Friday, November 15, 2013

Us and Them, Redux


After the Bush Administration slouched off into infamous history, I never thought I would need to haul this old post from September 2005 out of my attic.

But since our Elite Media has now lobotomized and sanitized the actual horrors of the Bush Regime to the point where they can sling around the term "Obama's Katrina" with a straight face (from the NYT) -- 
The disastrous rollout of [President Obama's] health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.
...
Republicans readily made the Hurricane Katrina comparison. “The echoes to the fall of 2005 are really eerie,” said Peter D. Feaver, a top national security official in Mr. Bush’s second term. “Katrina, which is shorthand for bungled administration policy, matches to the rollout of the website.” Looking back, he said, “we can see that some of the things that we hoped were temporary or just blips turned out to be more systemic from a political sense. It’s a fair question of whether that’s happening to President Obama.”
-- it is probably well past time to remind them of exactly what a bloody, murderous slog of pure hubris and anguish the Bush Regime really was.

It is certainly well past time to remind them that regardless of how many layers of whitewash they slather onto the Bush Administration to create a blank scrim against which they can project their paranoid fantasies and panic-peddling fairy tales about the Failed Obama Administration being as bad or, perhaps even Worse Than Booosh!...

...a few of us will never go along to get along and will never, ever agree to forget what life was really like under the ongoing, train-wreck of failure, ruin, hopelessness, corruption, treason, round-the-clock Liberal-bashing and utter, prostrate media-complicity that was the Bush Administration:
Oh by the way, which one's Pink? *

by driftglass. September 4, 2005



* (I will rarely do a modification to an existing post, but this seemed too sadly appropriate not to add.)

This is a graphic-intensive post, and be advised the last few images are rather strong.

They are tragically nothing you won't see on your local news, but some people may find them disturbing, and my intention is not to be gratuitous.

I'm simply furious.


("Us and Them", from "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd, 1973)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Us



and Them



And after all we're only ordinary men




Me,



and you



God only knows



it's not what we would choose to do



Forward he cried from the rear



and the front rank died



And the General sat, as the lines on the map


moved from side to side



-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Black


and Blue



And who knows which is which and who is who


Up


and Down


And in the end
it's only round and round
and round


Haven't you heard it's a battle of words


the poster bearer cried


Listen son, said the man with the gun


There's room for you inside



Down


and Out



It can't be helped but there's a lot of it about



With,


without,


And who'll deny that's what the fightings all about


Get out of the way, it's a busy day


And I've got things on my mind


And for want of the price...


of tea and a slice


The old man died


Fuck these men, and God damn you if you voted for them.

I don't believe for one minute in a petulant and vengeful Deity that murders people to score debating points. However, if I did actually put my faith in such childish superstitions, I think I would be be much less inclined to blame gays for every single bad thing that happens and pay very close attention to the fact that God is at His most wrathful when foolish men in great nations make monsters into kings.

May God forgive us for letting criminals and madmen run our country.


9 comments:

The cheese eater said...

Chris Hedges can be added to the list of both sider nincompoops who suggest that in one significant way Obama IS worse than Boosh...

In order to mock Hedges' naiveté you must hear what he has to say. You can do so by copying and pasting the following link:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11021

To save everyone's valuable time, it should be noted that Hedges thinks Manning is a hero and that American Press Freedoms are under threat, blah,blah,blah...

Anonymous said...

You actually prove both siderism to be correct here, you don't strike a blow against it.

Obama has utterly fucked up and mishandled one of the defining items of his presidency... just like Bush, Clinton, Bush the elder, Reagan, I could go on.

Your claim that it's not the same doesn't hold water. It's only not the same when you toss in a fuck ton of other caveats like "but nobody died" to define it away to the point where you can declare it different. You don't get to do that.

Both sides do bungle shit, horrifically. I am OK with that being true. Because people fuck shit up. Now if you want to say Bush got a lot of people killed and Obama has not, sure that's also true, but it's a different issue than both sides bungling shit up.

Anonymous said...

" Now if you want to say Bush got a lot of people killed and Obama has not, sure that's also true, but it's a different issue than both sides bungling shit up."

Oh puhleeeze. Yes, starting an ego driven war that ultimately kills or displaces hundreds of thousands of civilians in addition to thousands of U.S. soldiers (not counting the tens of thousands of maimed and traumatized) as well as letting a major city drown (and said city is STILL recovering) is EXACTLY THE SAME AS inconveniencing folks due to website problems and being blamed for the fact that insurance companies decided to cancel their shitty no-coverage policies rather than fix them.

Calling the Bush created devastation "a fuck ton of other caveats" is naive, obtuse or dishonest - I'm not sure which.

The cheese eater said...

Any visitor to this site knows that DG has blogged that "both sides don't" so often that he should consider getting the phrase trademarked. This particular notion is one of the cornerstones of his entire understanding of American politics. IMHO demonstrating how the MSM uses the "both sides do it" ruse to prevent our political class from being held accountable is a valuable service.

Thanks DG.

On the other hand, on any day that I occupy myself with current political events for even a brief time, I see an actual mountain of evidence that, in SOME VERY CONSEQUENTIAL WAYS, both sides do "do it".

There are many pundits that point out that both sides agree on significant and consequential policies that effect all of our lives. Some of these pundits are: Chris Hedges, Bill Black, Bill Moyers, Matt Taibbi, Dean Baker, Lori Wallach, Yves Smith, Barry Ritholz, and Robert Reich. I believe the above pundits are in a very different class from Brooks, Halprin, Noonan and Scarborough.

It is no sin to point out that the donor class gives money to both political parties and that these donors want policy written in exchange for their donations. It is also true that both parties actively work to see that their major donors get the policies that they have paid for. Again there is no sin in pointing this out.

For those who do not engage in black and white, either/or thinking, the above is not hard to grasp. Nobody I know that criticizes Democrats thinks they are identical to Republicans or that both sides are equally bad. The people I know that criticize Democrats do so when they see them putting forward bad policy or protecting plutocrats. As far as I can tell both sides do exactly this on a regular basis.

I hold this truth to be self evident...

Neo Tuxedo said...

In the spirit of John Simon's dictum that there is no point in saying less than your predecessors have said, I'll just link to roxtar's reposting of what one "The Gryffin" had to say over at the Gos:

I want to hang the diminished persona of King George of the Magical Flightsuit around the neck of every Republican for the next fifty years.

When he dies from alcoholism sooner rather than later, I don't want Zodiac Ronnie's Lovefest dusted off and repackaged in the MSM.

[...]

And during the twilight of human civilization, using the last resources at their disposal, I want the doomed children of Earth to build a giant statue of George W. Bush. I want them to launch it into space. And in every language, coding, and equation, I want the inscription to read one thing:

FUCKASS

Potatohead said...

Nobody admits Bush today. Not a soul. Can't find 'em. Well, I found one.

She voted Bush the first time. Fresh out of school, hanging around "that crowd" it all seemed a blur.

But then school is out, the horror begins, she cries, "never again!"

I work with her and she's great. Nice person, doesn't want people to hurt, be without, not mean, caring, true. That Bush vote sticks with her to remind her that politics matter.

We had a conversation once about this, and my guilt is tuning out in the 90's, who needs politics, no worries, things are great...

...until they aren't great, and that's why we speak or be spoken for.

Worse, those ones who are mean, lie, selfish, never, ever rest. If we slack off, there they are just itching to take it all back, dragging us into their shitty world, because it's all they know and deserve and they think we deserve it too and they think so because it's all they've known and they can't imagine how anybody doesn't live in the lord of the flies, ugly, fear and shame filled world they live in.

Yeah, fuck them. And fuck Bush. You have covered the major league fuckery, but I have to say Bush elevated the low lifes, validated them, normalized them, and now here they are with a little bit of power, entitled to fuck us over and working it for all it's worth, because they know down deep the moment it slips away, they are once again just shit.

This makes them mean, they lie, they cheat, and they really don't care, because they can't care and anybody who does is weak.

Bush normalized that shit and it will take decades to beat it back into the dark holes and little rooms from whence it came.

Horace Boothroyd III said...

"Nobody I know that criticizes Democrats thinks they are identical to Republicans or that both sides are equally bad."

Fair enough. If you are interested in widening you circle of experience, you could do worse than to wander over to dailykos.com where the hysterical ninnies of "not a dime's worth of difference" has a thunderous voice.

Even as we speak they are casting about for a leftie White Knight to sabotage the Democratic candidate of 2016, on the specific grounds that it would be better to have a crazy Republican president with a determined Democratic congressional opposition than a competent Democratic president with an enable Congress that will enact a moderate Republican agenda.

Don't fool yourself, these people really do exist - even outside NADER 2000 reunion gigs.

The cheese eater said...

I'll take your word for it when it comes to the comment section at the Daily Kos. I also admit that presidential elections result in real and consequential differences. In my voting age life I've always prefered the Democratic candidate to the Republican one. Always.

That does not make Obama a good president or his policy prescriptions for the economy, WallStreet, free trade, the military, the budget, press freedoms, the minimum wage, social security, drone strikes, our home grown police state, Israel, Iran or even health care worth a damn.

If you are saying that Republicans are even worse and that Republican policies on these issues are either the same, non-existent, or even more disastrous then I agree.

My point is and was that in many important and consequential ways both sides do do it . for example, if Obama signs a Grand Bargain on Social Security all the tears on the Democratic side of the isle will be crocodile tears because the donor class wants SS payments lowered.

What the majority of Americans want on such matters are rarely considered. All the politicians want is political cover when they implement disastrous and unpopular policies. In this way both parties are exaxtly the same.

Joe Max said...

I'll have to post this link to the slide show video I made from Drifty's Pink Floyd tribute. Amazingly, it's still on line after all these years.

http://www.najakito.com/~john/UsAndThemFULL.mov

Note: for some reason it won't stream, you have to wait for it to download before it plays.