who have not made it to the game yet can still hear Ernie Harwell describing how wondrous things will be as soon as we arrive and look out on that perfect green diamond.

We are still listening, Mr. Harwell.  We always will.

We might be powerless.

The oil flowing out from the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico may be under such great pressure that we do not possess technology to stop the tragedy.  Chances are quite good we have no true sense of the dire nature of the situation.  The facts that have been ascertained, however, lead to a dark scenario.

We know that the blowout preventers did not work but we do not know why.  There are theories, though.  The Deepwater Horizon rig was floating on pontoons about 5000 feet above the floor of the Gulf.  When drillers struck an oil deposit, the bit was reported to be at about 18,000 feet, which is approximately three and a half miles beneath the platform.  Does science even know what kind of pressure can be encountered at that depth, under almost a mile of water and two and half miles of rock?

BP and Transocean, which owns the rig, has said there was a maximum working pressure of 20,000 PSI but the system was able to handle a kickback pressure from gasses of about 60,000 PSI.  The breakdown of the blowout preventers can be interpreted to mean the pressure coming up from the hole exceeded 60,000 PSI.  Generally, various mixtures of mud circulate up and down the drill pipe to act as lubricants and equalize pressures encountered at great depth, and this process was said to be working at the time of the accident.  Does this mean it’s possible, even likely, that the Deepwater Horizon encountered pressures current technology are not equipped to handle?

Although BP and Washington are trying very hard to convince the public that everything possible is being done to stem the flow of crude, there is seemingly little that might be accomplished.  5000 feet below the surface of the water with oil blasting out at tens of thousands of PSI, and wreckage from the giant rig scattered about, fixes are not easy to find.  The latest plan is for a special funnel to be placed over the spout, which will then force the flow into a pumping channel.  But how does a funnel get placed over the top of anything pushing at that kind of pressure?  Consider that story to be an unrealistic solution.

A well blowout in 1979 offers a bit of context; except the Deepwater Horizon horror show is already about to transcend what happened in the Bay of Campeche off the coast of Mexico.  The Ixtoc 1 rig blew and began to spew crude that flowed uninterrupted for nine months.  Before the well was capped, 3,000,000 barrels of crude had drifted north to Texas and the northern coast of Mexico.  The endangered Kemps-Ridley turtle, which nests along the border beaches, had to be airlifted to safety and has only begun in recent years to recover in population.

The Ixtoc disaster, however, is spit in the ocean compared to the potential damage of the British Petroleum apocalypse.  If estimates are correct and the current blowout is putting 200,000 gallons or 5000 barrels of crude per day into the waters of the Gulf.  Ixtoc’s blowout was not capped until two relief wells were drilled and completed at the end of those nine months, and regardless of optimistic scenarios from the federal government or BP, relieving the pressure on the current flow is probably the only way to stop the polluting release of oil. The only way to relieve that pressure is with additional wells. No one is going to honestly say how much time is needed to drill such wells but consider the scope of environmental damage we are confronting if it requires at least as long as Ixtoc?  Nine months of 5000 barrels of crude per day ought to turn the Gulf of Mexico into a lifeless spill pond and set toxins on currents that will carry them to deadly business around the globe. And there is no way to know with any certainty if nine months will be sufficient time for capping.

Nor are there guarantees relief wells are the fix. What do we do, in that case?  Humans cannot function at 5000 feet of ocean depth and the mitigation efforts currently are being handled by robotic remotes.  What is left to us as a solution other than an explosive device, which is often what is deployed during above ground blowouts.  Given the pressures reported and the amount of flow, we may need a bunker-buster nuke to be placed over the wellhead.  We can then begin to talk about the water pressures caused by burst at detonation and residual radiation.  Is that a better or worse situation?  Certainly, aquatic life in the Gulf of Mexico is doomed unless there is a reclusive genius to step forward and save us from our great failure.

The attorney general of Texas, Greg Abbot, informed reporters that it appears Texas will escape harm.  Abbot’s visionary powers must exceed his legal skills since there is no way to know when and even if the well will ever be capped.  In fact, if there is no plug placed in the hole, it is not inconceivable that no part of the planet’s oceans will escape harm.  According to the non-profit, non-partisan, Air and Waste Management Association, a quart of crude oil will make 150,000 gallons of water toxic to aquatic life.  BP, which has been marketing itself as an energy company “beyond petroleum,” is setting loose upon the planet what is quickly turning into humankind’s worst environmental disaster.

Tone-deaf politicians, especially from Texas, are trying to manage public fears, which is exactly what the state’s former governor attempted in 1979.  Bill Clements, who was one of the founders of SEDCO and owned the Ixtoc platform, originally described concerns as “much ado about nothing.”  As oil moved toward the pristine beaches of the Padre Island National Seashore, his advice was to “pray for a hurricane.”  I confronted Clements on his lack of concern and he stuck his finger in my chest and told me the state was not hurt.  Thirty years later the tar balls still roll in with shifts of tide and wind and oil was everywhere on the beach for years.

Anyone who thinks this tragedy is not going to result in massive kills of marine life is either blind, ignorant, or in denial.  The one scenario that we all refuse to confront is the possibility that it is beyond our capabilities to stop this undersea blast of oil.  If that is the case, the flow continues until the pressure eases, which might be years.  How much ecological injury will that cause our planet?

Nobody knows.

“They say I killed six or seven men for just snorin’.  That ain’t true.  I only killed one man for snorin’.” – John Wesley Hardin, Texas outlaw

The governor of Texas is a weinie.  I can’t reach any other conclusion after reading the report about him shooting a coyote that threatened his daughter’s puppy.  Rick Perry said that he was jogging on a hill country trail near where he lives in a rented home and the animal came out and threatened his little dawgie.  Governor Gun pulled out a Ruger and sent the coyote to the big lonesome and empty prairie coyotes go to when governors gun them down.

But I’ve got some questions, your governorship.

First, I can say I’ve run thousands of miles on trails in Texas and I have never once thought of carrying a gun.  Well, yeah, a squirt gun.  I used to have a Doberman that came after me on a dirt road and I solved that by mixing some ammonia into water and putting it into a little squirt gun.  Got the big dog in the eyeballs next time he came barking after me and when he saw me pass by a few days later he ran away more like a chicken than a dog.  No shot fired in anger.

Perry said he carried the gun because he was afraid of snakes and that a number of people living in that area have lost pets to wild animals.  Well, Governor Gun, that’s the way nature is ordered.  Big fish eat little fish.  Wild animal eat domestic animal.  You don’t want your cat turned into a coyote hairball, keep it in the house.  But afraid of snakes and you carry a gun?  I don’t know any trail runner under the Lone Star sky that hasn’t come across a rattler or seven.  And not one of them ever said, “Hey, I think I’ll carry a gun and kill rattlers the next time.”  Unless you surprise a rattler, it’s going to slither away real danged fast.  And governor, I’ve seen you run; you aren’t going to surprise a snake or a turtle.

A Texas rattler to be fearful of.....

Too much of yer yarn just doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.  Whenever I see you plodding around Lady Bird Lake, you generally have two DPS guys, but always at least one trailing you. Sometimes they run.  Often they are on bikes.  And they have guns.  What the hell do you need a gun on a running trail for when you’ve got, according to the AP story, two DPS security guys running with you?  Three guns and one coyote?  That’s just not an honorable way to handle these things governor, and not the way we do it in Texas.

And, although I’ve never done it, seems to me like running and carrying a gun has to be kind of uncomfortable.  I read you were packing your pistol in a holster.  I just find it odd that you put on the running shorts, the Nike shoes, a tee shirt, and a ball cap, and then strapped on your coyote widow maker.  Who the hell does such a thing? And not just a regular ol’ 380 Ruger.  This baby has a laser sight.  You’re really scared, aren’t you?  Those nasty slithering, phallic things on the ground don’t have a chance, do they? Seriously, you are so afraid of snakes that you armed yourself to go for a run?  Aren’t there some other unsettled issues that you aren’t talking about here?  Let me also add that you ought to be thankful for your Anglo-Saxon heritage.  Being ethnic and running with a gun in Texas, on a trail or a road, might end up with a different living creature other than an animal being shot.

There’s something else.  If this happened in February, why are you just now sharing this?  It seems to me that you would have been a little excited the day you turned coyote killer and you might have mentioned it to a reporter or a political pal that could have let it slip to someone, somewhere.  But nothing until two months later?  Sorry, sounds a little too neat.  And if you were trying for the tough guy image, whacking a coyote isn’t really gonna do that for you.  Nor is packin’ heat cuz you are afraid of things that go slither in the sun.  I guess I have to say I don’t believe your story.  I need testimony or signed witness statements from your two backup gunmen in the DPS.  That might convince me.

Or let’s just do this by the books.  The law books.  If you were accused of being a coyote killer, the law would have to respond to habeas corpus and bring up the body to prove someone had been killed.  Or you’d have to be cut loose to deal with more snakes.  But let me turn that around on you.  Prove you killed a coyote.  Habeas coyote corpus.  Ah, but you can’t produce a body because the critter has been gone for two months.  You said he’s “mulch.”

So’s your story, governor gun.

“The promise of America is that something is going to happen, but after a while you grow tired of waiting because nothing ever does happen to people in America; except they grow old.  And nothing ever happens to American art, either, because the story of America is the story of the moon that never rose.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Time wrinkles a man’s memory as much as it does his skin.  There is also a chance that a few dozen electroshock sessions had ruined my father’s recall.  In his final years Daddy was unable to remember ever striking his wife or children or how his whirling fists had terrorized the people he had said he loved.  His children saw this loss of memory as a kind of grace, though Ma’s anger had not greatly lessened and she thought Daddy needed to be reminded of the pain he had wrought on his family.  Instead, his hazy reminiscences carried him back to when he was a boy in the South and they created for him a pair of attentive loving parents and a bountiful farm he shared with his siblings.  Often, I saw him staring into a blank distance and smiling and I thought I knew what he was seeing.

Although I had not been responsible for the breakage, I wanted to fix what might be repaired between my father and me.  I was never going to be the son who hunted and fished and took joy from the sound of a gun in the woods but there was a chance we might be comfortable with each other, if not close, and maybe he could come to understand his eldest son.  We were given some extra time when Daddy’s broad chest was split for a heart bypass and his life extended after he had retired to Mississippi.  All his years of hard work on the assembly line and the exercise he did on a weight bench in the back yard did not much reduce the damage caused by the decades he spent loving fried eggs, ham, bacon, steak, butter, ice cream; or anything he might eat that could be deep-fried, grilled, buttered, or sugared.

Living on the Line

On one of my last visits to Mississippi, I sat on the steps of Daddy’s back porch as he sipped a tumbler of whiskey flavored by a peppermint candy he had dropped into the bottom of the glass.  When he was young he rarely drank but a friend from the factory had told him that a spot of whiskey now and then had the power to soften the arthritic pain in his joints.  He put the glass between his feet on the porch and then looked at me as if he were going to make a profound confession.

“You know, when I was a boy, horses could still fly, Jimmy.”

I do not know if he thought I had an education that might confirm what he had just said but he looked at me in anticipation of my response.

“Daddy, I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Hell, I mean what I said, that’s what I mean.  Horses could still fly.”

He ground his lower teeth against his uppers and pursed his lips like he was expecting me to provide evidence he was wrong.

“Daddy, horses could never fly.  That’s silly and you know it.”

“Aw hell, Jimmy, don’t tell me.  Horses could fly when I was boy.”

“Why in the world would you say such a thing?  Can you imagine a horse flying””

“I don’t have to imagine it,” he growled.  “I done seen it, buddy boy.  And so did Poppa.  He seen it all the time when he was a boy, too.  They was just getting’ to where they couldn’t fly no more when I was little.  They did what you call evolve a way from it, is what you call it.  But we saw ‘em flying every mornin’ when we went to chop cotton.”

“You saw a horse fly?”

“I done told you that already, damnit.”

Daddy reached for his tumbler of whiskey and ice and turned his head away, disgusted by my unwillingness to accept such an idea.

“Well, I’m telling you, horses can’t fly,” I said, softly.  “They never could, Daddy.  There are horses in mythology that have wings and flew but there has never been any such animal that has lived on earth.”

“Aw, go to the devil; you don’t know what in the hell you’re talkin’ about.  What do you think Poppa and I saw then?  He seen ‘em before 1900 and I seen ‘em when I was comin’ up in the 20s.”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I have no idea.”

“You damn sure don’t have no idea,” Daddy told me.  “’Cause I know what I know and I know horses used to be able to fly.  Cain’t nobody tell me what I seen with my own two damned eyes.”

He threw back his head and swallowed a gulp of whiskey and looked at me again.  He knew who I was but my father never understood what I was.  Often, he referred to my career in television journalism as “that TV doin’s’.”  The business left him unimpressed because, while visiting a broadcast newsroom where I was working, he had been able to read as quickly as the AP wire clicked out copy onto a paper spool.

“You know, maybe you are right,” I told my father.  “I guess I need to do some more research.  I never heard of horses flying but I suppose that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.  I’ll check it out.”

“You do that, buddy boy,” Daddy said, victorious in his persuasion.  “You’ll find out what I already know.”

The pecans were falling from the trees early that year and we went out behind Daddy’s house and gathered a large bag.  He walked me through his garden and explained what he grew in each crop row that summer and told me about the boy who came and chopped the weeds because Daddy was no longer able to swing a hoe.  A healthy garden with good tomatoes and corn was always a matter of pride to my father and to be able to grow things well was an important measure of a man.

“You shoulda tasted my tamaters, buddy boy,” he said.  “They was as big as my fist and the sweetest you ever did see.  I had more corn than I could put back.  I got a freezer full of it and gave the rest to some colored folks.”

Back inside, we cracked the pecans and spread their fruit across a cookie tin.  Daddy got out a stick of butter and sliced thin pats to place on each pecan half and then he used a shaker to sprinkle salt across the top.  As they heated in his oven, we shared the whiskey and he told me more stories of being a boy during the Great Depression.  The one he had been repeating since I was little was about a headless horseman my grandfather and he had come across one morning while taking a buckboard wagon loaded with hay into town.

“He had his hands up just like this,” Daddy said, holding his arms out.  “But they wasn’t no hands and the reins was just floatin’ in the air at the ends of his sleeves.  And right where his neck shoulda started and his head oughta been there wasn’t nothin’ but space and a big ole top hat was ridin’ in the air above the empty place where his head was supposed to be and he was ridin’ a big, ole painted mare in circles around a oak tree in front of a farmhouse.  Poppa said, ‘Son, do you see what I see?’  And I told him, ‘I sure do, Poppa.’  He told me, ‘Don’t you ever talk about this to no one, son, ‘cause all they’ll do is think you’re crazy.’  I never did tell a soul until Poppa died and then I told all y’all kids.”

After eating the pecans, Daddy asked me to draw him bathwater and pour into it a bottle of vinegar and a half box of Epsom salts.  Hot water and vinegar when combined with the salts, he had heard from someone in Starkville, was a cure for arthritis.  His bones and all their connective tissue had grown creaky and aching from the uncountable hours he spent lifting bumpers out of a General Motors metal press and stacking them on wooden pallets.  While he soaked, I wandered around Daddy’s cluttered and disorganized house and wondered how he made it alone, what value or purpose did he see in his isolated existence in the far woods, a thousand miles from his children.

The next morning, he drove me around in his used Lincoln Town Car and showed me where my grandparents were buried.  I had never met my grandfather and have only a vague early childhood memory of a brief encounter with my grandmother.   Daddy went past a high school and pointed out the window.

“That’s where I ‘quituated,’” he said.  “Poppa needed me to help on the farm during the Depression.”

As hard as I tried while staring at his old school, I was unable to imagine my father sitting at a desk and learning from teachers and books. During the course of his entire life, I had never seen Daddy with an open book in his hands and that seems to have had much to do with his economic destiny.  In over three decades of working the line and the metal presses, his gross annual income had rarely topped $10,000.

Because most of his children and grandchildren were living around Flint, Daddy gave up on Mississippi and moved back to Michigan for his final years.  He had hoped to have constant visitors to his little house in Sturgis, Mississippi but his children had busy lives and were inclined to spend vacation time in locations slightly more appealing than rural Mississippi.  Daddy lived frugally when he returned to Michigan, as he always had, in a house less than a mile from Ma’s old restaurant up by the Chevrolet plant, Joyce’s Coffee Shop, and he was only a few more miles from the assembly lines where he had bent his back to the hard work he had endured to provide for his family.  When he needed clothes, he often went to the Goodwill Store and bought brown paper bags full of unidentified articles of clothing for $1.50 and then took them home and picked through them for anything that might fit.

Before I left him that last time in Mississippi, I asked my father what he thought of the way his life had turned out.

“I just never had me a chaynch, Jimmy,” he answered.  “The crops was never good enough down here to be a farmer and I never did make enough money on the line up north.  I never got me a chaynch to do what I wanted.”

“I guess that was to be farmer?”

“That’s what I wanted when I come home from the war.  But when I was up north if I’d of had me some money I’d a bought some land around them factories and gotten rich.  I wanted to buy that lot on the corner of Hill and Fenton Roads years before they’s anything there and now they’s a big ol’ McDonald’s and grocery store there.  I’d a made a million dollars, buddy boy.”

“Did you hate working in the factory and building cars you couldn’t afford to own?”

“I hated a lot of stuff.  But in them days we did what we had to do.  The Buick job made the house payment and fed you kids.  But that’s about all it ever did.”

“Do you regret going up there, Daddy?”

“Naw.  I don’t think about it much.  Wasn’t no point.  I did what I had to do to provide.  I had yer mumma and three of y’all kids and it was all the work I could get so I took it.  That’s all.  When there was six of y’all, I had more kids than I could afford.  I never had time to look up and think about anything else.  Besides, I didn’t have nothing to sell but my arms and my back.”

“You think things might have been different for you if you would’ve stayed in Mississippi and married a girl from down home?”

“I don’t know.  I don’t think I was ever gonna have too much just ‘cuz a the way I come up, Jimmy.  We was raised to grow crops and take care a animals and they just wasn’t much use for that after a while.  I reckon I was lucky I got one a them factory jobs in Michigan.  I know it wudn’t a hell of a lot a money but I did what I could, that’s all.  I don’t know that I’d of had me any better chaynch.”

While his heart began marking its final beats, Daddy lay in the hospital and accorded me a kind of acknowledgement that would have meant nothing to most sons.  My brother Tim, who was handling Daddy’s finances, had also been asked to take care of our father’s old Lincoln.  While I was visiting Michigan from Texas, Daddy urged Tim to let me into his automotive fraternity.

“Why don’t you give Jim the keys to my car so he can take it for a drive and see the kinda ride I like?” Daddy asked.

Tim smiled and we later drove the aging brown Lincoln around Flint.  This seemed to be as close as my father was able to draw me until his failing heart required that his leg be amputated.  I was at his bedside while the drugs were still massaging his nerves and he reached up and pulled me down toward his chest.

“I love you, son,” he whispered.

The words seemed so simple to say.  I wish I had heard them frequently as a boy but here they were, and no matter how much wrong he had done, I loved the sound of that sentence from my father.  What son would not?

“I love you, buddy boy.”

In his dreams as he tilted slowly toward his end, Daddy had begun to be visited by his Uncle Horace, who had taken him hunting and fishing as a boy and who he had loved the way he would have liked to have loved his father.  Horace was constantly gliding through Daddy’s sleep and telling him he was waiting for him and where they were going to find abundant deer and catfish and bass and the kinds of horses they were going to ride across eternity.

“I don’t know if I’m gonna see Momma and Poppa after I’m gone,” Daddy told me.  “I hope I do.  But I’m damned sure gonna be with Uncle Horace.  Ain’t no doubt in my mind, buddy boy.  He’s waitin’ on me right now.”

Before he was transferred to a nursing home for rehabilitation after the removal of his leg, Daddy pleaded with doctors to freeze the excised limb so it could be buried with him when he died.  He was insistent that he go to the next place with all of his limbs, the whole and robust man he had been when he walked through the world.  The doctors convinced him they were not allowed to preserve severed limbs and that God would make him complete again after he was gone.

Leaving the nursing home, Daddy was transferred to a group housing facility where he lived in a private residence with other people dealing with infirmities.  My sister Becky visited him often and he asked her to order him an inflatable raft because he intended to go fishing as soon as he recovered his health.  Daddy had focused his contemporary dreams on an area north of Las Vegas, which he had decided was crossed by streams overcrowded with fish and there was rich soil to grow all the crops he needed to feed himself.  No one was able to convince him that this spot on the map was a desert.  Becky asked him how he might get himself into the blow up raft with just one leg and he said that he would “damn sure figure it out by himself and he didn’t need nobody, no way, no how to tell him how to do nothin’.”

Exasperated by what he viewed as near imprisonment, Daddy managed to slip away from the care facility in his wheelchair.  No one knew where he had gone but Daddy had always had strength and independence and he was having difficulty relying on other people.  He was discovered many hours later a few miles distant from where he was living when someone had called to inquire about his identity.  Not too long after he was returned to his group home, a caregiver found my father lying motionless on his side.  His angry heart had stopped and all of the fierce blood that had flowed through him for so long had pooled along one side of his body.

The muscles of Daddy’s arms had atrophied and shriveled and when he died he had the same skinny bird-like appendages that he had carried around as a teenager.  I still thought he looked large, though, even in his final repose, just as he did when he was standing upright and daring the world to test him with whatever it wanted.  The part of his life that I was proudest of was his time serving his country during World War II and I arranged for his casket to be draped in a United States flag.  Daddy was buried off of Hill Road not far from the factory where he had worked and the house that he and Ma had purchased when they were young and hopeful.  Becky and her husband Skip take a blanket to lay upon his grave once each year and I have Daddy’s flag in a triangle box above my writing desk down in Austin.  He belongs to the soil of Mississippi but even in death he wanted to be near his children in Michigan because he had at last come to know and love them and he wanted whatever there was to have of us even after he was gone.  Daddy kept an empty space in the graveyard beside him for Ma, just in case the girl he never stopped loving chooses, in the end, to come back to him.

“I don’t have no regrets about nothin’,” was one of the last things my father had said to me.  “I lived in the best times they was to live in.  I seen human bein’s go from ridin’ in buckboard wagons to walkin’ on the moon.  You cain’t see much more ‘n that, buddy boy.”

I think of him that way now, as a man who did not waste time second guessing himself, and who did not see the Buick car plant as a place that killed him but as the source of his livelihood and the method he used to care for his family.  Daddy and Ma scraped by on small collections of ten dollar bills to make their 62 dollar a month mortgage payment but I once had a new bike and a baseball glove and a bed to sleep in and fairly regular meals.  We were not privileged but the rise of the automotive industry almost certainly saved us from dirt poor farms down in Dixie.  There was more to our lives than there would have ever been if Daddy had stayed in the South busting the soil with his muscled back.

I hope he knows he made a good choice.

.

If they weren’t so patently dangerous, the political inanities of Texas Governor Rick Perry might be entertaining.  Unfortunately, it’s hard to keep up with the tempo of his pendulum swings in logic.  Perry famously pandered to the marginalized radicals of the GOP right by suggesting to various Texas Tea Parties that our state might still secede.

He started off toward the political precipice exactly a year ago; Perry turned down $556 million in federal funds for extended unemployment benefits for 45,000 Texans still looking for work.  He said there were too many strings attached.  What were these horrible requirements Texas had to abide by in order to bring back to the state some of the hard-earned tax dollars that had already been paid by the employed of Texas?  Horrendous, socialist demands like extending benefits for laid-off workers in retraining programs and increasing benefits for individuals who had lost their jobs and had dependents.

In an almost incomprehensible turn of hypocrisy, a few months later the longest serving governor in Texas history asked the federal government for a loan of $170 million to cover its existing unemployment benefits.  Because that was only a stopgap amount, the total is expected to reach $650 million in federal loans, which is about $100 million more than he rejected in stimulus money.

As they used to say in the Vega-Matic commercials: but wait!  There’s more!

When the stimulus package was passed by congress in January, the man from Paint Rock said he was not going to apply for the money Texas was eligible to receive for improvements in public school performance.  By some accounts, Texas could have gotten up to $700 million.  Our governor said he did not want to tie his great state to federal performance standards.  Of course, when his predecessor became president and forced the fatuousness of No Child Left Behind down America’s education throat, Perry made not a chirp.  And hell, there wasn’t even any money attached to that invasive piece of nonsense.  If Perry were protecting an exemplary education system by turning down stimulus money, his decision might have been logical.  Unfortunately, the Lone Star State is number 50 in our republic in percentage of residents with a high school diploma, and we are near the bottom in SAT scores.  According to the National Education Association, our current expenditures per student rank 44^th among states.  So, yeah, we’re in good shape.  Thanks for the offer of $700 million, Mr. President, but we’ve got no problems.

Peace like a Plane?

The convolutions of Mr. Perry’s gray matter must be a sight to behold because he’s now got another contradiction he is pursuing that is flat dangerous.  On the right side of his mouth, he speaks about secession and keeping Washington out of our lives but on the left side of his barbecue pit he’s now demanding the federal government deploy unmanned aerial drones along the US-Mexico border.  How does one secede while also using federal troops to militarize a border?  The recent killing of US Foreign Service workers in Ciudad Juarez has prompted the new round fear mongering.  Even if the assassinations were not a case of mistaken identities, as has been reported, putting drones into the air is a permutation of a declaration of war.  The war between the drug cartels has resulted in killings north of the Rio Grande but that is not a recent development and it is unclear how having the intrusiveness of big brother’s eye-in-the-sky floating overhead might do anything to prevent that bloodshed.  Perhaps, the governor ought to ask for enough spy planes to patrol the suburbs of Dallas and Houston and San Antonio and Austin and every other major city in America where those Mexican drugs are consumed.  There would be no fighting and dying over the lucrative supply lines in Mexico if there were not a burgeoning demand for narcotics in the land of the free.

The US-Mexico border region is an enchanting and mysterious place.  I lived near the big river for many years and I return on a regular basis.  Building walls and sending drones and radar blimps into the air will continue the transformation of a once-friendly frontier into a kind of war zone.  Nothing will be solved and the stakes will only get higher. I wonder what it will be like to be camping in the splendid Chisos Mountains on the South Rim, looking out at sunset from 8000 feet about the desert floor, and hear the distant drone of a drone.

A friend of mine, who spends most of his time in the ghost town of Terlingua just west of Big Bend National Park, fears the drones will be secretly armed and that one night when he is driving home from the Boat House Bar or Long Draw Pizza in the blackness of a western night, he might get lost on those bladed desert roads, look suspicious, and get lit up by a trigger happy twenty something staring at a remote screen in Dallas.                                  

The Lost Boy

In a way, that has already happened.  In 1997, the US deployed Joint Task Force 6, a military patrol of combined armed services, along the remote stretches of the border east of El Paso.  They wore camouflage and sunglasses and hid in the creosote and cactus.  A Marine saw what he thought was a drug smuggler in the distance and then he convinced himself the criminal had pulled a gun.  He aimed down range, shot, and killed an 18 year-old goat herder named Ezequiel Hernandez, Jr.  The boy was bringing the family’s goats up from the river where they had been drinking water.  He is buried on a lonely mesa with a view of the mountains to the west and Mexico to the south.  The house where he lived his entire life and the spot where he died are all visible standing next to his grave.  His impoverished family had little more than stones and a wooden cross his to mark the place where he lies.

An Unlived Life

And anyone who thinks that drones and guns and walls and soldiers will solve the problems on the border ought to stop by and visit Ezequiel’s grave.

In his book and the various interviews and speeches surrounding publication, Karl Rove has made a point of attacking information Wayne Slater and I reported and published regarding Rove’s background and the formative years of his political belief system.  The topic he has seemed most prickly about deals with his father’s sexual orientation.  As is his practice, Rove ignores facts to practice skilled denial.

Louis Rove’s personal life was nobody’s business until his adopted son decided to make gay rights a wedge issue in the campaigns of George W. Bush.  Rove, who recently pleaded for privacy during the divorce from his wife Darby, pushed policies in campaigns that were designed to interfere in the private lives of gays, lesbians, and transgender people.  Rove has no right to demand privacy when he refuses to respect it in the lives of other individuals and families.  His relationship with his father is context for his politics and interest in his father is a consequence of those politics.

When he was interviewed by Matt Lauer on The Today Show, Rove said he had no idea if his father was gay.  If this is the case, Karl was one of the few people who knew Louis Rove that was not aware of his sexual orientation.  In our book, The Architect: Karl Rove and the Dream of Absolute Power, (I disagreed with the publisher’s hyperbolic subtitle), I interviewed several people in Palm Springs, California about Louis Rove and his politically ambitious son.  Joseph Koons, who was Louis Rove’s best friend for 13 years, told me, “Louie didn’t hide the fact that he was gay. But he didn’t play it up either.  We had lots of gay and straight friends.  I was never the effeminate type and neither was Louie.  We didn’t play it up that way, either.  But he was gay.  And so am I.”

Although Joe Koons, a retired insurance company executive, was the only one of Louis Rove’s gay friends to go on the record for our book, two other neighbors were quoted and confirmed that Rove had lived openly as a gay man.  Koons took Rove to numerous social gatherings with other older gay men but Louis preferred to spend his time at home in his Palm Springs neighborhood.  Koons said he was not romantically involved with Louis but was as “close as a brother” and that Karl was completely aware of his father’s sexual orientation.

During an interview for our first book on Rove, Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, we asked the president’s political guru about the causes for the breakup of his parent’s marriage and what might have driven his mother, Reba Wood Rove, to commit suicide.  At the time, we were not aware of Louis Rove’s sexual orientation and were simply asking Karl to speculate because he remembered so vividly his father coming home on Christmas Eve, an ensuing argument, and then the end of the marriage without any real explanation from his mother.  An astute observer even at 19 when the marriage failed, Rove continues to claim 40 years later that he had no clue then or now that his dad way gay.  When I went to Palm Springs in 2005 prior to the publication of The Architect, one of Louis Rove’s neighbors literally laughed when I told him Karl claimed he didn’t know what happened to his parents’ marriage.

“He [Karl] was obviously hurt by the divorce.  It’s just absurd when he says, ‘I had no idea what the problems were with my parents and their marriage.’  He knew damned good and well what was going on.  His father had decided to come out of the closet.”

In fact, according to Louis Rove’s friend Koons, Rove not only knew his father’s sexual orientation but also was comfortable with it and had accepted his father’s honesty.

“I don’t recall that there was any great tension over it,” Koons told me during the 2005 interview.  “I don’t know how much impact that plays in the family and when they did find out about it.  Karl is certainly not dumb.  I am sure he knows more than anyone about his father’s position.  The times I spent with Karl and Louie were wonderful and Karl was always just very, very nice.”

Karl, in fact, according to Koons and Louie Rove’s neighbors, was a frequent visitor to Palm Springs beginning in the 80s and vacationed almost annually with his father in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  It would have been difficult for Rove to not know this fundamental fact about his father.

Rove does get one thing correct in his book.  He said that we wrote his father, “after living openly as a gay man,” died quietly at home while his son was in the midst of launching the anti-gay issues campaign that was to lead to the re-election of George W. Bush.”  In his TV interviews, Rove twisted this around to make it sound like we were portraying him as a man who had denied his father, which was not the case.  The chapter in our book regarding Louis and Karl Rove repeatedly makes it clear that Bush’s Brain honored and loved Louis.

Lastly, I want to say bluntly I don’t give a damn about Louis or Karl Rove’s personal lives.  But when Karl decided that the private and personal lives of other consenting adults needed to be corrected to suit the moral imperatives of his party’s political desires, well, then Karl turned his family into a part of the narrative.  As he promotes his revisionist paperweight around the country, he is allowed to take an aggrieved stand of someone whose privacy has been invaded by amoral journalists.  What about the lives harmed or ruined by the sexual politics of Rove’s mean-spirited campaigning?  How is that measured?

Originally, I had told friends I did not want to be drawn into discussions about Rove’s book.  I’ve come to resent the poisonous nature of the discourse in our national politics.  The notion, however, that silence is consent is more than a little unsettling.  Rove started his political ascension with lies and he has now published a book that is filled with a new set of lies that attempt to convince the entirety of America that during the Bush administration everybody got everything wrong; except for Karl and President Bush.  This, too, is another Rove lie.  And it’s criminal for myself or anyone else to allow his lies to continue to live.