Epitaphs are typically reserved for the dead…but after reading the many views on the passing of Karl Rove…from his role in the George Bush White House…one might conclude that the “Wicked Witch” has had the misfortune of being under a falling house…one of his own mean spirited making. All that remains is to find the correct words for a fitting close.

Ironically, what looked at one point to be an invincible house…a virtual dynasty devised to withstand all efforts to bring about its demise…has seemingly crumbled under the weight of far too many cards dealt by a master of sleight of hand and an illusionist who was one rabbit shy of completing his final hat trick…perpetual GOP domination. In what one might call Mr. Rove’s house of mirrors, at some point the image that reflected back undoubtedly transformed the once invincible domicile into a house of horrors that became far too frightening to endure.

Unlike the great Houdini, who went on with the show even after receiving what would be his final and fatal blow, Karl Rove has chosen to make his escape…an escape more fitting of the resident church mouse…the one that inhabits the dark corners and travels from room to room…not out in the open…but in quiet calculating silence inside the walls…mindful of the smoldering infrastructure and the pending collapse of a metaphorical electrical grid that the ravenous rodent himself has stripped of its essential sheathing.

Karl Rove made a practice of sinking his self-aggrandizing and savaging teeth into any and all who stood between the weasel and the White House…and once he was able to inhabit its hallowed walls…walls he made hollow…he continued his drive to divide, defeat, and devour.

When I read the gratuitous remarks of his apologists…men like Peter Wehner…who not only wax on about the political genius of Karl Rove, but seek to paint him as “a deeply wonderful human being”, I am sickened at the apparent shortsightedness of these sheltered scions of society.

Karl Rove never met a man or a constituent group he didn’t seek to exploit for political gain…and as best I can tell, his scorched earth approach rarely, if ever, left him wondering about the welfare of the many innocent individuals that may have been consumed in the carnage he created with calloused and cunning calculations.

Mr. Wehner makes the mistake of many who live with the promise of privilege…those who have neither built the trough at which they feed nor done the hard work to harvest the feast that fills it…they stand shoulder to shoulder with other gluttonous and greedy purveyors of pain…sopping up the spoils while pushing the powerless under the proverbial bus. Pardon my disgust, but fine men aren’t made by driving on and over others.

While Karl Rove and his cronies see themselves as king makers, they climbed the pole of power on the backs of those they sought to sacrifice. His legacy of unleashing hatred upon homosexuals in order to herd the holier than thou hoards into the ballot box may be his hallmark…but calling him an honorable human being is simply another symbol of the corrupted Christian cacophony he sought to coerce.

While George Bush and Karl Rove gathered this morning in the glorious garden to exchange their eisegesistic epistles intended to honor the end or an era, millions of Americans continued to mourn the moment these men managed to maneuver and morph themselves into mythical moralists.

For those of us who have been scapegoated and betrayed by these GOP giants, today’s farewell was little more than a glaring reminder of Gethsemane. As I watched these two men walk towards their waiting helicopter…there to whisk Karl Rove and his political puppet away from the White House…together…for the last time…I had but one epitaph in mind…good riddance Karl Rove!

Cross-posted at Thought Theater