The Tea Party Candidate Conspiracy?:
The Rude Pundit's bud Mark C. is a man filled with crazy notions and conspiracy theories that make more sense when opium has seasoned your brain like so many hanging hams in a Virginia shack. Still, on a symbolic, if not realistic, level, they are fascinating. For it was Mark C. who said that he thought that at the 8/28 rally at the Lincoln Memorial, Glenn Beck was going to have himself crucified. It was an idea that the Rude Pundit picked up and ran with in an oh-so-sardonic way. Turns out that Mark was closer to the truth than most of the professional prognosticators when Beck made the rally into a deeply weird religious revival meeting.

Now, the heady combination of Xanax, pot, and bourbon that makes him get through a day has given Mark the idea that the success of Tea Party candidates is a Karl Rove-created conspiracy to restore honor to the nightmare presidency of George W. Bush. Follow the bouncin' ball here as the Rude Pundit explains:

See, Karl Rove spent the better part of his adult political life transforming Bush, an inbred loser who couldn't keep a fuckin' oil company in business in Texas, into a viable candidate for governor and president. The Bush presidency went down in flames, as we know, Christ, how we know, with Bush hurting the country worse than any plane-crashing assholes ever could have. But, ah, Karl Rove still was a believer, and just as he was able to make a coke-snorting, drunk-driving, AWOL cheerleader into a moralistic tough guy, Rove now wants to revise recent history. And the best way to do that with a man who historians have already named one of the worst, if not the worst President? By showing America that it can be far, far worse.

Oh, it's easy to do, this kind of retardation relativity. When someone says that Ronald Reagan wasn't as bad as Bush (or that Reagan wouldn't be allowed in the Tea Party), they're comparing the difference between a murderer who killed your boyfriend with a gun and one who killed him slowly with a knife. Yeah, it's better to get shot in the head than to bleed out bit by bit, but either way, he's still fucking dead. Now the Tea Party has come along and said, "You know, while you're laying there bleeding to death, I think I'll fuck your face."

The Tea Party candidates who have a chance to win, like Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Sharron Angle, and that dude in Alaska who looks like he was just released from prison for dealing meth to middle schoolers, are all bugfuck crazy and/or utter buffoons. Fer chrissake, one of the best they've got is Rand Paul, who made a big ass deal about how part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was wrong because it told private business owners what to do and then, three months later, he came out against the Muslim community center near Ground Zero, which is, you know, telling a private business owner what to do. The only way holding those two positions makes any sense at all is if Rand Paul just says, "Fuck it. I'm racist."

And it keeps going, this devolution, with Sarah Palin and now the even more devolved Christine O'Donnell. Shit, at least Palin was a mayor before she ran for governor. O'Donnell's running for Senate with all the experience of an average show dog. But this is what Rove wants, oh, yes, as Mark said. Because a Senate with Paul, Rubio, Angle, and O'Donnell in it, all these mice with human brains, with Jim DeMint as Majority Leader, will look like the slapstick room at a clown convention.

So of course Rove has allowed himself to be turned into the villain, the embodiment of an insider elite against which O'Donnell and Palin can react. It's fucking brilliant. It fires up the degraded base and will get them out for more than just the primary. And once Palin is elected president, Rove's con will be complete. For, indeed, among the ruins, Americans will look at the Bush years as the salad days. And, if Rove has his way, the devolution will continue, the ongoing reaming of the nation in the service of making Bush's reputation shine, until we all end up hailing President Trig.

Yes, Mark likes his conspiracies complete.

See, this has to be true. The results of the primaries have to be due to Rove's behind the scenes machinations. We better hope that Mark is right. Because if he isn't, then that means that large numbers of our fellow citizens are so deluded that they don't care about the ideologies or experience of who they elect, as long as it's not them bad ol' Washington insiders. It means we're so very fucked. It's one thing to get stabbed to death. It's something else entirely to stab yourself repeatedly.