The Alexander Butterfield Moment

“What the fuck did you just say?”

Every implosion has its Butterfield Moment.

Who was Alexander Butterfield?

Not the guy in the picture.

The guy in the picture was Senator Sam Ervin. He of the Sentient Eyebrows that seemed to react entirely independent of his face, but also, in some ineffable way, harmoniously. Like a jazz bassist, they picked out their own chords that somehow make contrapuntal sense with his long, lazy inflection.

A Southern Gentleman who stood Very Tall in my wee Yankee driftglass estimation for the way his easy, genial manner and sonorous drawl slowly scalpelled the Watergate Disaster open and laid it bare and plain for the world to see, one treasonous weasel at a time.

Butterfield was the guy who said, finally, that, yeah, there were tapes.

Butterfield also said that he knew "it was probably the one thing that the President would not want revealed".

Buttlerfield was one of the guys at whom the business end of the Watergate Committee was pointed.

He was this guy (emphasis added):

When Nixon was re-elected, Butterfield was appointed on December 19, 1972 as administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. He was routinely asked to appear before the United States Senate committee headed by Sam Ervin and was interviewed by staff of the committee on July 13, 1973, prior to going before the Senators. John Dean had previously mentioned that he suspected White House conversations were taped, and the committee was therefore routinely asking witnesses about it. Butterfield did not want voluntarily to tell the committee of the system but had decided before the hearing that he would have to if asked a direct question.

As it happened, Butterfield was asked the direct question by the minority (Republican) counsel, Donald G. Sanders. He told the staff members that "everything was taped ... as long as the President was in attendance. There was not so much as a hint that something should not be taped." All present recognised the significance of this disclosure and Butterfield was hastily put before the full Committee on July 16 to put the taping system on the record.

Every political implosion has its Butterfield Moment, and this story -- with emphasis added -- might very well be it for the Dear Leader.

March 1, 2006

Video Shows Bush Was Warned Before Katrina

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.
Bush didn't ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: "We are fully prepared."
The footage -- along with seven days of transcripts of briefings obtained by The Associated Press -- show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.

Linked by secure video, Bush expressed a confidence on Aug. 28 that starkly contrasted with the dire warnings his disaster chief and numerous federal, state and local officials provided during the four days before the storm.

A top hurricane expert voiced "grave concerns" about the levees and then-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown told the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren't enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome.

"I'm concerned about ... their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe," Brown told his bosses the afternoon before Katrina made landfall.
The White House and Homeland Security Department urged the public Wednesday not to read too much into the video footage.
…
-- Homeland Security officials have said the "fog of war" blinded them early on to the magnitude of the disaster. But the video and transcripts show federal and local officials discussed threats clearly, reviewed long-made plans and understood Katrina would wreak devastation of historic proportions. "I'm sure it will be the top 10 or 15 when all is said and done," National Hurricane Center's Max Mayfield warned the day Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast.

"I don't buy the `fog of war' defense," Brown told the AP in an interview Wednesday. "It was a fog of bureaucracy."

-- Bush declared four days after the storm, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" that gushed deadly flood waters into New Orleans. He later clarified, saying officials believed, wrongly, after the storm passed that the levees had survived. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility even before the storm -- and Bush was worried too.
...

"I talked to the president twice today, once in Crawford and then again on Air Force One," Brown said. "He's obviously watching the television a lot, and he had some questions about the Dome, he's asking questions about reports of breaches."
…

Bwahaha! Brownie ain't exactly going gentle into that good night, is he? He's loud, he's pissed, and he thinks he has nothing to lose.

The Butterfield Moment -- I would argue -- need not necessarily involve tape of some kind (although it's extra yummy when it does)

It comes when the political “Plimsoll Line” is crossed, and while the apologists and stooges and other McClellan-brand moral Handi-Wipes still stalk the decks of the Failed Bush Administration poking their Scary Mary Matalin fright masks into the cameras and insisting that All Is Well, and the Press Is The Problem…below-decks the Party structural engineers, who actually know how shit works and can see the extent of the holes in the hull, begin shimmying into lady's clothes and scurrying for the lifeboats.

(Hell, Bill Buckley has already stolen one of Nancy Reagan’s beaded, inaugural monstrosities, and Bill Kristol stripped Ayn Rand’s corpse of her funeral raiment and has tried squeezing his huge ass into her winding cloth.)

The clever rats are sprinting for cover, and we should expect a stampede behind them, because the moment is at hand when the Earth opens up, a corner is turned, the world changes, and the load-bearing capacity of the criminal enterprise is exceeded by the sheer volume, recklessness and lethality of its farrago of lies and fuckups and lies to cover up the the fuckups.

And once we have crossed into that place where the WH yapper factory can no longer or ignore or spin without simply looking insane, the situation potentially becomes very dangerous. Lots of people, for example, really thought Nixon would roll tanks in the streets before he would leave the White House in disgrace, and the particular peril of this oncoming trainwreck will be made all the more venomous by its historical context.

The ominous spectre of what y'all did to that nice, Clinton fella is about to loom very large over the political world again.

The fact that one, short Administration ago these same degenerate thralls were squealing with delight over the seven-year hunt for and eventual impeachment of Bill Clinton…

…over matters that could not even charitably add up to a fucking rounding error when it comes to tabulating the ruin, shame and disaster the Bicycle Chief and his Gang that Couldn’t Loot Straight have visited on our poor nation during any given year.

The mutilated, truncated Clinton Presidency blocks their rear, and millions of proud, furious Liberals who are finally ready to fight bare-knuckle and knives-out and have once-and-for-all had it with these scum stand between them and the fire door.

Of course, this Administration has already taken one hit after another smack in the wheelhouse, and it lumbers on, crippled and leaking carcinogens into the Republican topsoil, but do not mistake that for anything like courage or backbone or moral fiber. The Administrations bangs and clatters on, looking for the next bus to step in front of for one, simple reason: Its brain-dead base.

If you backed George Bush in 2004 – knowing all that we knew then about his utter, reckless incompetence – then you were either a fool, a bigot, a Fundy, scared out of your mind or just-plain-out-of-your-mind.

And if you continue to be among Republicans who back Bush, you’re simply a traitor, because these assclowns play with with our national security for the same reason they play with Social Security: partisan gain.

Nothing more.

Bush is in India on a visit and not there evading extradition because the Last Defenders of Plame-Alot will hang on to this failed criminal like grim death.

They know what waits for them in a post-impeachment worlds, and it ain't pretty.

They let cities die because they just don’t give a shit, and anyway, what has a few thousand more dead negroes ever been to a Bush Republican but a cause for celebration?

After all, they were Liberals, weren't they? Not good, well-behaved, eunuchs like Ron Christie and Lynn Swann. And the goosestepping legions of the RushReich have been encouraged by the Party Faithful to call Liberals filth and fit only for the grave, unchecked, for 20 years now, so why not?

Well congratulation, Republicans: In the bloated corpse of New Orleans, you have seen the future of your pathological, blame-the-Government-and-Liberals-for-everything Conservativism.

You have been given the rare opportunity to look upon the naked face of the “Fuck Everyone But Me”, so why aren't you dancing in the streets?

This is what you voted for.

This is what you begged for.

And now more joy!

Those of you White Pride Republicans who doubted you President’s street cred when it came to being down with Night Riders can rest easy: Now you have unimpeachable proof that when Dubya saw hammer coming down on the conspicuously black and conspicuously poor City of New Orleans -- and when he was told in no uncertain terms, days in advance, what kind of Hell on Earth was heading our way, he did what any good Klansman would do.

Turned his back, went on vacation, knocked back a few, and lied about it later.

Knowing that you Loyal Republicans would have his back if it ever got out.

Knowing that you Loyal Republicans already didn’t give a shit about the fact that this is the most deeply paranoid, deeply secretive Administration memory.

Knowing that you Loyal Republicans already didn’t give a shit that they classify the paper trail behind every fucking crime they commit – from Cheney and his fellow plutocrats carving up the oil market and calling it “energy policy”, to hiding behind the secrecy clause of the FISA law to keep the few Senators who knew the truth quiet, to how many meetings the President was at with Jack Abramoff -- behind the wall of national security or “We don’t talk about…” and then scream traitor whenever someone dares to ask why they keep breaking the law.

Knowing that you Loyal Republicans already don’t give a shit that these are people that would use a Marine Honor Guard to bury and protect every steaming pile of VP droppings each time Dick Cheney takes a fresh dump on the Constitution…and yet without batting an eye will leak national security secrets like an 90-year-old condom whenever it suits their partisan agenda.

Knowing that you Loyal Republicans don’t give a shit about torture or murder, or the lies that landed us in Iraq or the lies that keep us there.

So knowing that you Loyal Republicans despise every part of this country that doesn’t have your stink on it, and you Loyal Republicans couldn’t give a damn if Dubya killed a billion ay-rabs as long as it kept the prices at the pump reasonable, Bush wisely assumed that you Loyal Republicans would be cool with letting a city get wiped from the face of Creation…as long as that city was mostly broke and mostly dark.

That he would do what he does best -- what you Loyal Republicans elected him to do: talk drunk big and drunk stupid, drop the ball, wander away as people die behind his incompetence, and let someone else pick up the tab.

A Fundy Simpleton who would destroy the government is what the GOP wanted, and its what they got.

And had someone merely alleged that Bush had been told about Katrina, and then blew it off ‘cause he had an early tee-time, the immediate response would have been what it always is: the same he-said-she-said-hey-let’s-blame-Clinton okey-doke that passes for taking responsibility and being straight with the American people under this “War is Peace”, “Ignorance is Strength” regime.

Except this time there was a tape.