Rove returns to slay the vampires!

Good grief!  Karl Rove, one of the big losers in the November election, is unapologetically back to slay the GOP's no-longer-welcome intruders. He's prepared to offer  a daring new see-through Spring Collection for his winless lot of hapless candidates. Editorial writers would describe the plan as "bold". You could say that, too, as in "desperately bold". Everybody in the political world is talking about it.

Rove has  created a new Super PAC that he calls the modern Conservative Victory Project to halt the Tea Partyers in their tracks.  And if you think that will finally bring peace,  harmony  and a little sense to Rove's party, you haven't followed the modern saga of the more distressed right-wing crowd that finds something to hate in government every hour.

Rove has always been something of a behavioral therapist, leading  George W.Bush's through more reflective moments as "Bush's Brain."  But now, even though his money machine, American Crossroads, was unable to elect a single conservative candidate on his personal list, he's decided to charge into the deepest quarters of his natural habitat   for what he clearly intends to be a game changing moment on the national runway.

Simply put, if that's possible, he wants to protect moderately conservative candidates from primary challenges from the horrific people who call President Obama a socialist born in a rain forest and say profoundly stupid things about women who have been raped.

Not that a man of Rove's towering presence  in the GOP hasn't managed to open a new front in the political wars.  The right wing that has guided the party through four-plus years of Barack Obama  is flapping loudly.    Their gurus are assailing him as a turncoat feeding at the Potomac trough and have begun to re-enlist their battered forces from the past campaign.  The torpedoes from the Club for Growth, the treasure house for political rightists,  are making the rounds on Fox News  and other sympathetic outlets to condemn Rove's plan. Names are being called on all sides.

From FreedomWorks, where Dick Armey reigned until recently, comes this troubling thought:  The Republican Party would be sapped of the energy and wisdom of guys like Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Pat Toomey and Mike Lee if Rove's designated hitters drive them from competitive races.

When they put it like that, I may find myself reluctantly agreeing with Rove on a one-time basis as he wanders into his familiar  divide-and-conquer comfort zone.  Do I really have a choice?

Beware the hermit crabs in the political class

THE LATE A.J. LIEBLING, the iconoclastic journalist and acerbic critic of newspapers, once described two Columbus papers housed under the same roof as "two hermit crabs living in the same shell." That also seems to be the crabby case now with the former Republican Party and its Tea Party proprietor that have been clawing the Obama Administration. In their meteoric rise, the TP's have shared time, space and manic attacks on their Democratic victims as well as bashing some of the programs that have been around for more than three-quarters of a century. For example, Social Security.

While many Republican pols find ways to lessen the political consequences of an all-out appeal for ending the program that has served countless millions of retirees, the Tea Partiers toss it into the same stew as, say, street cleaning or 4th of July fireworks. If it comes from the government (i.e., taxpayers) , it has got to go. Some of the very same pols even quietly deny that they are in accord with their Tea Party friends on all counts and that neither occupant of the shell really wants to deprive us of monthly Social Security payments. That's baloney, of course., that only the Fox News culture would have us believe.

I would excuse some Tea Partiers who only know what they heard from Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. But if you want to know what they are really thinking, pay attention to Dick Armey, the former Texas congressman and bloated chairman of FreeomWorks, whose comfort zone is squarely in the Tea Party base. In an interview with ThinkProgress at a Tea Party rally in Chicago, Armey declared that Social Secruity was a "corrupt goverment practice" and a "pay-as-your-go Ponzi scheme."

Such damning seems to come easily for a person of Armey's means who would live very well, thank you, without those monthly checks. Trouble is, such calculated madness has taken root in a lot of people for whom Social Security, Medicare and other forms for federal assistance are literally keeping them alive these days. W hen the wealthiest among us pretend to empathize with folks living on the edge, what hope is there for a level playing field in this year's elections?