Lullaby Pit looks at Karl Rove, and whether Rove began to believe his publicity, that he’s a genius. LP writes:
I have said it before, and the GOP catastrophe last Tuesday won’t stop me from saying it again: Karl Rove is a feckin’ genius. He’s easily one of the smartest men to ever slither into Washington, and the fact that’s he’s almost pure evil doesn’t mitigate his brilliance.
…But being a genius is a condition that breeds an interesting and potentially dangerous mindset. For starters, it’s a bit lonely. As your self-awareness grows, you come to realize that you really do have to rely heavily on your own judgment because you’re smarter than most of those around you. In this respect you’re set above and apart, and your integration with the herd is never quite seamless.
The down side of this dynamic, though, is that the shadow of hubris looms over you. Self-awareness and arrogance dance closely on a razor’s edge: the honest comprehension that you must trust and privilege your own intellect tempts you to believe that you can’t listen to anybody else’s opinion. The knowledge of your brilliance slowly shifts from conclusion to assumption, and nothing in Cart-Before-the-Horse Land is quite so lethal as deciding you’re right before the deliberations even begin. Slowly, but surely, dissenting voices are depositioned and exiled, and the resulting unanimity that surrounds you closes the self-fulfilling feedback loop.
Read the whole post. At this point news reports suggest that the Genius Trap was indeed at work. We’ll know more in 2008, of course, whether this election was just a fluke.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.