Runnin' scared

Nancy Pelosi’s taking umbrage at the whacko pronunciamentos of Comandante Chavez is an indication that the Democrats, riding high only a few weeks ago, are suddenly beginning to run scared. They realize they may have overplayed their hands in the Bush bashing department and now, with the Iran/Venezuela International Debating Society enlightening the “cognescenti” in the General Assembly, they are in a rush to disassociate themselves. Even Charlie Rangel, no stranger to demagoguery himself, is telling Hotbreath Hugo “Not in my house!”

Perhaps this has all been a conspiracy to once again elevate the reputation of Karl Rove. I was always something of a skeptic msyelf – I mean what’s the big deal? It’s only politics, not, as they say, rocket science. But I think the Rovester really does have a secret and that is just to do nothing – a kind of Zen meets Hippocrates approach to political game playing. (“First do no harm, Bodhidharma.”) If you wait long enough, all your enemies will come crashing down around you from their own energy. The Plame Affair was an interesting example. Rove just sat there with barely a response as his opponents (great truth-seeking journalistic Children of Watergate) filled nearly every issue of Newsweek with Talmudic analyses of this non-event, projecting the writers’ own paranoid fantasies and agression on an object that clearly did not exist. It is all very reminiscent, I imagine Shrinkwrapped might tell us, of behavior patterns described by the Chicago School of Psychoanalysis. Or maybe it just comes down to the oft-quoted words of old Gretrude: “There’s no there there.” Only now there is. An election once universally handed to the Democrats is again approaching deadlock.

UPDATE: One of my predictions from the post below is alreay proving accurate. [Braggart.-ed.]