Bruce Baugh on the psychology behind the Rove/Bush folie a deux – it’s a sublimated crush:
A while back, some blogger I read – Digby, I think – speculated that Rove is gay and has a lasting crush on Bush Jr. That made sense to me, and still does. I have an elderly gay friend who talks with a sigh about stupid things he did for the sake of a decades-long unrequited crush on a classmate and co-worker he knew was straight and he knew he wasn’t the type to go poaching, but where he just couldn’t give it up until unrelated griefs forced him into a general reexamination. Now he feels that he wasted far too much of those decades trying to help out the object of desire, not nearly enough of them helping himself, either professionally or personally, say, by seeking out a relationship with reciprocity in it. Unlike Rove, my friend is a decent, honorable guy who’s an asset to his family, friends, neighborhood, and nation. But anyone is capable of mind-boggling stupidity and a lot of it under the right circumstances.
A lot of movement conservative leaders really seem to like their sex squalid and dirty, or at least to need it that way. They have sordid affairs, they engage in sleazy behavior in public parks, they dump their wives in painful and needlessly abusive ways…in such an environment, there wouldn’t be much incentive for a gay man with an unfulfillable crush to seek out a healthy alternative, and all the incentive in the world to seek solace or distraction by (for instance) carrying on with a prostitute passing himself off as a reporter, much to the grins and giggles of everyone on the inside.
This could all be dead wrong, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Digby was hardly the first to notice.
Even I can remember, back around 2001/2002 or so saying on usenet (and I’ve blogged about it numerous times since) that what the Republicans are about is denial – there’s a hardcore in the party and its fundy base of closeted gays with mil-fetishes, all longing for a good hard seeing-to by a hot, buff stud in full combat gear. American posters were deeply offended and spoke of homophobia, and knee-jerk anti-Americanism. But it’s only homophobia if you think being gay is bad, which I don’t. And I’m anti-imperialist, not anti-American, though admittedly these days it is hard to tell the difference.
As I tend to repeat over and over, it’s the hypocrisy, stupids.
A majority of Republicans and their base on the other hand do truly believe or profess to believe that homosexuality (or pretty much anything but dry painful missionary in the dark copulation) is sinful, wicked and dirty – which of course is why they get so much guilty pleasure from it. It’s forbidden, oooh…. and religion is a spice that that hots up sex wonderfully, as profitable writers of convent porn know. All that guilt… Speaking of which, I’d love to see what sort of lurid Bush/Cheney/Gannon fanfic Rove might’ve written had he been a fanfic sort of guy… he’s certainly not backwards in coming forward with the homoerotic language – remember the apocryphal
“We will f**k him. Do you hear me? We will f**k him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever f**ked him.” ?
Bush himself isn’t averse to a touch of of the ol’ brokeback rhetoric himself: here he is on bin Laden:
‘I will screw him in the a**!’
I suppose it is theoretically possible that Rove has finally accepted that his longtime private pash object has feet of clay and that’s why he’s going, but somehow I doubt it. I also doubt that their poisonously co-dependent relationship has actually ended or will ever end with Rove’s official exit. All these oily, nasty little spoutings-off on tv (Fox is an agent of Congress? WTF?) – no way these aren’t approved by the WH hierarchy, such as it is these days (I’m seeing Cheney-> Bush->Gonzales-> Miers-> Barney the dog. Correct me if I’m wrong).
I do wonder if Turdblossom’s actually resigned at all. Or has he just been let off the leash? Is this the last line of defence in the media, part of the slash and burn defence Bush & Cheney promised?
If so, it’s not very effective, because one result of all this unaccustomed Rovian media visibility is that the public are finally seeing Rove in all his oleaginous, porcine pomp
and really, really don’t like him.
There’s also potential legal proceedings pending against Rove and it could be that his early ‘departure’ is their pathetic way of distancing the White House from it. Fat chance – Rove is forever tied to Bush, whether he wants to be or not. His ability to make his own reality was fleeting and in actual reality is he’s become one of the most hated people in the country.
It iis gratifying to see some Americans finally coming round to the same way of thinking as many of us abroad who saw the politically and emotionally perverse nature of the Rove/Bush relationship and of the obscenity of the corrupt political movement calling itself Republicanism, right from the days of Reagan and the so-called moral majority.
But it’s a shame, to put it mildly, that they’ve pushed the US off a poltical cliff and the rest of the world has had to go through all this crap – I think war, corruption torture or mass murder count as crap – for the American public to finally wake up to Bush, Rove and Cheney’s sick little Oval Office psychodrama. Their unrequited longings for one another (unrequited as far as I know; if they are requited, bang so to speak goes a major plank of my argument) and the whole dark dominance and daddy thing they have going is the very quintessence of modern Republicanism.