The Voices In Their Heads

Within hours of Bill Clinton's televised perfidy, breaching the levees of George Bush's stupidity with a flood of fiscal common sense, the usual suspects were manning the fortifications of the crumbling castle of crony capitalist pseudo-conservatism.

Chief amongst the orcs of Helms Deep was something calling itself The Conservative Voice, who through injudicious editing and stratospheric bullshit-to-reality ratio, is just begging for a thorough fisking.

And just because I was so mean to Clenis back in the '90s, but I miss him terribly now, I'm gonna step up and defend him against these mendacious punks.

Key political opponents say that President Bush is oblivious or insensitive to racism and poverry [sic], or worse.

That is gutter politics.

They are demagogues.

Right. "Key political opponents say". Um, has this asshole checked the polls lately? (No, of course not; these highly principled beasts are impervious to the shifting sands of public opinion.) The "poverry" rate has grown, reg'lar Americans' purchsing power has stalled thanks to exploding gas prices and stagnant real wages, and the message has been driven home with a vengeance in Bush country -- which, after all, is the most fiscally vulnerable area to begin with.

That's the wondrous joke of it all -- if you're a wealthy businessman, these guys are doing exactly what you're paying them to do, otherwise, you're just a complete schnook who let yourself get hosed for a couple of bullshit social issues. Enjoy your enhanced "poverry" level.

BUT, President Bush does seem oblivious to the menace posed by the Machiavelli of secular extremism, Bill Clinton.

The man who skillfully resurrected his political career after he lost a gubernatorial reelection race by ostentatiously attending televised church services regularly in Arkansas carrying the biggest Bible he could find.

The man who shamelessly lied to the world about the sinful nature of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and pretended that he was in a state of grace by going to Holy Communion in a Roman Catholic Church in South Africa on a televised Palm Sunday service.

Oh please. Every damned politician in this benighted asylum of a country has to go through the motions because, as Matt Taibbi once so excellently put it, Americans have an affection for boobism, for leading the intellectual lives of farm animals. Bush is a good Christian like Paris Hilton is Mother Teresa.

The man who was impeached, but not removed from office, because no Democrat Senator has ever voted to remove a fellow Democrat from the White House and there were enough Democrat Senators to preclude a two-thirds vote.

Yes, and? Objectively, what The Voice is imparting here is that Republicans didn't have the goddamned sense to come to their senses when it counted most -- when it came time to keep the punishment proportionate to the "crime".

Now, we all know that it wasn't about the sex, but the lying. Right. Gotcha. Unless it's lying about things that matter, right, O Serious Thinkers?

The man who made sure that the Ten Commandments were cast out of courthouses by appointing two secular extremists--Justices Ginsburg and Breyer--to cast the fourth and fifth votes for the purpose.

How exactly are Ginsburg and Breyer "secular extremists", especially when noted commie atheist Orrin Hatch says he suggested both Breyer and Ginsburg to Clinton? Either Hatch is padding his cred, or The Voice is emanating from a sphincter.

The ungrateful man who did not hesitate to falsely charge that President Bush and his administration had "an emergency plan that works" only for "middle-class people up."

The former President is a talented liar who is loathe [sic] to criticize blacks or women, whom he expects to carry the day for Hillary and him in 2008.

So he implictly targeted the former head of FEMA, Michael Brown, a white Republican male who had leaned far forward in the case of Hurricane Katrina and successfully dealt with hurricane disasters for years (until Louisiana's unique combination of corruption, incompetence, crime and political rivalry caught up with it).

Note: There were shooters and looters in New Orleans, but no shooting and little looting in Mississippi.

Do tell. No shooting, little looting, any lynching? Whatever the case, The Voice (which is way beyond shrill by this point) pads Drownie's thin résumé even more than Drownie himself did. How many hurricane disasters for how many years? Florida doesn't count; Jeb gets what Jeb wants. Drownie's not even on Jeb's radar.

Put it this way -- Florida got hit hard by four hurricanes in four weeks in the summer of 2004. How often did Mike Brown's name come up before, during, or after all that?

Referring to his own administration and his FEMA director, the former President related this revisionist history:

"When James Lee Witt ran FEMA, because he had been both a local official and a federal official, he was always there early, and we always thought about that.

"But both of us came out of environments with a disproportionate number of poor people."

Even Joe Scarborough, a die-hard Bush Leaguer, has openly praised James Lee Witt, and compared Mike Brown very unfavorably to Witt. Again, is this retard paying attention to what some of his own people are saying? The facts are that Witt had experience in the field, and handled his FEMA duties competently; Brown was forced to resign from the horsie club because the judges were on the take.

Was Clinton indulging in a bit of class warfare? You betchum. Is it high time someone did, given Bush's complete disregard for the first 72 hours of the Katrina emergency? Hell yeah. Truth hurts.

On Sunday, September 18, 2005, former President Clinton went on ABC and NBC to Bush bash.

In an interview on the ABC News program "This Week," former President Clinton told his former subordinate, George Stephanopoulos, that class divisions were to blame: "It's like when they issued the evacuation order. That affects poor people differently. A lot of them in New Orleans didn't have cars. A lot of them who had cars had kinfolk they had to take care of. They didn't have cars, so they couldn't take them out."

The former President put it this way: "This is a matter of public policy. And whether it's race-based or not, if you give your tax cuts to the rich and hope everything works out all right, and poverty goes up and it disproportionately affects black and brown people, that's a consequence of the action made. That's what they did in the 80's; that's what they've done in this decade. In the middle, we had a different policy."

The ungrateful former President's malevolent message: President Bush's tax cuts are at fault for the debacle. Not lack of proper local preparation, a Mayor who waited to order mandatory evacuation after President Bush urged him to do and then left hundreds of buses parked and empty instead of using them for the purpose, and a Governor who passed on President Bush's offer to have the federal government take control and then kept the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army out of New Orleans after Hurrican Katrina had passed and the people in the unsupplied Superdome refuge needed their assistance.

Nonsense. Clinton's message was that not only did Bush dick around when the shit was about to hit the fan, but his policies made a bad problem worse. A third of the Louisiana National Guard's personnel and equipment is in the other Gulf, chasing shadows around al-Anbar. FEMA is top-heavy with useless toadies and donors. Instead of "director", the head of FEMA might as well be called a "ranger" or a "pioneer", whichever is ranked higher I suppose.

Despite President Bush's graciousness and the tradition that former Presidents not criticize or mute criticism of their siccessors[sic], former President Clinton has often been critical of his successor.

And on Sunday he passionately repeated many of those criticisms in discussing the invasion of Iraq, the growing federal deficit and other issues.

The Clintons are constantly in campaign mode. Not President Bush, who has been inadvertently helping the Clintons, who would appoint more ACLU types to the United States Supreme Court to strike "under God" from "The Pledge of Allegiance" and "In God We Trust" from American's currency and complete the separation of church and state that would have been anathema to the Founders and Framers, who never intended their respect for the private right of conscience to be expanded to keep America from acknowledging God and supporting religion generally.

Ah, so the Clintons, and not Bush, are "constantly in campaign mode". What a crock of shit. Half of Bush's month-long power nap was taken up by fundraising stops and cheerleading sessions.

And the implication that the "Founders and Framers" had anything to do with "under God" or "In God We Trust" is so laughably easy to debunk, you have to wonder why this moron brought it up at all. Could it be that he has no idea that those phrases were foisted on us in the 1950's by the freakin' Knights of Columbus? Indeed, it could be; the moron hasn't gotten much else right, has he?

The former President's latest effort to undermine consumer confidence before Hillary runs for relection to the United States Senate in 2006 and for President in 2008:

"What Americans need to understand is that ... every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts.

"We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else."

"We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense."

The former President can contribute his share of the tax cuts to the United States Treasury, and more, whenever he wants.

Yes, he can. But nice dodge, while you're at it, bub. Note how The Voice doesn't bother to even address the factuality -- the shit-scary factuality -- of what Clinton said. We're up to our eyeballs in debt to countries who are jockeying for position on the world stage. And we've squandered our goodwill. The rest of the world isn't just tired of the Bushies, they're sick of us because these assholes got back in. They figure that if we're that fucking dumb, that we'd put Chimpco back in power after getting a big whiff of their corruption and incompetence, there's just no reasoning with us anymore. We're little kids, distracted by the bright, shiny objects, pretending that "intelligent design" is a principled scientific debate, rather than a purely political scam.

We're 4% of the world, consuming 25% of its resources. That is an unsustainable paradigm to begin with, even if the oil was in our backyard and everyone liked us. But for morons like The Voice, it's all Clenis' fault once again.

As I've duly noted before (and several readers have backed me up on this assertion), I hold no brief for Clinton -- indeed, I savagely and consistently criticized him while he was in office. I had very little patience for his oleaginous insincerities. But he has recast himself remarkably as an elder statesman, counter to the late-night frat-house rap-session atmosphere that was supposedly cultivated during his terms in office. (Not that there's anything wrong with that in my book; if there's one job that is not 8 to 5, it's running the country.) Remember how we were told that "the adults were in charge" when Chimpco took over? Well, you tell me -- which one looks like a diffident adolescent fuck-up right now, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush?

And what do you think Bush will do when he's put out to pasture? You think he'll even pretend to do anything good for the poor and downtrodden of the world? You think he'll do one goddamned thing that's not meant to line his pockets, or the pockets of his benefators? You think he remembers what his favorite political philosopher said that the love of money was the root of?

If Bush spends his retirement doing anything besides keeping a seat warm for the Carlyle Groups of the world, I'll be damned surprised. And the Conservatard Voices of the world will squawk themselves hoarse singing their usual hymns to the supposedly free market.