The ultra-left echo chamber blog Firedoglake is continuing to excel in its pursuit of the worst in political hysteria. This time, the notorious blog articulates its wish for Karl Rove's demise by describing the hyper-violent murder of the early twentieth century Russian mystic Rasputin. The post is titled 'Rovesputin', and features an image of Rove superimposed on a painting of the unfortunate advisor to Czar Nicholas.
FDL was founded by Jane Hamsher, who made her big name by posting a picture of Joe Liebermann in blackface on The Huffington Post,and then being forced to apologize for it. She is also known for being the producer of the ultra-violent film Natural Born Killers. According to Wikipedia, "Hamsher had an uncredited cameo in the film as a female demon." Hamsher has recruited a fine group of contributors to FDL, and the result is a continuing escalation of conspiracy-theory rhetoric.
The pseudonymous FDL poster TRex, who has described himself as having "a burning crush on retired NBA star John Amaechi",was the author of the Rove post. He begins with the following historical account of Rasputin's murder:
The murder of Rasputin has become legend, some of it invented by the very men who killed him, so that it becomes difficult to discern exactly what happened. However, it is generally agreed that on December 16, 1916, having decided that Rasputin's influence over the tsarina made him too dangerous to the empire, a group of nobles led by Prince Felix Yusupov, and the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich (one of the few Romanov family members to escape the annihilation of the family) apparently lured Rasputin to the Yusupovs' Moika Palace, where they served him cakes and red wine laced with a large amount of cyanide.
Determined to finish the job — and now we are fully in the realm of narrative legend — Yusupov worried that Rasputin would live until morning, so that the conspirators wouldn't have time to conceal his body. He ran upstairs to consult with the others, then came back down and shot Rasputin through the back with a revolver. Rasputin fell. The company then left the palace for a while. Yusupov, who had left without a coat, decided to return to grab one. While at the palace he went to check on the body, Rasputin opened his eyes, grabbed Felix by the throat, strangling him. Rasputin ominously whispered "you bad boy" in Yusupov's ear, and then threw him across the room and escaped. As he made his bid for freedom, the rest of the conspirators arrived and fired at him. After being hit three times in the back, he fell. As they neared his body, they found he remarkably was still struggling and trying to get up so they clubbed him into submission; then, after wrapping his body in a sheet, they threw him into the icy Neva River. Three days later the body of Rasputin — poisoned, shot four times, and badly beaten — was recovered from the river and autopsied. The cause of death was drowning. His arms were apparently found in an upright position, as if he had tried to claw his way out from under the ice. In the autopsy, it was found that he was poisoned, and that the poison alone should have killed him.
Later in the post, TRex makes this equivocation, to make sure his delusional fantasy of murdering Rove is not mistaken as literal:
Who on our side is going to have the stomach to take him down? Who's going to wrap Rovesputin in a rug and throw him into the frozen Potomac? (I mean that politically, of course.)
And then this odd testament to the author's imagination:
Karl? Is that you? It smells like Vienna sausages and Astro-Glide in here, so it must be you.
The post ends with an image of a stuffed horse's head lying on a pillow:
This is classic incitement rhetoric, and the folks at FDL seem to be pulling out all the stops to rile up their audience. Or perhaps they are just gunning to be the next bloggers for the Edwards campaign...
