All:
Mark has always had a rapier-like writing style; this time
he skewers with great abandon.
Note: not for the squeamish. But Mark usually isn't.
WinterBear
========================
George W. Bush Still Rocks!
Stop criticizing! The rich man's CEO president is
executing his job requirements perfectly
http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/
By Mark Morford, San Francisco Gate columnist
Friday, September 9, 2005
Everyone is slamming poor Dubya. Everyone is saying,
oh my God, he's more inept than we ever imagined, he
has no idea what's really going on, he's oblivious and
in denial and he pretty much let all those poor black
people die in filth and misery, and he basically
ignored the massive Katrina disaster for days before
finally being pressured into cutting his umpteenth
vacation short and actually taking action.
This is what they're saying. Kanye West was right,
Bush doesn't care about black people, or the poor, or
anything that doesn't directly serve his handlers'
agenda or flatter his monochromatic ego or anything
that isn't spelled out for him in nice simplistic pie
charts and reassuring matronly tones.
And lo, the darts are slinging in from around the
world, according to SF Gate's own World Views column:
"Maddening incompetence ... reminiscent of a
drought-stricken African state," says Britain's Daily
Mail. "Can't get it together," says a major paper in
Italy. "A plethora of grim tales of disaster," says
the Scotsman. "Superpower or Third World?" asks the
Spanish daily Noticias de ?lava. Why did BushCo fail
its first great national-security test since Sept. 11,
despite having two days' advance notice of Katrina's
wrath? asks Le Monde. And on it goes, the world's
powers looking on in one part shock and one part
disgust and all parts repugnance for Bush's rampant
ineptitude and America's apparent inability to take
care of its own.
But it's so unfair, isn't it, to attack poor Dubya
like this? Just a little misplaced? After all, Bush
has always been the rich white man's president. He is
the CEO president, the megacorporate businessman's
friend, the thug of the religious right, a big
reservoir-tipped condom for all energy magnates,
protecting against the nasty STDs of humanitarianism
and progress and social responsibility.
He has always been merely an entirely selective
figurehead, out of touch and eternally dumbfounded, a
hand puppet of the neoconservative machine built and
fluffed up and carefully placed for the very specific
job of protecting their interests, no matter what.
Repeat: No. Matter. What. Flood hurricane disaster war
social breakdown economic collapse? Doesn't matter.
Corporate interests ?ber alles, baby. Protect the
core, reassure the base, screw everyone else unless it
begins to affect the poll numbers and then
finger-point, deflect, prevaricate. All of a piece,
really. Because Bush, he was never actually meant to,
you know, lead.
So maybe it's time to stop with the savaging of poor
Dubya. He is, after all, doing a simply beautiful job
of kowtowing to his wealthiest supporters while
slamming the poor and running the nation into a deep
hole and creating the largest deficit in American
history, all while his cronies in oil and industry and
military supply and Big Energy gain immense and
staggering wealth and pay less and less tax on it.
This is what he was hired to do. This is why he is in
office. Hell, the day after Katrina, Bush flew right
by Louisiana and headed straight to San Diego to party
with his Greatest Generation cronies. Reassure the
masters, first and foremost, eh Shrub? Understood.
Is this not what we all expected? Can you reasonably
say you thought it would be different? Just look. All
major social services are being gutted. The Federal
Emergency Management Agency is a joke, second in line
only to the ungodly useless Homeland Security
Department, which has become about as reassuring and
trustworthy and humane an organization as a prison in
Guant?namo.
The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of
Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and
flood programs in New Orleans just last year. The
White House hacked that down to about $40 million,
even as it passed the most bloated and nauseatingly
pork-filled $12.3 billion energy bill in recent
history, one that guaranteed we'd be sucking at the
tit of foreign oil and kneeling before Bush's pals in
Big Energy for decades to come, even as more and more
teenagers die in Iraq for Bush's inept and failed war.
Yay politics.
Why didn't National Guardsmen from Louisiana and
Mississippi march into New Orleans immediately after
Katrina exited to take charge and keep the peace? Why,
because most of them are serving in that same violent
and brutally costly war in Iraq, silly. Fully 30
percent of the guard is stuck over there, along with
50 percent of their equipment. Yay Vietnam 2.0.
Why did FEMA chief Michael Brown wait hours after
Katrina struck to timidly plead with his parent
company, Homeland Security, for some backup, not to
actually get their hands dirty but rather to help
"convey a positive image" about the government's
response to the victims? Why, because he's an
incompetent lackey Bush appointee who was fired from
his former job as head of something called the
International Arabian Horse Association. Yay pathetic
nepotism.
Just look. Senate majority leader Sen. Bill Frist,
icon of hollow self-righteousness and the energy
magnate's friend, has already leveraged the Katrina
nightmare to argue for more drilling in Alaska, much
in the way BushCo whored Sept. 11 to cram the Patriot
Act down the nation's throat and make fear and
xenophobia a national pastime. And let's not forget
trusty profit-sucking sidekick Halliburton, which has
already scored a sweet deal to help repair Katrina
damage, thanks to the fact that the former director of
FEMA is now a Halliburton lobbyist. Ah, war and death
and tragedy. They are just so goddamn profitable,
right, Dubya?
And then, the kicker. Then you read that Bush has
actually ordered an official probe into the botched
Katrina relief efforts, a formal federal investigation
into what went wrong, which is a bit like a shark
ordering an investigation into what happened to all
the fish. Unless this probe starts and ends in the
White House, unless it hangs Bush himself up by his
monkey ears and dangles him over a river of toxic
Louisiana sewage, it's merely useless and insulting
and more than a little sad.
Let's say it outright. The truest measure of any
president, of any leader, is how well he takes care of
his own people. And Bush, well, Bush has done a simply
spectacular job of taking care of exactly his own
people -- the wealthy, the corporate, the extreme
religious right, his core base of supporters -- while
happily and fiercely ignoring, restricting,
condemning, destroying the rest. Are you educated or
progressive or liberal or alternative-minded or
sexually open or homosexual or anti-war? This means
you. Are you dirt poor and belong to a minority and
don't drive an SUV and contribute six figures per
annum to the RNC and maybe live in a flooded swamp in
the Louisiana bayou? This means you, squared. Sucker.
Here, then, is the new American motto, as reimagined
by BushCo: Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled
masses, and we'll let them die in a filthy and
decrepit storm-ravaged American football stadium while
our president languishes on vacation and ponders his
oil futures and fondly remembers his good ol' days of
getting drunk at Mardi Gras before going AWOL from the
military. God bless America.
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