Pleased to meet you …

Two quick facts:

1. Today, August 31st, 2007, is Karl Rove’s last day working at the White House, as he heads off to spend more time with his family. [I’d love to be a fly on the wall at that office farewell luncheon. Will anyone will run out to the grocery store to get a cake? And if so, who?]

2. Astronomers at the University of Minnesota announced last week that they had found a Mysterious Hole in the Universe. [Kudos to Joel Achenbach for bringing this to many people’s attention in his Achenblog.]

The timing of this discovery of a huge dead spot in the universe, apparenly devoid of matter (dark or regular), heat, and light - and almost certainly, love, hope, kindness and caring - came so quickly on the heels of the White House announcement regarding Karl Rove’s departure from the Bush Administration, that I thought:

This can’t be a coincidence. What’s Karl got to do with it? What’s he up to now?

So, I managed to acquire a copy of data containing information on the “hole” and processed it through our own 10thcircle Augmented Reality Telescope and Data Unlock Master System (ARTDUMP), and found something amazing amongst the pixels.

See for yourself:

The Void in the Universe, the Hole, the Emptiness, looks like - Texas.

[Go ahead and say it, 2001 fans: “Oh my God, it’s full of Texans!”]

Now, it all becomes clear.

Karl is preparing to retire to this TexaVoid - free of Distractions from pesky Democrats, Congressional Subpoenas, reporters, and the Constitution of the United States - to write his history of the George W Bush White House, to build the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Thought Fortress, to prepare the Texas Void as an appropriate home for mass arrivals in January of 2009, and to ponder alone in the dark, considering his next moves.

So when you look up in the sky tonight, after Karl’s gone to his spatial Hole on the Range, remember:

He’s out there. And he’s watching and planning.

And after his time in the Darkness, he’ll be back.

bc

The White House

Washington, DC

(today’s date)

[DRAFT: Self-guided HR Action Form # GWB-2T-1/09 2 GO]

[Please fill this form out as completely as possible with a #2 pencil. Please print neatly and legibly, using all capital letters. Any forms submitted using pens, colored pencils, magic markers, crayons, sticker collections or Funtime Ink Stamp kits will not be accepted)

From: (your name here)

To: President George W. Bush

Dear Mr. President

I am a (check all that apply): 

[ ] close advisor [ ] White House Counsel [ ] Cabinet Member [ ] Staff member [ ] other

And I would like (check all that apply):

[ ] you to please accept my resignation from my position of (your office here) [ ] to accept your generous offer for an open position to the office of (the job you want here) [ ] please please please accept my resignation 

Effective:

[ ] right frigging now. Life’s short, and so’s my patience. [ ] 2 weeks from now (I have another job, you know?) [ ] end of the month (yes, I’m doing you a favor here, Mr. President, sir. And don’t you forget it.)

Reason:

[ ] so I can spend more time with my family [ ] so I can spend more time with someone else’s family [ ] illness (i.e. attacks of ‘visionitis,’, which means “I can’t see myself dealing with the crap around here anymore, or ‘conscience,’ which means “I can’t see myself dealing with the mess all of this has become anymore, so I’m going to write a book (see Reason #1)) [ ] I’m the target of a Left Wing conspiracy/witch hunt/whaling expedition [ ] I can’t get a table at a good restaurant in this city anymore

Thanks,

(your name here)

(your signature here)

PS Please:

[ ] do consider me for a Presidential Pardon, and forward my files to the Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney/Roger C. Adams [ ] don’t have anything further to do with me, I’ve got enough problems as it is.

bc

“Why is he doing this, and why now?”

I was discussing Karl Rove’s resignation with a friend of mine the other day, and without preamble, this is the first question she asked.

“He’s the Boy Genius,” she continued. “There must be some reason for this.”

“I thought about this for a minute, “Well, he is also the Turd Blossom,” said I. “Maybe he’s decided that there’s nothing more he can do for the Bush White House and that there are better uses for his time besides dodging Congressional subpoenas.”

“You don’t buy the ‘spend more time with my family’ bit?”

“Do you?”

“Well,” she said, “There might be something going on with his family that we don’t know about, maybe some sort of serious illness, and he might be leaving to spend time with them.” Where would we be without women, thinking like this?

“You’re right, that is a possibility. But that’s not what he’s saying,” I replied. “I think he’s smart enough to tell people if that were the case, knowing that it would paint him as a more sympathetic character, and improve his public image. He knows that any privacy regarding a family medical matter would be blown pretty quickly. There are plenty of people gunning for him.”

“Speaking of which, he’s going to need some personal security. Who’s going to provide security for him, and who’s going to pay for it?”

“Wow, good point,” I said, smiling to myself again at how this lady’s mind works. “I suppose a case could be made that Rove knows too much about the Bush Administration’s war plans to leave him without personal security. No doubt the Administration could consider it a National Security risk, and provide him with a Secret Service detail per an Executive Order.”

“Yes, but how long do you think Congress and the taxpayers are going to go along with that?”

“Um, probably not at all, but the White House should be able to justify providing it until January ’09.”

“Then who picks it up?”

“Er, I imagine whoever’s paying him at that point. My money’s on a movie studio. Some  blockbuster CGI monster movie about a great white male, er, I mean *whale* that swims up the Potomac from the sea and makes a big mess in Washington DC.”

Silence on the other end of the phone. This is her way of telling me I’m not funny.

“I think he knows something may be coming, and he’s known it for the past year, since he started talking with President Bush about leaving,” she says, breaking the silence as if she’s been holding her breath for a minute.

“OK, but why leave now?”

“This does give him time to get in line for a Pardon come January ’09 with plenty of time to spare, and Bush wouldn’t have to do so with him as a current member of the Administration.”

“Ha. Sounds like he’ll lose his Secret Service security but gain legal protection in the same week. I wonder if he’s got an application for a Pardon on file with Roger Adams at the DOJ yet? Heck, I imagine there’s a file full of ‘just in case’ applications for Rove already.”

Finally she says it:

“What does he know that we don’t? Maybe he knows something’s up, and it’s best that he gets away from the White House now, because his presence there will only make things worse later.”
There it is.

I had to ask: “How bad?”

“Like Iran-Contra bad.”

“Yikes,” I said thinking about what a Tower Commission would do to the Bush White House. Can a President’s approval rating go into the single digits?

She was thinking on the other end of the phone, and repeated, almost in a whisper:

“What does he know that we don’t?”

We may never know, and he’s unlikely to reveal any secrets in his forthcoming book; the first draft manuscript reportedly titled, “Maybe I Did It.”

bc, with help from my friend