A Visit to the Hogwarts Academy for Ideologically Pure Republicans

http://counterpunch.com/farago11202007.html


The Dark Arts and the Bush Dynasty


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If you listen closely, you can hear the inner sanctums reverberate with recriminations. Karl Rove, phoning in to Fox News his rear-guard attacks on Hillary, now spends equal time in the faculty club of Hogwarts, explaining to aggrieved teachers the loss and alienation of conservatives from fortress Republican.

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It must be a frustration for Jeb down in Miami, where weather is particularly fine, that the national stage is so obscured by a magical fog of their own making.

The Rovian/Norquist dark arts worked far better in Tallahassee than nationally. If it were up to Jeb, the Hogwarts academy for ideologically pure Republicans would relocate to Coral Gables where the mainstream media has been tamed to a docile cat and no comparable feats of wizardry have emerged from Democrats in a very, very long time.

Florida, with its fragmented media markets and vast homeland of segregated diaspora, was an easy place to craft messages of a calm and beneficent leader, Jeb!, to do what's best for Florida-whether it was handing out bags of ice after hurricanes, or, clearing regulatory thickets for his key constituency-Florida's developers-to overbuild the state to the bursting point.

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What a frustration it must be to the Rove/Norquist faculty at Hogwarts that W. made such a hash of opportunity. Not like the other Bush, the one from Florida-who organized campaign contributions from the Growth Machine straight as lines of cocaine on a glass table-and could have done so much better if only he had been elected president.

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It will take someone new, to help. Someone like Marco Rubio, Miami Republican and House Speaker.

In Florida, the Hogwart's ire has turned on Jeb's successor, Republican Governor Charlie Crist.

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Jeb governed as a divider, as a leader who knew better than voters how beating the beast of government (or in Norquist's words, shrinking it to the size it could be drowned in a bathtub) required skill and cunning.

Charlie Crist set out instantly to reach across the bitterness that Jeb was unafraid to summon. He made friends with Sierra Club. In other words, Crist as apostate is undoing much of the ideological purity Jeb sought to instill in two terms as governor.

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A few weeks ago, while Crist was on a trade mission to Brazil, the dark arts rebounded in Tallahassee.

Jeb acolyte, Speaker Marco Rubio organized a counter-demonstration in the state capital: a forum to promote industry-friendly opposition to Crist with a keynote speaker who had earned credentials as an early advocate for likely positive economic impacts from higher temperatures.
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eyes should be kept on Jeb/Rubio at all times.

Bad as Il Dunce is, it sounds like brother Jeb would have been much worse. I wonder if the blight of W will still be stong enough to keep Jeb out of 2012.