Degrees of Separation from Karl Rove....

I know I promised I would post photos of the guy I went to college with who now works closely with the evil Karl Rove (chief of staff for the Moron in Chief). Actually, the guy isn't just a colleague, but actually a Karl Rove disciple from way back before Karl was a household name...Well, I've decided that I'd better not post any photos of this guy because if he ever found out, I'd probably end up on the No Fly list...or worse. Karl Rove is an evil man who can do anything, you know.

However, I will tell the story of how I came to know such an evil Republican individual. (Some of the folks at Atrios will already have heard some of this). Normally I don't hang out with Republicans, but the two of us happened to be American students studying at Oxford University. His flat was next door to mine, along with the fact that I was a close friend of his roommate (they were not roommates by choice, by the way). Oftentimes a group of us would hang out at the pub, and if Tim were there (I'll call him Tim, not his real name), he and I would mostly just argue about politics. You see...it was 1993-94, and President Clinton and the Democrats had control of the White House and Congress, so Tim was quite combative and extremely angry about life in general. Tim came from a family that was very involved in Texas politics...he was basically destined for that life (I can’t say more about this, or it will be too obvious who he is). Of course, he considered all of the professors in Politics at Oxford to be Communists, so he wasn't having a very pleasant time. (He also considered me to be a Communist, which he was absolutely convinced of after hearing I'd stayed with a family in Moscow just a few months earlier!)

It turns out that, unbeknownst to me early on, Tim was rather jealous of his roommate (I'll call him Matt), with whom I used to hang out a lot. I’ll try to describe Matt by saying that he was rather Gaz Coombes-esque…handsome in a devilish sort of way, and very dedicated to pot smoking. (Also, he happened to have a pierced tongue long before it was ever a thing to do.) Given my notorious taste in men, of course I was smitten with him right away, even though he had a girlfriend back home...so mostly he and I were just friends. Matt was very much into music, like me, so we'd go out to see bands, go into London together...that sort of thing. Anyway, as the school year went on, I noticed that the once clean-cut Tim was becoming more and more like Matt, growing his hair out kind of scruffy and not shaving quite so often, trying to be cool…It was sort of funny to watch.

Then one day, Tim was over at my flat for some reason, and we got to looking at some photos from a weekend trip to Canterbury that a group of friends had taken. Suddenly, out of the blue, Tim leaned over and told me that he was in love with me. I immediately thought he must be joking, and started laughing....but it turned out he was serious. I ended up apologizing for laughing, but asked him what in the world he was talking about, and how did he expect me to react to such a thing?!! I told him that I only liked him as a friend, and that, really, I didn't think we actually got along very well, given that we always argued about politics and pretty much everything else...and we really didn't have a lot in common. After that day, he wouldn't speak to me much, and generally avoided me.

Nowadays, Tim is a big time Republican political consultant who makes literally millions of dollars every year consulting with Karl Rove and other important members of the Texas political machine. (Yes, if there's a place called Hell, it's certain that Tim will end up there.) Ah...and to think...I passed him up! Well, looking back now, at least I don’t have any regrets for not having hooked up with Tim.