More lies please!

Patent Medicine: it’s good for what ails you.

For the first time in his Presidency, George Bush has a problem that he actually recognizes as a problem.

The destruction of a city full of poor, black Americans?

Oh fuck no!

If they didn’t want to die, they shouldna oughtna been poor, right? I mean for all their whooping and hollering and Jesus-this and Jesus-that, didn’t these people read the real scriptures, like “Sodom and Gomorrah” or the “Parable of the Talents”? Or “The Bell Curve”? Being rich and white proves your superiority, and if you choose to be poor and black and live in a city full of sin...well, God’s will be done.

The fact that his handling of the destruction of a city full of poor, black Americans has been lazy, inept and criminally negligent?

Oh fuck no!

George Bush has been lazy, inept and criminally negligent his entire adult life, so where does anyone who voted for him scrape together enough testosterone to come off now, at this late date, all Shocked and Stunned that he is what he has always been? The GOP rank and file has never been bothered in the slightest by the obvious fact that they elected and then re-elected an lying, incompetent fucknut...just as they have never been bothered in the slightest by the fate of poor and/or black Americans.

And besides, George has a Mandate, remember? A m-a-n-d-a-t-e. Which means that he’s, y’know, sorta like God. Infallable. A Mandate, after all, means the mere fact that he says 2+2= 1 billion makes it so.

Of course...Clinton had a mandate, and that didn’t stop the GOP from impeaching him...but that doesn’t matter: Republicans don’t “do” ethical consistency, and rules are for other people.

For little people.

For poor and/or black people.

No, George Bush does not give a shit about what is going on in New Orleans outside of the fact that it has given him a huge a P.R. problem. The nation has been humiliated by the complete failure of the National Government to cope with a National Catastrophe and for reasons he obviously cannot even comprehend, the public apparently (and, to him, inexplicably) expected Dubya – as the head of the National Government – to have taken some kind of keen interest in the life-and-death problems of little people.

Shit even some conservative pundits are starting to sound all French and Treasonous and Disloyal to their Master. The Union Leader? Tony Blankely? David Brooks?

For God’s Sake, what’s next? Lassie sinking her teeth into Timmy’s leg!?

But as a P.R. problem, it’s fast turning into one big enough and earth-shaking enough for Bush to start to pray that Cindy Sheehan would find her way back onto the front pages again.

I mean, first, since there were no feeding-tubed, brain-dead white women to politically exploit in any states run by his relatives, GW felt he didn’t have to cut short his vacation, lace up his Seven League Boots, leap across half a continent and into action in the middle of the night.

But for some mysterious reason, this did not play well the masses who were supposed to have been post-9/11 spot-welded into unblinking, eternal loyalty to Dear Leader, so what’s up with that?

And since there are no War Heroes standing between him and a fat, greasy slice of electoral pizza, that means there are no honorable men that Karl Rove can be dispatched to slander and defame.

There are no Domestic Rumsfelds to trot out to hose down the press corps with a couple of hundred, high-pressure gallons of happytalking bullshittery about why the debacle in New Orleans had turned a corner, and a few regime dead-enders and Democracy was Marching, and so forth.

There were no aircraft carriers plying the waters of Lake Pontchartrain into whose deck Chickenhawk One could skid to a halt. Where Bush could snap off ragged-ass salutes, swagger out in front of a staged audience of prop soldiers, in front a lying banner, and declare the shitstorm was over long, long, long before the real shitstorm had even begun.

It's also a little too soon to fire up the Presidential Medal of Freedom factory and begin striking off chest salad for Michael D. Brown and any of the other boys and girls over at FEMA who have presided of such a spectacular, humiliating and lethal bureaucratic implosion.

Also, to my knowledge, no one involved in the many warnings about the potential disaster that was waiting for the right circumstances to converge on a New Orleans is married to an active CIA who can be kneecapped for the crime of having a spouse that told the Truth to Power...so that’s out.

And since the whole fucking thing was on the Weather Channel, we can't exactly chalk it up to an untraceble "intelligence failure" can we?

In short, having thumbed through the entire Team Bush Ratfuck Playbook all the way from Page One to Page Three...he’s got nuthin’. Nuthin’!

Well, nuthin’ except the usual; just lying his ass off.

This, excerpted from Blah3, where poster “Stranger” gives a quick object lesson in the lensing/focusing power of bloggers to aggregate and analyze faster than you can say, “You sit on a throne of lies.”

I urge you to drop over and read it all.

The Potemkin Photo Op
Saturday, September 03 2005 @ 09:40 PM Eastern Daylight Time
Contributed by: Stranger

I was tuning in and out of Bush's massive photo op on the Gulf Coast yesterday, and everything at the time seemed just a little too pat for me...

But from beginning to end, the entire exercise was a series of lies - a Potemkin photo op designed to fool those Americans who were not bothering to look closely at what was going on.

Let's look at key aspects of Bush's trip that were covered by television.

The Briefing: There were a lot of questions asked yesterday morning about the phony briefing that Bush got in that hangar, featuring a backdrop of Coast Guard helicopters. People were wondering why those choppers were not out picking up flood victims or delivering supplies. The reason why is simple - Bush had the majority of helcopter traffic stopped while Marine One was in the Gulf Coast region.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported this (Via AmericaBlog):

Three tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard Parish and on Algiers Point sat on the Crescent City Connection bridge Friday afternoon as air traffic was halted because of President Bush’s visit to New Orleans, officials said. ...

The First 'Comforting Session': Then it was off to Biloxi, MS to survey the damage. As Bush, Haley Barbour and others walked down a street, 2 women appeared seemingly out of nowhere for Bush to 'comfort' them...

A number of threads at Democratic Underground discuss the weirdness of these women showing up in a disaster area. And a transcript of the conversation between Bush and the women reads like a bad comedy skit:

Bush to women: "There's a Salvation Army center that I want to, that I'll tell you where it is, and they'll get you some help. I'm sorry.... They'll help you.

...

Woman 1: "I came here looking for clothes..."
Bush: "They'll get you some clothes, at the Salvation Army center..."
Woman 1: "We don't have anything..."
Bush: "I understand.... Do you know where the center is, that I'm talking to you about?"
Guy with shades: "There's no center there, sir, it's a truck."
Bush: "There's trucks?"
...

The 'Recovery Efforts': Wherever Bush went yesterday, it seemed as though people were already hard at work rebuilding the affected areas. Unfortunately for Bush, there were a few foreign journalists at his photo ops, and they pulled back the curtain on what we saw on TV to reveal that the 'work' was staged for the media. Here's a translation from the German news show web site.

Christine Adelhardt live from Biloxi:

"Two minutes ago the President drove by with his convoy. What happened here in Biloxi during the day is really unbelievable. All of a sudden the rescue troops finally showed up, the clean-up vehicles; we didn't see those over the last days here. In an area where it really isn't urgent, there is nobody around, all the remaining people went to the city center.

The President is traveling with a press convoy, so they get wonderful pictures saying the president was here and the help will follow. The amount of this catastrophe shocked me, but the amount of set-up that happened here today is at least equally shocking for me.

And there's more, this time on the 'recovery efforts' in New Orleans, from War And Piece:

There was a striking dicrepancy between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV.

ZDF News reported that the president's visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of 'news people' had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time.

The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF.

Levee Repairs in New Orleans: As Bush flew around the skies above New Orleans, CNN began showing footage of a bulldozer and dump trucks working on the 17th Street levee,...

But according to Sen. Mary Landrieu, the crew that was working so hard yesterday left and apparently never came back:

...
Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast - black and white, rich and poor, young and old - deserve far better from their national government.
...

You are being lied to, and lives have been lost because of it.

In other words it's Status Quo in Bushylvania...and the Lying Dude abides.