What Lies Beneath

We all know the apocryphal ancient Chinese blessing/curse "May you live in interesting times"; we've been neck-deep in such times for several years running. The interesting subtext about this week's events is how even Dear Leader's own peeps are finally starting to get the message about how their idol truly cogitates, to the extent that he does.

Perhaps the photo montages all over the internets -- contrasting Bush delivering a birthday cake to John McCain and pretending to strum a git-tar, with floating dead bodies and writhing misery along the Gulf Coast -- did the trick. Considering how cynically Bush and his ilk have used matters of faith and God to retain their grip on power, you have to admit, it would be pretty ironic to have it all come undone by -- well, an act of God.

But really not; any political damage that accrues to Bush and his posse is entirely their fault, entirely a result of their bullshit attitude toward the whole mess. Bush dawdled in getting back to Washington, stopping on the way back from the west coast in Crawford at the tumbleweed farm to sleep over one more night.

Call me crazy, but I'm quite sure that Air Force One, like all jumbo jets, can make it coast-to-coast in three hours or so, and in fairly luxurious conditions. Call me crazy again, but I humbly submit that in the dire circumstances we've all seen, every minute counts. How many more people died needlessly because Bush didn't just haul ass back the minute we all heard?

Message: he doesn't give a fuck. He can have all the hermetically-sealed photo-ops with cherry-picked survivors that he wants, we all saw what he did (and more importantly, didn't) do in getting a handle on this thing in a timely fashion. To add insult to injury, he managed to say with a serious look on his face that "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees", when there are literally dozens of scientific reports and in-depth articles from the last couple years predicting exactly that.

How does he live with himself? Very well, it appears; he really is in a reality-challenged bubble. Bush lives and breathes on a priori reasoning -- if it didn't happen directly to him, it didn't really happen, or at least, doesn't matter all that much. It doesn't seem to matter to any of them all that much -- it took Cheney until Friday to emerge from his burrow in Buttfuck, Wyoming and get back to work. Condi Rice went to Broadway shows and shoe stores this week, after the disaster, and even had an uppity peon ejected:

Just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue, Condoleeza Rice was seen spending several thousands of dollars on some nice, new shoes (we’ve confirmed this, so her new heels will surely get coverage from the WaPo’s Robin Givhan). A fellow shopper, unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice’s timing, went up to the Secretary and reportedly shouted, “How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!” Never one to have her fashion choices questioned, Rice had security PHYSICALLY REMOVE the woman.

Fucking worthless cunt. Proving once again what how useless she was as national security advisor -- after all, 9/11 happened on her watch, after receiving the infamous "Bin Laden Determined To Attack Within The U.S." memo, essentially giving her every possible heads-up except the actual date and time.

But you know, this nation is worth nothing if the citizens are not permitted to speak their minds -- indeed, that's what we're all about. So having Secret Service toss this woman is nothing less than her Marie Antoinette moment, to match that of her work husband, Dear Leader. Truly, each of them have displayed a nearly sociopathic level of indifference, and an unforgivable level of incompetence.

So while Bush uses scarce helicopters for his opportunistic damage control photo-ops, FEMA has a donation link on its site to our good buddy Marion Gordon "Pat" Robertson, whose laughably named "Operation Blessing" undoubtedly saves money by excluding fags and fornicators from its help list.

Finally, the excellent Brad DeLong reiterates the classic Richard Pryor line that many have been saying for quite some time in regards to this metastasized tumor of an administration -- who you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes?

So the red-staters are finally starting to see the reality of these venal, corrupt, callow bastards, and the consequences of what they've wrought. It doesn't take a genius to look ahead and wonder aloud that if they're this indifferent and inept with a problem that had been forecast and even projected in emergency-management scenarios, what do you think it's gonna be like when, God forbid, someone detonates a dirty bomb in Houston or Chicago?

That's it in a nutshell. People voted for Bush because they were tired of Clinton's oleaginous platitudes, and in Bush they saw someone who spoke in a relatively straightforward fashion -- if anything, he was too dumb to lie, because successful liars have to be able to recall what they told to whom. Even I understood such sentiments at the time -- after eight years of Clinton's lubricious nonsense and glandular outbursts, I at least could relate to the desire to have someone who didn't have the gall to parse one of the shortest, most obvious words in the entire English language.

Of course, now we parse obvious words on practically a daily basis with the current gang. Words mean what they want them to mean, as needed.

Anyway, they outsmarted themselves on their desire for simplicity -- Bush really is that dumb, and he really doesn't give a shit, and all that was driven home in a painfully obvious fashion this week. This is not seven additional minutes thrown away reading My Pet Goat; this was three fucking days of precious time while hundreds of thousands of people had their lives uprooted and destroyed, and the body count is entirely likely to surpass that of 9/11.

And he refused to change his plans. That is not a liberal media creation; these people can read clocks and calendars just fine, and they saw what they saw. I hope they remember all this the next time they vote, and I wish to hell the Democrats would step up and start hammering on this.

Anyone who soberly intones "now is not the time for politics" is full of shit -- now is exactly the time for politics. Putting it all off till next week is what's kept these vultures in power this long. The Bushies have a real cut above their eye now, and the good boxer works that cut until it's an open, running wound that refuses to close up. Hit it hard, and hit it now. Enough is enough. It's already going to take a generation to undo the damage these animals have done in just five years. We need to get them the fuck out of there now before they lock us into failure for the entire century.