karl rove is pregnant with my two-headed love child

In 1998 I still got some of my news from television. I was attending night classes four nights a week that year, and I came home every night at ten to study and watch Keith Olbermann on The Big Show on MSNBC. I liked Keith, and I liked the fact that he was slowly being driven mad by what he was being forced to report.

(It’s difficult for an English teacher to write about Times Like These. Because, in the midst of a media feeding frenzy, everything happens in the passive voice.)

Since I liked Keith, my television stayed on MSNBC. I got all my Monica Lewinsky news from MSNBC.

Now, I get everything online. And since so much of it comes to me filtered through the blogs, I’ve developed a defense mechanism: I instinctively assume that the stories that look huge to me aren’t getting nearly the kind of play they deserve, out there, in whatever’s left of the real world.

So maybe it was appropriate that I saw my first Karl Rove television on MSNBC. The teevee was on at the SO’s house, and the network wasn’t so much reporting as displaying fave soundbites in an endless collage. There was Bush plaintively, smirkingly insisting that the investigation was still “ongoing”! Here’s a bulleted graphic displaying Republican talking points! Watch this loop from the press gaggle with Scotty! Listen to the reporters laugh as they ask if Scotty’s going up on the shuttle!

Ah, it was good to hear the press laughing again. Yes—they were enjoying this, their first foray in years into—

I was going to type “real journalism” but, of course, it’s not.

We still habitually refer to each new scandal as “—gate,” but the Year of Monica has surpassed Watergate as the new gold standard. We were caught up in it as we watched MSNBC last night. Were we watching Bush’s “I did not have sex with that woman” moment? Should we start referring to it as his “finger-wagging denial”?

And that’s too bad, because the issues with this scandal, with this administration, are real. Karl Rove betrayed the nation’s trust and security, putting a CIA agent at risk by using her politically. But we Democrats have spent so much of the past seven years rightly decrying the tabloid nature of the reportage of 1998. Now any comparison of Rove-gate to Monica-gate diminishes Rove-gate. And the comparisons are all too easy. Not accurate, just easy.

But that dog bites the postman and its owner. The tabloid blender that Republicans created to destroy Clinton will now mercilessly shred Rove. Their carefully-crafted talking points (were they written by Rove? his last hurrah?) will never be heard over the tumult and the shouting.

Karma’s a bitch.

SPACEDARK