Apocalypse November

[BaalShemRa]

From

www.southknoxbubba.net/skblog/archive_2004_03.php#2700

Apocalypse November!
(Music)

This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end

Opening Scene:

Martha's Vineyard, shit. I'm still only in Martha's Vineyard. Every time I think I'm going to wake up back in D.C.. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing...

I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a new Mercedes and she ran off to Paris for a birthday party. When I was here I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back to D.C..

I've been here a week now. Waiting for a mission, getting softer. Every minute I stay in this luxury suite I get weaker. And every minute DeLay squats in the Rayburn Building he gets stronger. Each time I look around the walls move in a little tighter.

Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service.

INTERN: "Senator Kerry? Are you in there ?"

KERRY: "Yeah."

KERRY (voice over): It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I'd never want another.

KERRY: "Whaddya want?"

INTERN: "Are you all right Senator?"

KERRY: "What does it look like?"

INTERN: "Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Yale class of '66?"

KERRY: "Hey buddy, are you gonna shut the door?"

INTERN: "We have orders to escort you to the airfield."

KERRY: "What are the charges?"

INTERN: "Sir?"

KERRY: "What I did?"

INTERN: "There's no charges, Senator. You have orders to report to party ComSec intelligence in New Hampshire."

KERRY: "New Hampshire?"

INTERN: "That's right. Come on Senator, you still have a few hours to get cleaned up. Senator ? Dave, give me a hand. Come on Senator, let's take a shower. We're gonna take a shower, in we go ..."

[BaalShemRa]

In New Hampshire:

I was going to the worst place in the world, and I didn't even know it yet. Months away and hundreds of thousands of miles down a campaign trail that snaked through national politics like a main circuit cable and plugged straight into Rove. It was no accident that I got to be the caretaker of Karl Rove's legacy, any more than being back in Martha's Vineyard was an accident. There is no way to tell his story without telling my own. And if his story is really a confession, then so is mine.

In the briefing trailer:

STAFFER: "Come on in.. At ease. Want a cigarette?"

KERRY: "No, thank you sir."

STAFFER: "Senator, have you ever seen this gentleman before? Met the chairman or myself ?"

KERRY: "No, sir. Not personally."

STAFFER: "You have worked a lot on your own, haven't you?"

KERRY: "Yes, sir. I have."

STAFFER: "Your report specifies protest operations with Vietnam Veterans Against the War."

KERRY: "I'm not presently disposed to discuss these operations, sir."

STAFFER: "Did you not protest the war with Jane Fonda?"

KERRY: "No, sir."

STAFFER: "Did you not protest an unjust war and expose a corrupt, out of control Republican administration and help run them out of office, Senator?"

KERRY: "Sir, I am unaware of any such activity or operation - nor would I be disposed to discuss such an operation if it did in fact exist, sir."

TERRY MCAULIFFE: "I thought we'd have a bite of lunch while we talk. I hope you brought a good appetite with you. You have a bad hand there, are you wounded?"

KERRY: "A little fishing accident on R&R, sir."

MCAULIFFE: "Fishing. On R&R... But you're feeling fit, ready for duty?"

KERRY: "Yes, chairman. Very much so sir."

STAFFER: "Senator, you heard of Karl Rove?"

KERRY: "Yes, sir, I've heard the name."

MCAULIFFE: "Tom, would you play that tape for Senator, please. Listen carefully."

ON TAPE "October 9th, 0430 hours, sector K."

STAFFER: "This was monitored out of Georgetown. This has been verified as Rove's voice."

KARL ROVE (on tape): "I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor, and surviving. "

ON TAPE: "11th transmission, December 30th, 0500 hours, sector D."

ROVE (on tape): "We must destroy them. We must humiliate them. Bill after bill, appropriation after appropriation, appointment after appointment, scandal after scandal. And they call me a monster. What do you call it when the monsters accuse the monsters? They lie.. they lie and we have to be merciful for those who lie. Those nabobs. I hate them. How I hate them..."

MCAULIFFE: "Karl Rove was one of the most outstanding political minds the system has ever produced. He was a brilliant and outstanding in every way and he was a good man too. Humanitarian man, man of wit, of humor. He joined the Administration. After that his ideas, methods have become... unsound."

STAFFER: "Now he's crossed over to The Dark Side, with his media army, who worship the man, like a god, and follow every order however ridiculous."

MCAULIFFE: "Well, I have some other shocking news to tell you. Rove was about to be arrested for a national security violation."

KERRY: "I don't follow sir. A national security violation?"

STAFFER: "Rove leaked of the name of a covert CIA agent working on weapons intelligence. She happens to be the wife of a former ambassador who embarrassed the Administration by exposing their Iraq nuclear weapons intelligence as phony. Actions he believed would terrorize the Ambassador and the media and make them lay off the bogus WMD story. What he really wanted was more money for the war and Cheney's pals at Halliburton so they could secretly funnel millions back into the campaign. So he took matters into his own hands."

MCAULIFFE: "Well, you see Senator... In this political environment, things get confused out there, power, ideals, the old morality, and practical political necessity. Out there with these natives it must be a temptation to be god. Because there's a conflict in every human heart between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil. The good does not always triumph. Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Every man has got a breaking point. You and I have. Karl Rove has reached his. And very obviously, he has gone insane."

KERRY: "Yes sir, very much so sir. Obviously insane."

STAFFER: "Your mission is to proceed down to Georgetown in a stretch limo. Pick up Rove's path at K Street, follow it, learn what you can along the way. When you find him infiltrate his team by whatever means available and terminate Rove and this Administration."

KERRY: "Terminate? The Administration?"

CIVILIAN IN SHADOWS: "Terminate. With extreme prejudice."

MCAULIFFE: "He's out there operating without any decent restraint. Totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. And he is still in the field leaking memos."

STAFFER: "You understand Senator... that this operation does not exist, nor will it ever exist."

[BaalShemRa]

In stretch limo:

KERRY (v.o.): "How many political hacks had I already destroyed? There were those six that I know about for sure. Close enough to wave their last campaign attack video in my face. But this time it was a member of the Administration. That wasn't supposed to make any difference to me, but it did. Shit...charging a man with leaking classified information in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500. I took the mission. What the hell else was I gonna do? But I didn't know what I'd do when I found him."

Arriving at Rove compound:

AGITATED WEIRD GUY: "It's all right, it's all right. You're all being approved."

AGITATED WEIRD GUY: "Watch out those goddamn monkeys bite, I'll tell ya. Eh, that's a pretty one. Move in right in towards me... I’m a Republican! Yeah, elected Republican. It's all right. And you got the beer? That's what I've been dreaming of."

KERRY: "Who are you?"

AGITATED WEIRD GUY: "Who are you ... ? I'm the President. President Bush. I've been here since 2001. I've been in Texas, Kennebunkport, Camp David... I’ll tell you one thing, this limo is a mess, man."

KERRY: "Who are all these people?"

BUSH: "Yeah, well... They think you have come to take him away. I hope that isn't true."

KERRY: "Take who away?"

BUSH: "Him. Karl Rove. These are all his children, as far as you can see."

KERRY: "Could we, uh, talk to Rove?"

BUSH: "Hey, man, you don't talk to Karl. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet-warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he'll, uh, well, you'll say hello to him, right? And he'll just walk right by you, and he won't even notice you. And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you in a corner, and he'll say do you know that if is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you -- I mean I'm no, I can't -- I'm a little man, I'm a little man, he's, he's a great man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas -- I mean --"

KERRY: "Stay with the limo."

BUSH: "Hey, uh, don't go -- don't go without me, OK? I want to get a cookie. He can be terrible, he can be mean, he can be right. He's fighting the war. He's a great man. I mean... I wish I had words. I can tell you the other day he wanted to kill me."

KERRY: "Why did he want to kill you?"

BUSH: "Because I took his cookie. He said if I take his cookie again - I'm gonna kill you. And... he meant it! So you just play it cool, lay back, dig it... He gets friendly again, really does. But you don't judge him like an ordinary man."

KERRY (v.o.): "Everything I saw told me that Rove has gone insane. The place stank of rotting opposition research: Sex scandals, insider trading deals, government contract scams, corporate kickbacks... if I was still alive, it was because he wanted me that way."

Suddenly Kerry is surrounded by a group of Secret Service agents. They grab him and carry him to a temple - to meet Karl Rove:

KERRY (v.o.): "It smelled like slow death in there, paranoia, nightmares. This was the end of the campaign trail alright. The bottom of the political barrel."

KARL ROVE: "Where are you from Kerry?"

KERRY: "I'm from Massachusetts, sir."

ROVE: "Whereabouts ?"

KERRY: "Beacon Hill, sir."

ROVE: "How far were you from the river?"

KERRY: "The Charles River, sir? A few blocks."

ROVE: "I went down that river when I was a kid. There's a place in the river.. I can't remember... Must have been a fish cannery at one time. All wild and overgrown now, but about five miles you'd think that heaven just fell on the earth in the form of codfish... Have you ever considered any real freedoms ? Freedoms - from the opinions of others... Even the opinions of yourself. They say why..., Kerry, why they wanted to end my administration?"

KERRY: "I was sent on a classified mission, sir."

ROVE: "It appears that it’s no longer classified, is it? What did they tell you?"

KERRY: " They told me that you had gone totally insane and that your methods were unsound."

ROVE: "Are my methods unsound?"

KERRY: "I don't see any method at all, sir."

ROVE: "I expected someone like you. What did you expect?"

Kerry only shakes his head :

ROVE: "Are you a Liberal?"

KERRY: "I'm a Senator."

ROVE: "You're neither. You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill."

Kerry is then put in a cage. Later Bush comes to visit him and offers some water and a cigarette:

BUSH: "Why? Why would a nice guy like you wanna terminate a genius? You know that the man really likes you. He likes you, he really likes you. He's got something in mind for you. Aren't you curious about that? I'm curious, I'm very curious. You curious? There's something happening out there, man. You know something, man, I know something that you don't know. That's right, jack. The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad . Oh yeah. He's insane, I think. He hates all this, he hates it! But ... the man's ... uh ... he reads poetry out loud, alright? ... And a voice! A voice. ... He likes you because you're still alive. He's got plans for you. Nah, nah, I'm not going to help you, you're going to help him, man. You're going to help him. I mean, what are they going to say, man, when he's gone, huh? Because he's gone, when it's gone, man, when it's gone, he's gone. What are they going to say about him? What, are they going to say, he was a kind man, he was a wise man, he had plans, he had wisdom? Bullshit, man! Am I going to be the one, that's going to set them straight? Look at me: wrong! ... You!"

[BaalShemRa]

In the morning Kerry is carried again to meet Rove, who sits in the temple and reads a T.S. Eliot's poem:

ROVE:

"We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;"

BUSH: "Do you know what the man is saying? Do you? This is dialectics. It's very simple dialectics. One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions -- you can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, with fractions -- what are you going to land on, one quarter, three-eighths -- what are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something -- that's dialectic physics, OK? Dialectic logic is there's only love and hate, you either love somebody or you hate them."

Rove angrily throws the poetry book at him:

BUSH: "This is the way the fucking world ends! Look at this fucking shit we're in, man! Not with a bang, with a whimper. And with a whimper, I'm fucking splitting, jack!"

Bush leaves:

KERRY (v.o.): "On the campaign trail, I thought that the minute I looked at him, I'd know what to do, but it didn't happen. I was in there with him for days, not under guard - I was free - but he knew I wasn't going anywhere. He knew more about what I was going to do than I did. If the party leaders back in New Hampshire could see what I saw, would they still want me to terminate him? More than ever probably. And what would his people back home want if they ever learned just how far from them he'd really gone? He broke from them and then he broke from himself. I'd never seen a man so broken up and ripped apart..."

ROVE: " I've seen horrors...horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a monster. You have a right to terminate me. You have a right to do that...But you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face...And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.

I remember when I was with the Bush/Quayle campaign... Seems a thousand centuries ago... We went into a town to spread lies about Dukakis. We hung some posters around town showing Dukakis handing Willie Horton the keys to his prison cell and gave some attack videos to the local media, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and rounded up every poster and every video. There they were in a pile... a pile of little campaign posters and videos, set on fire. And on the local radio, they were broadcasting a breaking news report about Bush having an affair with his secretary.

And I remember...I...I...I cried... I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized...like I was shot... Like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead...And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The -- genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could understand that these were not monsters...These were men... political operatives... these men who campaigned with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love...but they had the strength...the strength... to do that.

If I had ten divisions of plumbers and mechanics like these men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to campaign without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us."

KERRY (v.o.): "They were going to make me President for this and I wasn't even in their fucking party any more. Everybody wanted me to do it, him most of all. I felt like he was up there, waiting for me to take the pain away. He just wanted to go out like a warrior, standing up, not like some poor, wasted, raggedy-assed hack. Even K Street wanted him gone, and that's who he really took his orders from anyway."

ROVE: "The horror. The horror..."

CELL PHONE IN LIMO: "PBR Street Gang this is Almighty, over..."

Kerry switches off the cell phone...

[Theodore Doxford]

I don't think Bush or Kerry would swear would they???

What's going on...what's it all mean???

I am off to sleep now and will dream about this for at least 5 minutes

[BaalShemRa]

Actually, Bush once said to Cheney ( when he thought he was speaking far enough away from the microphone that it wouldn't be heard ) that a guy was a "major asshole". Does "asshole" count as swearing?

Kerry's been caught cursing too, once when speaking to people and he thought the camera was off ( or maybe he knew it was on and wanted to look tough ) and once when a secret service agent made him fall while skying.

So, yes, they would curse.

[Theodore Doxford]

Baal you seem to be a very deep thinking sort of person ...
So can I ask you your opinion as to which of the two leaders would be best for the world and the USA.

[Beniah]

Theodore said:

Baal you seem to be a very deep thinking sort of person ...
So can I ask you your opinion as to which of the two leaders would be best for the world and the USA.

I know this question wasn't addressed to me, and I might not be as "deep" a thinker as Baal, but if I may add my humble 2 cents, I think it all depends on what your worldview is. I believe Bush is a much better choice for a leader, even though I'll admit he and his administration has many flaws. I don't particularly "like" either candidate, being a true conservative, but Bush is much more of a conservative then Kerry. But hey, if you are liberal, and agree with the liberal worldview, then by all means, vote Kerry. I just feel the conservative worldview is far superior to the liberal one.

[BaalShemRa]

"Baal you seem to be a very deep thinking sort of person ...
So can I ask you your opinion as to which of the two leaders would be best for the world and the USA."

Well, umm, thanks, not sure I'm there quite yet.

First, I'm Canadian, not American, in case you thought I was the latter.

Second, I don't like either candidate so this is a case of the least worse choice, even more than usual.

On the one hand, Kerry would likely cut the deficit to a grater degree ( though not completely ) and socially, want less restraint. Internationally, having another, less hubris filled face to represent the US might help too.

On the other hand, he's been makin som eprotectionist noises, let's hope it's posturing. The main reason one might vote for Bush, however, might, and I do say might, be so that the blame for all the consequenes that are going to result from the Bush admin's actions don't end up on Democrats. For exampel, if the Dems get into power and Iraq fails further, a large portion of the population will say that the Bush admin was doing a good job but Kerry messed it up.

So if I voted for Bush, it would be more strategic than anything else. I don't know how good a reason that is though.

As for Bush being conservative, well, the terms "conservative" and "liberal" have become more connotative than denotative, so I don't know how useful they are. But if someone wants more fiscal balance, they should make sure that the legislative branch is controlled by one party and the executive branch by the other party. Historically ( I have to track down that site somewhere ), a GOP Congress with a GOP presidency will grow the size of government even more than a Dem Congress with a Dem presidency and that last one will grow it more than mixed government.

I don't think I've given you a clear, simple answer. I think that's mainly because there isn't one.

[Theodore Doxford]

Living in England we don't get too much of the political debates in the US......

So my uninformed views are this at the moment..

If Kerry wins we will have very little US leadership in the battle against Bin Laden and his like.
The Islamic terrorists will think the have achieved a victory and will be encouraged that the tactics of terror are being successful...So we would be in for a worse time regarding terror attacks,as the militants will feel they are winning..
If Bush wins we would have the war on terror and the islamic terrorists would feel that they have to step up the attacks on the west...This will make the christian fundamentalists feel that they are under threat and they might force Bush to increase his efforts in fighting these people.......
So whoever wins we loose..
Religious people could make the Apocalypse come true..



It's now bed time here(I start work early in the mornigs) so I will have another go at this tommorow....night night BaalShemRa and Beniah I enjoy reading your posts