George W. Bush Still Rocks!
Stop criticizing! The rich man's CEO president is executing his
job requirements perfectly
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, September 9, 2005
Everyone is slamming poor Dubya. Everyone is saying, oh my God,
he's more inept than we ever imagined, he has no idea what's really
going on, he's oblivious and in denial and he pretty much let all
those poor black people die in filth and misery, and he basically
ignored the massive Katrina disaster for days before finally being
pressured into cutting his umpteenth vacation short and actually
taking action.
This is what they're saying. Kanye West was right, Bush doesn't
care about black people, or the poor, or anything that doesn't
directly serve his handlers' agenda or flatter his monochromatic ego
or anything that isn't spelled out for him in nice simplistic pie
charts and reassuring matronly tones.
And lo, the darts are slinging in from around the world, according
to SF Gate's own World Views column: "Maddening incompetence ...
reminiscent of a drought-stricken African state," says Britain's Daily
Mail. "Can't get it together," says a major paper in Italy. "A
plethora of grim tales of disaster," says the Scotsman. "Superpower or
Third World?" asks the Spanish daily Noticias de Álava. Why did BushCo
fail its first great national-security test since Sept. 11, despite
having two days' advance notice of Katrina's wrath? asks Le Monde. And
on it goes, the world's powers looking on in one part shock and one
part disgust and all parts repugnance for Bush's rampant ineptitude
and America's apparent inability to take care of its own.
But it's so unfair, isn't it, to attack poor Dubya like this? Just
a little misplaced? After all, Bush has always been the rich white
man's president. He is the CEO president, the megacorporate
businessman's friend, the thug of the religious right, a big
reservoir-tipped condom for all energy magnates, protecting against
the nasty STDs of humanitarianism and progress and social
responsibility.
He has always been merely an entirely selective figurehead, out of
touch and eternally dumbfounded, a hand puppet of the neoconservative
machine built and fluffed up and carefully placed for the very
specific job of protecting their interests, no matter what. Repeat:
No. Matter. What. Flood hurricane disaster war social breakdown
economic collapse? Doesn't matter. Corporate interests über alles,
baby. Protect the core, reassure the base, screw everyone else unless
it begins to affect the poll numbers and then finger-point, deflect,
prevaricate. All of a piece, really. Because Bush, he was never
actually meant to, you know, lead.
So maybe it's time to stop with the savaging of poor Dubya. He is,
after all, doing a simply beautiful job of kowtowing to his wealthiest
supporters while slamming the poor and running the nation into a deep
hole and creating the largest deficit in American history, all while
his cronies in oil and industry and military supply and Big Energy
gain immense and staggering wealth and pay less and less tax on it.
This is what he was hired to do. This is why he is in office. Hell,
the day after Katrina, Bush flew right by Louisiana and headed
straight to San Diego to party with his Greatest Generation cronies.
Reassure the masters, first and foremost, eh Shrub? Understood.
Is this not what we all expected? Can you reasonably say you
thought it would be different? Just look. All major social services
are being gutted. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is a joke,
second in line only to the ungodly useless Homeland Security
Department, which has become about as reassuring and trustworthy and
humane an organization as a prison in Guantánamo.
The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers
asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans
just last year. The White House hacked that down to about $40 million,
even as it passed the most bloated and nauseatingly pork-filled $12.3
billion energy bill in recent history, one that guaranteed we'd be
sucking at the tit of foreign oil and kneeling before Bush's pals in
Big Energy for decades to come, even as more and more teenagers die in
Iraq for Bush's inept and failed war. Yay politics.
Why didn't National Guardsmen from Louisiana and Mississippi march
into New Orleans immediately after Katrina exited to take charge and
keep the peace? Why, because most of them are serving in that same
violent and brutally costly war in Iraq, silly. Fully 30 percent of
the guard is stuck over there, along with 50 percent of their
equipment. Yay Vietnam 2.0.
Why did FEMA chief Michael Brown wait hours after Katrina struck
to timidly plead with his parent company, Homeland Security, for some
backup, not to actually get their hands dirty but rather to help
"convey a positive image" about the government's response to the
victims? Why, because he's an incompetent lackey Bush appointee who
was fired from his former job as head of something called the
International Arabian Horse Association. Yay pathetic nepotism.
Just look. Senate majority leader Sen. Bill Frist, icon of hollow
self-righteousness and the energy magnate's friend, has already
leveraged the Katrina nightmare to argue for more drilling in Alaska,
much in the way BushCo whored Sept. 11 to cram the Patriot Act down
the nation's throat and make fear and xenophobia a national pastime.
And let's not forget trusty profit-sucking sidekick Halliburton, which
has already scored a sweet deal to help repair Katrina damage, thanks
to the fact that the former director of FEMA is now a Halliburton
lobbyist. Ah, war and death and tragedy. They are just so *****
profitable, right, Dubya?
And then, the kicker. Then you read that Bush has actually ordered
an official probe into the botched Katrina relief efforts, a formal
federal investigation into what went wrong, which is a bit like a
shark ordering an investigation into what happened to all the fish.
Unless this probe starts and ends in the White House, unless it hangs
Bush himself up by his monkey ears and dangles him over a river of
toxic Louisiana sewage, it's merely useless and insulting and more
than a little sad.
Let's say it outright. The truest measure of any president, of any
leader, is how well he takes care of his own people. And Bush, well,
Bush has done a simply spectacular job of taking care of exactly his
own people -- the wealthy, the corporate, the extreme religious right,
his core base of supporters -- while happily and fiercely ignoring,
restricting, condemning, destroying the rest. Are you educated or
progressive or liberal or alternative-minded or sexually open or
homosexual or anti-war? This means you. Are you dirt poor and belong
to a minority and don't drive an SUV and contribute six figures per
annum to the RNC and maybe live in a flooded swamp in the Louisiana
bayou? This means you, squared. Sucker.
Here, then, is the new American motto, as reimagined by BushCo:
Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and we'll let them
die in a filthy and decrepit storm-ravaged American football stadium
while our president languishes on vacation and ponders his oil futures
and fondly remembers his good ol' days of getting drunk at Mardi Gras
before going AWOL from the military. God bless America.
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and
Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To
get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove
one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an
archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably
insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him
gifts.
As if that weren't enough, Mark also contributes to the hot,
spankin' SF Gate Culture Blog.
URL:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/09/09/notes090905.DTL
©2005 SF Gate
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president
represents, more and more closely, the inner soul
of the people. On some great and glorious day the
plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last and the White House will be adorned
by a downright moron." --- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
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