At this busy time... let's thank Karl Rove.

I want to buy Karl Rove a great big thank you card with puppies and kittens on it.

It seems too small a gesture for the way he has transformed our country.

Yes, there's the terrible, twisted, sick things he made possible. I am not discounting them. At all.

But in the classic, evil sows the seeds of its own destruction kind of way, he has been responsible for two sea changes.

One is the rise of the worst government policies ever, that have brought us to the brink of annihilation.

But he also paved the way for us to rise from these ashes.

What the heck do I mean?

I have a movie.

A blend of The Boys From Brazil and The Manchurian Candidate.

At the dawn of the Goldwater era, a band of renegade scientists began an bold, audacious project. They recruited new concepts from others of their kind, trained before the school boards began cutting evolution out of the textbooks, and genetically engineered a very specific type of man.

He was designed to be an unconventionally masculine man and was placed in the most mercilessly conventional of conservative enclaves. A father figure would be provided, but one who was especially deemed lacking in what his environment considered the most important quality in a father. It was an upbringing cruel enough to create resentments as deep and unyielding as granite.

Contempt. How could Karl Rove not feel contempt and anger towards the attitudes around him that never accepted him, never supported him, and made him feel inadequate and inferior? But he buried it deep. He would show them!

At a critical time in his adolescence, the plotters provided father figures who applauded his achievements and tutored him in the dark arts. At a critical time in his adulthood, they waited for his ambition to fire over an array of proper candidates.

When it did fire, their project had learned all the dirty ways to win. Because he had to win. He had to show them. He bored from within until he had the most secure and powerful position in government, balking at nothing to achieve his goal. Always with his secrets and insecurities buried under layers of pride and ambition and the stinging lash of contempt.

If Karl Rove were a secret agent, raised since birth, trained by exacting masters, to destroy the Republican party, he couldn't have done any better.

After all, he’s driven the man under his tutelage into record low levels of approval, presided over record levels of corruption, and broken the Republican party for at least a generation to come.

And that's not all!

He lured weak reeds from the opposing party into his cunning plan, letting them destroy themselves by allying themselves with the party he was bringing down. All the corruptible and power-mad elements of the other party also succumbed to his siren song of hate, division, and dirty tactics.

And now, I am seeing something that only a chaotic, desperate, terrible time can create.

Political realignment.

We know how badly Rove damaged the Republican party. But he has also damaged the go-along, get-along, we-love-lobbyists-too! wing of the Democratic party as well.

That's the part Hillary belonged to. Her weaknesses, her dirty tactics, her willingness to do anything to win; they are all working against her in the atmosphere Rove has created in today's electorate.

She's refusing to quit because she, and those around her, can't believe the rules have changed. It always worked before. She's not doing anything different, but it's not working.

Because things have changed.

And Karl Rove; more than seminars and position papers and the many many working diligently to restore sense and accountability to our government, more than politicians and speeches and good intentions; Karl Rove has done that.

Karl Rove is the one I hold most responsible for Iraq, Katrina, the shredding of our Constitution and the implementation of torture in our name. Without his actions, we wouldn't have the Bush administration and all that followed.

We wouldn't have people waking up and looking around and going, "Damn. This is really screwed."

Sadly, this is apparently what it takes. A complete, spectacular, and utter meltdown.

Courtesy, more than any other, of this one man.

I want him to know he made it possible.

I want to say, "Thank you," to Karl Rove.