The International Writers Magazine:REALITY CHECK

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THE "KARL ROVE IS INNOCENT" FAVOR RENDERED • James Campion and a pair of shoes.... This was supposed to be a searing tribute to the bravery and resilience of the British citizenry, whose generations have endured more than a half century of bombardment and terrorism, and last week took a hit in London from al Qaeda or some other rogue Islamic outfit trying to cash in on the publicity of the city’s Olympic bid win or some other bullshit about Iraq.

I was going to wax poetic on the resolve and character of the English, how they bested Hitler’s Blitzkrieg and the random violence of the Irish Republican Army. But that’s all by the boards now. Friendship has taken precedence over the planned Anglo-gushing. A friendship, however warped and tainted it may be, which has been called to duty this week.

Georgetown, our resident GOP snitch, has made the request I know he despised making. He needs a favor. A favor you ask? What could he elicit that would make a respectable journalist such as myself waste precious column space to entertain.
"You have to come to Karl Rove’s defense," he demanded. "Remember The Meeting."
It was a favor I knew one day would have to be returned - The Meeting. It was, after all, Georgetown who got me into a clandestine summit of Rove and the Fancy Boys that balmy summer night in DC five long years ago, when George W. Bush was a pretender from the Lone Star State and everyone was pretty sure that whatever carcass Al Gore left behind in Bill Bradley, it was merely a warm up act to wiping the campaign trail with our beloved Captain Shoo-In. Rove had gotten a kick out of my barrage of e-mails, which claimed, one after one, that I possessed compromising photographs of the vice president playing carnal games with farm animals and a detailed document claiming that Tipper had twice been to rehab in Westchester, NY for "substance abuse". I was later to report she had been mainlining Ajax cut with Diet Rite Cola and Jim Beam, but that is neither here nor there.

What is in question now is how I will handle Mr. Rove’s latest battle to stay inside The Loop on Pennsylvania Avenue now that his name has been implicated as the "high ranking source" that leaked the name of an upitty CIA operative to syndicated columnist Robert Novak, a federal crime carrying a ten-year sentence. "Karl is a pussy," Georgetown continued. "He’ll die in prison. He doesn’t have the facility for male sex that Gordon Liddy did." There was no allaying his fears. There were many and they were varied. He was anxious. It was easy to see there was no way out for me. I would have to pen something akin to Old Soldiers Never Die or a Thomas Paine knock-off. I could do it. I have done it many times for less. This was a "high ranking official" of our government. I’m a literary jester at best, a sniveling bilge merchant at worst. But the piper had his hand out. I had danced. Now I needed to pay. "Campion, god damn it!" my highly agitated friend intoned sternly.
"This is important! None of your cheap jokes this time! A man’s life is at stake here - a very important man. He’s not like the rest of us. Karl Rove is...different." It was the way he whispered the word "different" that set me off. It was creepily reverent, and it disgusted me.
"Jesus Christ, man!" I screamed back at him. "You do realize they are tossing journalists in jail now. I will give you up, and Rove and Novak and every damn one of you pusillanimous dregs before I let that happen to me! You’re all guilty of something!"
"The only one who is guilty is that miserable bastard, Novak," he simmered. "He would sell his grandmother to organ thieves for a decent column. He’s a hack and he has sold out our soul for a paycheck!"
"I won’t let you abuse the name of anyone in the Fourth Estate," I fought back. "Least of all for a binge drinker like Rove."
"Karl Rove is a Christian and a great American genius, and like that other Great American Genius, Jacko, he cannot go to prison. The man saved us from John Kerry!"
"That may be so, but he tipped the bottle one time too many, and worse still, trusted the wrong man, one who is all-too sober and mean and had it in for the CIA for making the president look like a stone-faced liar and caused Scott McClellan to weakly blather excuses like a goober."
"But it’s Karl Rove we’re talking about. The man is a saint. He loves his mother and Jesus and he wears all the right clothes!"
"Rove? What do we really know about this guy? The last time I saw him he shook me down for hooker money, and then after he’d had his way with the poor girl he sent her to me to replace her shoes!" "That’s a damned lie, Campion!"
"I still get the shutters every time I think of what Rove did with a working girl’s pumps, and now you expect me to endure this horrible assignment!" He had no answer for my charges. He knew about the hooker’s shoes. They all did, McClellan, Chaney, that chubby fop who writes copy for FOX News. There was fury behind his solicitation, but Georgetown knew, as always, I would be his bitch, if only to fill space and be left alone. But he also knew more than anyone what Rove’s ouster would mean to the bedrock of religious freaks he drove to the polls last November. How would they react when their shining light is dragged into court like a common criminal to explain why this fuck-awful farce the administration has run into the ground in Iraq for the past two years could lead to corrupting the law?
But enough about that nonsense, I am a man of my word, if nothing else. So I shall do my part and fulfill my end of the bargain.
Karl Rove is innocent.
© James Campion July 16th 2005

Fidel Castro must Die!


James Campion is featured in Hackwriters monthly - he will return in September

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