Turd-blossom speaks up
Oh come on. You have to be kidding. This has to be from the Onion, or the Daily Show – this can’t be for real. Can it? Can it? Karl Rove calling Obama ‘arrogant’? And then expanding on the point?
“Even if you never met him, you know this guy,” he said at a Capitol Hill breakfast, according to ABC. “He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone.”
Is that more funny than it is enraging? Or the other way around? I can’t tell, I just can’t tell. Okay, so let’s get this straight – a white powerful privileged guy who helped to get a white unqualified incompetent ignorant incurious lazy disengaged wildly overprivileged guy who would be nothing if his father had not been president, elected president, is calling a black guy with no presidents or senators in his family who made his own success by using his own brains and effort – the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone?
What country club? What fucking country club you miserable crawling contemptible stop-at-nothing hack? And as for making snide remarks – your talentless vacuous privilege-using arrogant boss is famous for them, and Obama isn’t. So what are you talking about?
Oh look, I figured it out: it’s more enraging than funny.
Okay, we know what he’s doing, and we know it works, so it’s not surprising that he’s still doing it. It’s not surprising, it’s just shameless. Hillary Clinton tried the same thing. He’s complaining that Obama is too god damn smart; he’s equating intelligence with arrogance; and then he’s insulting the intelligence of everyone present by pretending to think that Obama is country club guy while Bush is a Texas farmhand who got to the White House by being salt of the earth reg’lar folks despite having quite school in the 8th grade.
Country club. Country club. I can’t get over that. Country club. The Bushes are the country club. The country club is built with plaster made from Bush ancestors. The Bushes are the country club and the legacy at Andover and Yale. Humble salt of the earth George Bush went to Andover and Yale because he was a legacy; if he’d had Obama’s family and his own (as opposed to Obama’s) grades, he really would have gone to East Jesus High School.
Okay, so there is nothing those cynical bastards won’t say, no stupidity too stupid to try out. I knew that. But sometimes the actual examples…make little red spots jump up and down in front of my eyes.
Perhaps this is just my ignorance of American politics, but why would anyone want the president to be ‘one of us’, just a regular joe? Don’t they want someone intelligent, able to deal with complex domestic and international issues, someone who is, in some way, apart?
Second question. Isn’t this regular playing of the race card — and Rove’s comments, though attempting to paint Obama with the Ivy League, Country Club image, is really racist at heart — going to backfire on the Republicans? Arguably, Hilary lost (at least in part) because she played the race card. Can Rove and his ilk play the same game and get away with it?
Well, you know, “arrogant” is the new “uppity”.
Is that better or worse?
Good call, Cam.
Having a cigarette and a drink and making snide remarks? How better to act at a Country Club?
If it’s a proper country club, surely it would be a cigar?
And not one of those cheap ones , mind.
I didn’t think the smart, soh-fis-tik-ayted folks at the country club would be dumb enough to pollute their bodies with mere cigarette tobacco?
Surely they leave that to the guys from the ‘hood, yo?
:-)
Still, must say it was bloody hilarious seeing OB in “minor apoplexy mode”…
:-))
The phrase “country club Republicans” has long been a bit of artful rhetoric for the American left (such as it is), but there is a profound difference between that usage and any reference to “country clubs” excreted by the loathsome Karl Rove: There genuinely ARE a lot of wealthy, influential Republicans who belong to country clubs. They do business on the golf course, they cozy up to elected officials and judges and other useful persons at the exclusive parties, and generally do a lot of wheeling and dealing at country clubs.
While there are certainly many examples of what one might term “country club Democrats” as well – the Kennedys leap to mind – Democrats (especially genuinely leftish Democrats who aren’t just Republican-lite conservatives who call themselves “moderates”) are quite thoroughly outnumbered by Republicans in the innermost circles of wealth and privilege and access in this country, which is really what the term “country club” is a code for. And there is absolutely nothing in Barack Obama’s background, not even his hard-won Ivy League education, that meaningfully qualifies him for any such associations.
I don’t know why I’m even bothering to write this: Karl Rove is a sleazy liar trying to turn the reality of his own party’s failings into rhetoric against his enemies. Gee. How novel. In other news, water is wet.
But there’s just something extra super-duper skeevy about Rove’s chosen rhetorical twist. I mean, seriously Karl, a country club reference? It wasn’t so many years ago that someone who looked like Barack Obama wouldn’t be allowed in the front door of most country clubs. Hell, there are still many, many country clubs in the U.S. where the only black people you’ll ever see are serving drinks and cleaning up! Rove referring to country clubs in this way displays so much mind-numbing, over-the-top, staggeringly unbelievable gall that I almost want to shake his hand and congratulate him. (Such a handshake would, not coincidentally, put me in a terrific position to knee him very hard in the…)
Eric: No, it seems average people don’t want someone smarter than them as their leader. People want someone just like them, who sees things the same way they do, or at least is good at pretending they do. Anti-intellectualism is rife, and wears many different masks.
Cam arogant just means arogant and wether or not it aplies to Obama is pretty much in the eye of the beholder,Rove who is a G.O.P operative just made a snide of the cuff remark about an oponent nothing more, why make him out to be a racist?
G.Do you think you might be stereo typing republicans maybe?
Actually, Richard, one can only stereotype a group of persons by making universal claims about them. I neither made nor implied any universal claims about Republicans. If anything, I might have been stereotyping people who belong to country clubs: I implied that country club members are (for the most part) wealthy, white, and lean towards conservative politics. Unfortunately for the claim that this is merely a stereotype, it also happens to be true.
Oh, sure, there are lots of municipal golf courses where ordinary schlubs can go knock golf balls around, and even many places that call themselves “country clubs” which really aren’t, because they aren’t private establishments where only dues-paying members can play. But actual, honest-to-goodness “country clubs” in the classic sense – the kind of country clubs implied by Rove’s snide rhetoric, or in the more classic “country club Republican” rhetoric of the American left – are in fact one of the most obvious, carefully sheltered enclaves of blatant privilege left in America. And in the U.S. (as in the UK, I believe), “privileged” still overwhelmingly (although not universally) means being white, being wealthy, and supporting the sort of political conservatism which protects the system that creates and perpetuates privilege.
Both Barack Obama’s personal life story and his demonstrated political goals (or at least many of them) are very much about criticizing, opposing, overcoming, and hopefully transforming the system that creates and perpetuates our system of privilege for the few and fuck-all for the many. That’s exactly why Rove slandering Obama with country club/insider elitism/arrogance of privilege rhetoric is so appalling.
Off the cuff comment – we are talking about the Karl Rove here?
The man’s an operator and this is an operation at it’s finest – the big lie, the dog-whistle racism, the neatly translated anti-intellectualism. All a bit obvious these days, but all there nonetheless.
This stuff cracks me up every time I hear it, even though I’ve heard it a million times. The Bushes and their lackeys have gall, I’ll give them that. It takes serious gall for these aristocrats to lounge around in Texas, clearing brush and pretending to be “of the people” and calling their African-American opponent “arrogant” and “elitist.”
By dog whistle racism you mean racism that doesnt exist but I am going to hint at it anyway because I dont like Rove Fracis?
Rove’s point is not very subtle. I knew when I read it that the prase he was trying to call to people’s mind was ‘uppity n***er’, and so did almost everyone else who has been watching these sly digs go in. Rove may or may not be the sort of person who would hold a phrase like that in his private thoughts, but he knows dam’ well that a lot of white Americans would, and he’s doing his job…
You may have gone over the top. Obama’s mishandling of the Free Trade issue shows that he is not quite ready for prime time so treating him as a paragon is ludicrous.
I nowhere said that Obama was a paragon. But compared to Bush? Including in readiness for prime time? Please.
“But compared to Bush?”
The only time I really paid attention to the presidential elections was in 2000 and that experience left me totally bewildered as what Americans wanted from their chief executive. There was Gore, a rather placid bore, and then, Dubya, whose smirking countenance and faux humility/charm/oneofus-ness was so disturbing that I actually leaned away from the telly when I first saw him. Imagine the shock of learning that HE was considered the personable candidate!Watching the town debates, the tv pundits’ idea of who was ahead – Bush, whose answers to questions were barely comprehensible at times, never matched mine. Then there was the fiasco of the elections and the disappointing supreme court judgement, and I thought, sod it! Let them live with the clown, he’d be great cartoon fodder for the rest of the world. The 9/11 terrorists turned the joke into a tragic farce.
At least this time around, Obama, the attractive candidate, is genuinely telegenic and articulate. I’d be wary of expecting too much from him – he is only a politician, not the messiah but he is light years more evolved than the chimp and it is a shame that one of the chimp’s handlers is trying the racial sabotage. Maybe it will backfire on Rove and the republicans…?
“Perhaps this is just my ignorance of American politics, but why would anyone want the president to be ‘one of us’, just a regular joe? Don’t they want someone intelligent, able to deal with complex domestic and international issues, someone who is, in some way, apart?”
The short answer is: no. The American electorate has been trained for nearly three decades to desire a rough rider, a Green Beret, a cowboy, a paragon of manly virtue. The fact that, in practice, most Republicans who achieve high office turn out to be sniveling cowards with scandalous personal lives (I recommend Glenn Greenwald’s Great American Hypocrites for more on this) does little to counter the perception of the Republican Party as the Man’s Party for Real Red-Blooded Men. (You’ll notice that when an actual combat veteran was nominated, the party hacks found themselves somewhat nonplussed, and McCain himself has had to cowboy up a good deal to woo the “conservative” base.)
Democrats, on the other hand, are portrayed as effete, sniveling double-domed pansies. Rove is simply repeating the same script that was used so effectively to smear Kerry and his allegedly “French” proclivities.
Well I’m much the same, mirax. I have never, ever been able to understand the appeal of Bush. I know the explanations. I’ve taken them in, but nevertheless I don’t get it and never will. These days as his approval ratings are in the low single digits I just wonder: what took so many people eight years to notice?
I don’t actually expect much from Obama in terms of domestic legislation. But in other ways I do (quite confidently) expect a hell of a lot.
By the way…
“Also he is hardly a poor black kid from the south Bronx he grew up in Hawaii and went to a private school and later on to Columbia and Harvard”
I didn’t say he was poor or from the South Bronx. I didn’t even imply that. The point is, Bush is the grandson of a senator and son of a president, who got into Andover, Yale and Harvard because of his family connections not because of his grades or intelligence, and then proceeded to rely on family connections again to get jobs and loans and to fail at everything he tried. Obama, on the other hand, has no presidents or senators in his family and had no family pull to get him into Columbia and Harvard. You do see the difference, Richard, don’t you? Bush got into good schools despite having bad grades and being thick, while Obama got into those schools by being clever and doing good work. Bush is the elitist who has had everything handed to him all his life and who has given nothing back, and Obama is the opposite of all that. Bush is the one who is arrogant because it is colossally arrogant to think one is qualified to do the job of being president merely by family entitlement. What’s arrogant about Obama? The fact that he doesn’t put on a fake folksy Texas accent? Me, I think it’s the fake accent that’s arrogant.
You guys seem to take this seriously. I am puzzled – Rove I haven’t heard in his own words, usually they are filtered through my superiors in the VRWC, but this dog-whistle claim above is choice!
Who, exactly, dropped the n-word above? Some spittle-flecked far-right country-club rethuglican, no doubt?
Having seen your fine country reach its zenith under a President with Alzheimer’s, its hard to imagine a serious problem with whichever of the jokers you are offered – oh yeah sorry, Carter… damn it DOES matter.
Interesting too, how you seem to be running Obama against Bush not his actual opponent.
It’s Rove making the comment. Which political figure is Rove most closely associated with? Not very difficult.
And gee, why would anyone take Karl Rove seriously – I simply can’t imagine. Of course he’s just some lone maniac burbling to himself in a corner, he makes nothing happen in the world. Demented back-assward political rhetoric has zero effect in the US, where all political campaigning is carried on in the most limpidly rational manner possible. No wonder Chrisper is puzzled. And, as so often, condescending with it.
Richard’s post has been deleted?
Me bad woman! I unreservedly apologise to chimps everywhere for fouling their rep by linking them with Dubya.
Mirax wether you love or loath him G.W.B is the president of the United states,it just seems infantile to me to use terms like chimp to describe him,I would say just the same thing if you had used a term like that to describe Obama.
Hmmm…Chris Per…I guess your definition of “Zenith” is a little different than mine. Crushing deficits and national debt. War crimes in Central America. Total abdication to the military industrial complex. Continued decay in the real economy not tied to “defense” (or oil)…Yep, the Gipper’s era was indeed some kind of zenith (of delusion, perhaps)
“whether you love him or loathe him Herr Hitler is Chancellor and Fuhrer of Germany, it just seems infantile to me to insinuate that this international statesman is testicularly deficient…”
Honour, not honours, as Richard Burton [the explorer, not the actor] used to say.
“Mirax wether you love or loath him G.W.B is the president of the United states,it just seems infantile to me to use terms like chimp to describe him,I would say just the same thing if you had used a term like that to describe Obama.”
No, I don’t believe this limp-wristed equivalency argument, and I don’t think anyone else does either.
Dave at the end of Hitlers life the continent of Europe lay in ruins the people were starving,almost the entire European Jewish and gypsy people had been exterminated in factory like death camps. Could you please explain why you would make a comparison between George Bush and Hitler I am intreted.
Well, I think Richard is right. George Bush has only ruined a nation, stirred up an entire region, led to a rise in energy prices that is devastating the world economy, and whose voluntary war has only killed 700,000, sent 2 million into refugess camps, and bankrupted the United States, while advocating the doctrine that the President can do whatever he wants, even if it involves torturing the child of a “terrorist.” So, obviously, Bush and Hitler are not the same…Still…… :)
Dave was wrong but I will justify his comparison anyway, is that what you are saying Brian?
Brian, surely you can do better than that.
No, Richard, I’m right. Your suggestion that GWB deserved respect just for being POTUS is as stupid as suggesting that Hitler deserved respect for being the leader of a major European power. Well, maybe not AS stupid, but pretty close, and I was making the point by the well-known rhetorical technique of exaggeration.
And given that the invasion of Iraq will probably go down in history as the single most expensive [and stupid, and damaging] mistake made by the USA in its entire illustrious history, I’d say the verdict is still out on how much of an exaggeration it is.
Dave,
The intention of the following question is not to refute your statement re the mistake that is Iraq. But how do you think Iraq will compare historically with the (mis)adventures in SEAsia?
Dave I didnt say he deserved respect just that it was infantile to call him names or make Hitler comparisons for that matter.
But you said that immediately after pointing out that he is the potus – which presumably you realize everyone here knows, so presumably you said it to make a point. You had a comma between that and the statement that you think it’s infantile to call him names, rather than a ‘because’ or a ‘therefore’ so you didn’t explicitly make a connection – but you did imply one. The idea seems to be Bush is the potus SO it is infantile to call him names. That’s the suggestion that Dave is disagreeing with. I must say, I disagree with it too. The very fact that he is the potus has done a huge amount to make it impossible to think being the potus carries a certain dignity or authority or respect-worthiness. He’s not the only one who’s done that, but he is a giant in the field.
Even if Dave thought I meant respect I still reject his Hitler comparison and here is why. My mother and grand parents were bombed senceless every night for a year by Hitlers air force,later on they were rained on by b1 and 2 rockets that would whistle over head for a few seconds before dropping and destroying a few of their neibours houses. Cousin Alberts wife and all of his children(3)were killed in one of these air raids. My grandfather had to take the loved family dog to the vet to be put down because there was no food to feed him and even if there was the bombing night after night would petrified him. I went to school with a kid called Benjamin his parents had been some of the last German Jews out of Germany, the families they left behind all perished leaving Benjamin with no living relatives other than his parents.
How does George Bush effect me or Dave for that matter?