Wednesday, September 14, 2005

I want to be a Repugnican consultant! I mean, how hard could it be? In almost every situation, you could just simply advise your Repugnican employer: "Whatever your idea to say or do is -- don't." For instance, it wasn't enough that Barbara Bush and Dick Cheney asserted, or at least implied, that the Gulf Coast staters displaced by Hurricane Katrina are actually better off now than they were before Katrina struck; Laura Bush had to add her voice to the chorus. Reports Editor & Publisher today (with thanks to Mikhaela, from whom I found out about this): Top Republicans have long charged that the press focuses on the bad news from Iraq, ignoring positive stories. Now one leading Republican -- the first lady -- has made the same complaint about media coverage of the hurricane catastrophe in the Gulf [Coast states]. Laura Bush said [yesterday], in a speech before the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., that much more good than bad has come from the response to the catastrophe, no matter what Americans see on TV. She cast blame on the media for focusing on the negative in the recovery efforts. "We've seen terrible, terrible things and we've seen unbelievably unselfish acts of giving as well by communities all across the United States and, of course, many more unselfish acts of giving than bad things," she said in the speech. "Maybe the media hasn't shown us that much, but we've read about it and we do know about it." She said evacuees she met in her three trips to the hurricane zone are thankful they don't have to start over, from zero, because of donations and others acts of kindness. "That's what I've seen at each of the shelters I've visited," she said. "I've never heard a single word of complaint." [Emphasis mine.] She referred to "one woman who fled with her family to Louisiana wanted Americans to know -- and she said she really wished the press would show this on television -- and that is that evacuees have hope." The first lady also praised the Heritage Foundation for being "at the leading edge of the policy debates that affect our country and the world. And you contribute fresh ideas from a conservative perspective, encouraging policymakers to continue government reform and to stay true to our timeless values. And compassion is certainly one of those timeless values.... "My husband believes deeply in American compassion, and that value directs many of his policies." The political fallout from the Bush regime's inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina is from the fact that the members of the Bush regime are so freakishly isolated from and so freakishly unaware of the ordinary American's reality. So to keep asserting, or at least implying, how fucking happy the displaced Gulf Staters actually are -- not politically smart. Memo to Ken Mehlman, the closet case who chairs the Repugnican National Committee: I will be looking for the check in the mail for my political consultation. 9:44:24 PM    Comments []

+o help or no+ +o help? Ted Rall's latest column, titled "Charities Are for Suckers: Leave Katrina Relief Efforts to Government," is provocative: Hurricane Katrina has prompted Americans to donate more than $700 million to charity, reports the Chronicle of Philanthropy. So many suckers, so little foresight. Government has been shirking its basic responsibilities since the '80s, when Ronald Reagan sold us his belief that the sick, poor and unlucky should no longer count on "big government" to help them, but should rather live and die at the whim of contributors to private charities. The Katrina disaster, whose total damage estimate has risen from $100 to $125 billion, marks the culmination of Reagan's privatization of despair. The American Red Cross leads the post-Katrina sweepstakes, quickly closing in on the $534 million it took in just after 9/11. But Red Cross spokeswoman Sheila Graham told the AP it needs another half billion "to provide emergency relief over the coming weeks for thousands of evacuees who have scattered among 675 of its shelters in 23 states." Shelley Borysiewicz of Catholic Charities USA, which has raised $7 million thus far, also continues to solicit donations: "We don't want people to lose sight of the fact that this is going to take years of recovery, and we're going to be there to help the people who fall through the cracks." What "cracks"? Why should New Orleans' dispossessed have to live in private shelters? We live in the United States, not Mali. There's only one reason flood victims aren't getting help from the government: because the government refuses to help them. The Red Cross and its cohorts are letting lazy, incompetent and corrupt politicians off the hook, and so are their donors. It's ridiculous, but people evidently need to be reminded that the United States is not only the world's wealthiest nation but the wealthiest society that has existed anywhere, ever. The U.S. government can easily pick up the tab for people inconvenienced by bad weather -- if helping them is a priority. That goes double for Katrina, a disaster caused by the government's conscious decision to eliminate the $50 million pittance needed to improve New Orleans' levees. For our leaders the optional war against Iraq is such a priority, which the Congressional Budget Office expects to cost $600 billion by 2010. That's four or five Katrinas right there. (That's also where the levee money went.) Because rich people are always a political priority, their taxes have been slashed by $4 trillion over a decade -- the equivalent of 32 Katrinas. So worried are our public servants about the tax burden placed on the rich that they're looking out for rich dead people. This is why they've gutted the estate tax that, at a cost of $75 billion annually, will run half a Katrina a year. Trickle-down economists beginning with Milton Friedman shout "starve the beast," but while the social programs are put on a diet, the mean and powerful pig out more than ever. Disaster relief is too important to be left to private fundraisers, with their self-sustaining fundraising expenses, administrative overhead (9 percent for the Red Cross) and their parochial, often religious, agendas. It's also way too expensive. In the final analysis, after the floodwaters have receded and the poor neighborhoods of New Orleans have been razed under eminent domain, major charities will be lucky if they've managed to raise 1 percent of the total cost of Katrina. Congress, recognizing the reality that only the federal government possesses the means to deal with the calamity, has already allocated $58 billion -- over 70 times the amount raised by charities -- to flood relief along the Gulf of Mexico. As Bush says, that's only a "down payment." Cutting a check to the Red Cross isn't just a vote for irresponsible government. It's a drop in the bucket compared to what you'll end up paying for Katrina in increased taxes. Granted, in terms of popularity of likelihood of success, trying to make a case against giving money to charities compares to lobbying against puppies. The impulse to donate, after all, is rooted in our best human traits. As we watched New Orleanians die of thirst, disease and anarchic violence in the face of Bush Administration disinterest and local government incompetence, millions of us did the only thing we thought we could to do to help: cut a check or click a PayPal button. Tragically, that generosity feeds into the mindset of the sinister ideologues who argue that government shouldn't help people -- the very mindset that caused the levee break that turned Katrina into a holocaust and led to official unresponsiveness. And it is already setting the stage for the next avoidable disaster. It's time to "starve the beast": private charities used by the government to justify the abdication of its duties to its citizens. Rall makes a lot of good points. There are many homeless people in my Sacramento neighborhood whom I see regularly, and often when I see them I wonder where the fuck my tax dollars are going (nevermind; I know that my federal tax dollars, at least, are going to Halliburton via Iraq) and I wonder what in the fuck our "leaders" are doing. Aren't we, through our tax dollars, paying our "leaders," from our city council members to our president, to solve our social problems? So why the fuck aren't they? And it sometimes occurs to me, when I see the homeless people in my neighborhood, that to give them money is to perpetuate the status quo in which the rich pay less and less in taxes and we over-taxed members of the middle class increasingly have to help the poor. We members of the middle class are being squeezed between the rich and the poor, and what are the rich and the poor going to do when they have flattened us completely? A part of me says, "Don't help the poor. Helping the poor only delays the revolution for which this nation is long overdue. Helping the poor only allows the rich to continue to fuck the rest of us up the ass." But then I think of the mentally ill homeless people, those who aren't homeless because they're lazy and/or addicted to alcohol and/or drugs, but who are homeless because they are mentally ill and live in a "Christian" nation that doesn't give a shit about the least of us. And I think of the children of the poor, who, being dependent upon their parents, didn't create their situations and who are pretty powerless to change their situations. And I even think of the poor's poor pets. (I see a lot of homeless people with dogs.) And when I think of them, and especially when I see them, it's hard to take a detached, hard-line social Darwinistic stance. Thus far I have given $50 to the American Red Cross and $15 to the Humane Society of the United States for Katrina relief. Rall is right: I, a member of the middle class who already pays plenty in taxes, shouldn't have to reach into my own pocket to help in the Katrina relief effort. My taxes already should be going there -- and not to Dick Cheney's Halliburton and other subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp via the Bush regime's bogus war in Iraq. And the rich motherfuckers, the majority of whom wrap themselves in the American flag and/or in the Shroud of Turin, should be paying their fucking share of taxes.  But it's not as easy for me as it is for a Repugnican or for a hard-liner like Rall to do absolutely nothing about others' pain and suffering -- and to justify my refusal to help them as representing some higher good. So, until the middle class is wiped out, which shouldn't be too long from now, I guess that when there is another natural disaster, I'll be shelling out again. 3:35:10 PM    Comments []

Reuters photos Katrina and George W. Bush, both photographed on Aug. 29, 2005 Katrina is Bush's Monica Like Bill Clinton was, George W. Bush has been sunk in his second term by a woman. Of course, there are significant differences between Katrina and Monica. No one died because Clinton had sex with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Or because initially he lied about it. In contrast, more than 650 bodies have been counted in the Gulf Coast states thus far in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. (The husband-and-wife owners of a New Orleans nursing home have been charged with negligent homicide for having ignored instructions to evacuate their residents, which resulted in the drowning deaths of 34 of them. Gee, do you think that George W. Bush or former Federal Emergency Management Agency head Michael "Brownie" Brown will ever look out from behind bars for their failure to evacuate New Orleans? No, of course not; it's only the little guy or gal, the Lynndie Englands of the world, who are incarcerated for their crimes, while the rich and powerful white men who are responsible for the Abu Ghraib prison atrocities of the world get off scot free. At worst, they are forced, like "Brownie" was, to resign.) Another difference between the Katrina scandal and the Lewinsky scandal, of course, is that while the Lewinsky matter was, like the Bush regime's originally stated rationale for Gulf War II (Saddam Hussein's/Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction), a matter that was whipped up by the Repugnicans, Katrina was very real and very serious (ask the bloated corpses that they're collecting in New Orleans right now) -- and was not whipped up by the Democrats or Osama Bin Laden or any other "evildoer." The majority of Americans who had soundly re-elected Bill Clinton in 1996 over his Republican opponent Bob Dull -- er, Dole -- didn't give a fuck that he'd had sex with Lewinsky. In 1998, Americans, fat and lazy from the Clinton-era prosperity, didn't much care what was going on in Washington, D.C., but only wanted to consume, so the Repugnicans, who had never gotten over the fact that Clinton toppled King George I in 1992, without a public outcry to stop them, were able to shove the Lewinsky scandal down America's throat. For years they had been looking for something, anything, to use against Clinton, and, as usual, if you look hard enough and long enough, you'll find some dirt on just about anyone. When the Whitewater witch-hunt didn't pan out, the Repugnicans found out through a hussy named Linda Tripp that Clinton had had sex with Lewinsky -- there was even a spooge-stained blue dress of Lewinsky's to prove it. (Clinton earlier had testified under oath that he hadn't had sex with Lewinsky.) Because the Repugnicans controlled the House of Representatives, they were able to impeach Clinton in December 1998 for a "crime" (lying under oath about having had sex with Lewinsky) much less serious than the war crimes and the treason that George W. Bush & Co. have committed. The Senate, traditionally more sensible than the House of Representatives, in January 1999 decided that Clinton would not be removed from office, but, as the Repugnicans had hoped that it would, the Lewinsky scandal cast a pall over the 2000 presidential election. The presidency of George W. Bush thus far is pretty easy to sum up: Bush became "president" in 2000 with a little help from Republican Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the state's top elections official who conveniently had co-chaired the Florida committee to elect Bush, and from the five members of the U.S. Supreme Court who had been appointed by Republican presidents. The official Florida presidential vote tally had Bush winning the make-or-break state by only 527 votes more than his Democratic opponent, Al Gore, who had won the nation's popular vote by more than 500,000 votes. Just as in the Lewinsky scandal, Americans, still engorged like Augustus Gloop on the prosperity of the Clinton years, didn't make an outcry when Team Bush stole the White House in late 2000. It didn't matter to a good chunk of Americans which man was president, George W. Bush or Al Gore; it didn't really make a difference, they believed. (They would find out later that indeed it did make a difference.) Bush set out early in his first term to reverse the gains that the common American had made during the Clinton years and to further enrich the rich, because that's about all that Repugnicans in government know how to do: Use the government to personally benefit themselves and their friends at the expense of the middle class and the poor. Bush was a lackluster "president" already. Then, there were the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which happened a little over a month after Bush had received, while vacationing on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, a presidential daily briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Even though he looked stunned and paralyzed as he held the book My Pet Goat in a classroom when he was informed of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans gave Bush a pass on 9/11. It was widely accepted that the Bush regime couldn't have seen the attacks coming -- despite the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." "Had I had any inkling whatsoever that people were going to fly airplanes into buildings, we would have moved heaven and earth to protect the country," Bush said of 9/11 in April 2004. Of course, the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing proves that Bush did have, or should have had, an inkling that people were going to fly airplanes into buildings. The memo mentions airliner hijackings and the World Trade Center. What I'd really like to know, though, is why Bush didn't "move heaven and earth to protect the country" late last month although meteorologists had given us plenty of warning about Hurricane Katrina. He'd fucked up the first time; 9/11 happened after he'd received a warning the previous month. But jingoistic hatred for the sand-monkey perpetrators of 9/11, jingoistic hatred that he and the members of his regime stoked tirelessly, had diverted the nation's attention from his failure to heed the warning that he had received. The members of the Bush regime were able to wave the bloody shirt of September 11, 2001, into November 2004, by which time they had pretty successfully branded themselves as the only party that can keep Americans safe from danger. Probable election fraud on the Repugnicans' part (especially in Ohio) aside, the official 2004 presidential election results were 50.7 percent of the popular vote for Bush and 48.3 percent for his Democratic opponent, John Kerry. The election all came down to Ohio, whose Republican secretary of state, Kenneth "Katherine Harris" Blackwell, also very conveniently had sat on his state's committee to "re"-elect Bush. Unsurprisingly, Bush "won" Ohio, just like he'd "won" Florida in 2000. Whew. Close call. Surely after his reprieve from 9/11, George W. Bush wouldn't ignore another warning of imminent catastrophe on American soil, right? If you were Bill Clinton and your original presidential campaign had been jeopardized by accusations that you are a womanizer, you'd wouldn't go on to have sex with an intern in the Oral -- er, Oval Office, right? If you'd gotten off the first time, you'd count your ass lucky and you wouldn't make the same mistake again, right? But what was Bush doing on Aug. 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit land? Was he at a hurricane command center, closely monitoring the situation and marshalling resources? Was he overseeing, with "Brownie," a massive federal evacuation effort of the people of New Orleans? Um, no... He was eating birthday cake with Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain in Arizona on Aug. 29, 2005. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne gives the date of George W. Bush's political death as Sept. 2, 2005, "the day Bush first toured the Gulf Coast States after Hurricane Katrina." I disagree. I give the date of Bush's political death as Aug. 29, 2005, when he decided that eating that birthday cake with John McCain was a higher priority than was being the protector-of-the-people president that since 9/11/01 he and his puppeteers had been claiming incessantly he is. It isn't the pictures of Bush sucking frosting off of his thumb on Aug. 29, 2005, that have done him in, although they are enough, although those pictures say a thousand words. It is the consequences of his decision to do little to nothing before Hurricane Katrina struck that have done Bush in, the greatest consequence of which is that unlike in Iraq since March 2003, this time we're doing a body count, and while most Americans seem rather undisturbed by the fact that Bush is responsible for the unnecessary deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians since March 2003, Americans do care about unnecessarily dead Americans (at least on American soil -- only we moonbats seem to really give a shit that almost 2,000 of our troops have died unnecessarily in Iraq since March 2003 and that our troops continue to die there unnecessarily). They say that dead men tell no tales, but those bloated bodies in New Orleans -- which you can see for yourself on ogrish.com, by the way -- have quite a tale to tell. Bill Clinton was forced, when he was confronted with the existence of the blue dress with his dried DNA on it, to admit that he indeed had had sex with Monica Lewinsky. George W. Bush was forced, when he was confronted with the existence of the corpses in New Orleans and elsewhere in the Gulf Coast states, to finally take some responsibility for something five years into his disastrous presidency. But like it was too late for Clinton's reputation and legacy when he finally 'fessed up, it is too late now for George W. Bush's. 9:11:00 AM    Comments []