Uncle Bud and I were having our last beer for night in the Select Taproom Room, an undistinguished establishment (OK, run down dive) in Southeast DC that he’d bought in his retirement. It was a quiet, out-of-the-way place for the GOP crowd to meet below the radar of the media and any other nosy types. It was early in the morning, around 4 a.m., and the debris from Karl Rove’s going away party still littered the old, battered place. The partygoers had wandered off. It had been a fine send off for the Brain, but Uncle Bud was unhappy. He’d never liked Rove much, and had little use for the whole Grover Norquist wing of the GOP. I know he was glad to see Abramoff out of circulation, and wanted Ralph Reed to go down with him. As for Bush, I’ve always suspected that one of Uncle Bud’s assignments when he was working as a Republican operative was to kept tabs on the young W. I’ve heard Bud say, more than once, that “the boy needs several keepers on duty ‘round the clock.”
Uncle Bud had been sitting silently, and tapping his fingers absently on the table for at least five minutes before I interrupted him. “What’s eating you?” I asked, “Still pissed of at Norquist’s little party trick?” Some of the junior staffers, recent graduates of the Young Republican corps, had brought an old bathtub with them, filled it half full with gin and tossed in some apples. While they were merrily bobbing for apples, Norquist had walked over an announced that one particular apple was the Federal government. He then kept dunking the apple with his forefinger while saying that it was almost drowned. He then held another apple under the surface and asked the crowd to guess what that apple represented. After many wrong guesses, he yelled, “New Orleans! And I’m FEMA! Goes to show that the government can’t do anything right.” Whoops of laughter filled the bar and cries of “Privatize!” competed with “Tax Cuts!”
Uncle Bud loved New Orleans. The attraction was simple to understand. He loved a party and loved an open town. He told me he’d run several operations out of New Orleans because no one asked questions down there. Norquis’s jokes had pissed off Uncle Bud and he’d been close to throwing the obnoxious bastard out. Instead, he just shrugged and muttered, “It’s Rove’s party, so you’ve got expect the vultures to show up. Birds of feather and all that,” he muttered, shaking his head slightly. He lapsed into silence again. He seemed to be considering something. I waited patiently.
A little noise somewhere between a grunt and a sigh indicated that he’d reached a decision. “I’m out of it,” he said firmly. “They didn’t ask my advice and they won’t get it. I’m tired of cleaning up after that boy and his brothers, anyway.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, expecting to get my question waved away, and the subject changed. But to my surprise he turned to me and asked, “You up for a story, kid?” Of course I was, and here it is, as he told it to me.
At one point in the evening, it must have been when I was helping in the kitchen, Rove and some of his assistants had disappeared upstairs to the little apartment above the bar. The group moved into the small kitchen and reflexively fished their BlackBerries from their pockets. Uncle Bud went with them to make sure the guest of honor was having a good time, as well as to keep an eye on the group. Turns out that something big was about to break and W needed Rove’s help. Impeachment loomed and W was running scared, not a pretty sight, as a scared W is angry, petulant, and error prone.
Seems like they’d been tipped by someone in the Senate that impeachment was coming from a strange place - “from left field” to be exact. Rove asked who was behind the impeachment threat. He said that he thought the Dems had been bullied into silence. A nervous young aide said that it was George Mitchell.
“But he resigned from the Senate in ‘95,” said Rove. “What can he do?”
“The steroids investigation,” said the nervous aide. “Mitchell’s going to subpoena W. He’s got evidence that W not only knew about the Rangers using steroids while he owned the team, but that he arranged for a friend of his to supply them to the players. This friend, a Dallas plumbing contractor, hired a few chemists and started a company, Big Head Boys Labs, to develop undetectable performance enhancing drugs. They experimented with a delivery system consisting of a small pump in a flat box mounted on the players back and attached to a pik line. They were a kind of Third Coast Balco. I can see the headlines. ‘Crony Chemistry!’ ‘W’s Drug Problem’ ‘The Black House Scandal!’”
“Damn! All that mess was supposed to be locked up tight. Why did I let Gonzo handle it? What was I thinking?”
Rove flopped down at the kitchen table and started barking out orders. He jabbed a White House aide in the chest and said, “Get this to Josh Bolten right away. Executive privilege to Juan Gonzalez, Ivan Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGuire and A-Rod. And send some people around to tell them to keep their mouth shut.
“What about Bonds?” asked the aide.
“ Nah. He’ll never talk. Too much to lose. The only danger is that he’ll grow a second head or some such. And make a note to suppress the autopsy results when he explodes before he turns fifty.”
He scanned the faces around the table and pointed to a junior staffer from Cheney’s office. “Get Dick to gin up some evidence that Jose Canseco is a high ranking al-Qaeda covert agent, then slam him into Gitmo fast.”
“Shouldn’t that be the other way ‘round?” asked Cheney’s aide.
“You learn fast, Junior,” said Rove grinning, and he resumed scanning the assembled aides.
Another eager aide brightened when Rove’s gaze settled on him. “You, set up a Swift Boat operation on Mitchell. Let’s see. His mother was Lebanese and never learned English, start there. The Irish thing. Connect him with Sinn Fein or Ian Paisley and the Provos. You never now which side of that one you’ll need to use. You’ve got 48 hours to be ready to air. I want to see results in 36.”
The aide tapped a few keys on his Blackberry and nodded his head. Rove moved on.
“You,” Rove snarled, singling out another aide. “Write this down and take it to the name I’ve written on top of the page. He’s a new commentator we’ve placed at Fox, and he’ll eat this up. You should see his resume, kid. It puts you all to shame. Top aide to Tom Delay, Counselor to Rick Santorum, Special Assistant to Dick Cheney, Roommate and/or Secret Society member at Harvard and Yale with a half-dozen candidates for President. He’s gold. Tell him, light edit to fit his voice, but hit every point.”Rove slid a notebook and pen across the table to the kid, and then, leaning back in chair and rubbing his forehead, he began dictating.
“Former Democrat Senator George Mitchell has joined the radical netroots rabble determined to impeach the Commander Chief while he is valiantly leading the War on Terror that threatens, no, imperils, the American way of life. The pro-terrorist Democrat leadership is turning to Mitchell because they cannot overcome Senator McConnell’s staunch defense of the War President in this desperate hour.”
“God, I’m going to miss this!” exclaimed Rove, pounding the table with both chubby, little fists and stomping his feet on floor.
“I’d seen enough,” said Uncle Bud, sighing as he got up to get another beer. Walking to the bar, he lifted his empty glass and called over his shoulder, “To Karl Rove! May ye reap what ye have sown.”
“Amen,” I said, tossing down the dregs of my beer. “Amen.”
