Bush in New Orleans: A Shameless Sham

The King’s triumphal resurgence in front of a national television audience on Thursday night had all of the typical hallmarks of a Karl Rove bullshit epic: the extensive attention to detail in the staging, lighting and angles that allowed Bush to be shown at the podium with the perfectly illuminated Jackson Square in the background as well as the absence of any extemporaneous activity or pesky reporters or audience members that could provide a distraction from the great and mighty leader. This was yet another meticulously crafted public relations achievement by a White House propaganda machine stocked with those highly influenced by the work of Leni Riefenstahl and given the fact that they had to truck in their own lights and generators to pull off the big con of putting the bloom back on the rose, polishing the turd or otherwise putting lipstick on the pig that any documentary footage could be transformed into a modern masterpiece that would totally blow away Triumph of The Will. Dan Froomkin's most recent Whitehouse Briefing blog has an excellent bit on just how bogus that it all was but you will need to register in order to view it.

It’s a good thing that the reopening of the French Quarter and its legendary drinking establishments are the first and foremost priority in the plans for the rejuvenation of the Crescent City because you would have to be pretty fucking snockered to place any credibility at all in Thursday night’s shameless horseshit disbursement ceremony. In the speech itself there was the obligatory linking to terrorism and 9/11 although it was much more subtle than the fear mongering of the past. More predictably and perhaps more alarmingly there was a super sized helping of the usual red meat that is thrown to the radical ‘christian’ crusaders that comprise the majority of Bush’s base and the holy warriors can expect even more as Rove orders the government to spend like drunken sailors which is certain to alienate the fence sitting fiscal conservatives who are growing more nervous by the day at the profligate in chief maxes the national credit cards for present gain. The speech if anything was well put together, Rove’s screenwriters did a great job as is typical, especially the historical references which are rare for an administration determined to keep the public as ignorant of the past as humanly possible. I have absolutely no doubt that a good percentage of simple minded Americans have are thoroughly convinced that their divinely annoited emperor actually penned it himself with talent on loan from God, a real miracle from a man whose literary skills were most recently displayed while scribbling slips seeking permission to go potty, and he didn't even use a crayon.

After playing the God and Terror cards, Bush's dissertation also contained stunning promises of massive government largesse and the ensuing piling on of even more debt to an already unseemly deficit that is groaning under the burden of frivolous tax cuts (Bush later absolutely ruled out tax increases to finance the grand rebuilding plans put forth), an extremely costly foreign war (that for the time being much to Rove’s delight has been forgotten the mainstream media and consequently by the general public who are focused on New Orleans) and the government sanctioned graft machine that has become so overtly prevalent during the past four and a half years of Rove’s agenda and the unscrupulous reign of Tom DeLay. The massive expansion of federal government this time is sanctioned by traditionally anti-big gov't ideological think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and underwritten by radical special interest groups who only hate government spending of goliath proportions when they don't control the politicians who control the purse stings.

When examining the transcript of the speech keep in mind the following excerpt from a recent Wall Street Journal story:

"Congressional Republicans, backed by the White House, say they are using relief measures for the hurricane-ravaged Gulf coast to achieve a broad range of conservative economic and social policies, both in the storm zone and beyond.

"Some new measures are already taking shape. In the past week, the Bush administration has suspended some union-friendly rules that require federal contractors pay prevailing wages, moved to ease tariffs on Canadian lumber, and allowed more foreign sugar imports to calm rising sugar prices. Just yesterday, it waived some affirmative-action rules for employers with federal contracts in the Gulf region.

"Now, Republicans are working on legislation that would limit victims' right to sue, offer vouchers for displaced school children, lift some environment restrictions on new refineries and create tax-advantaged enterprise zones to maximize private-sector participation in recovery and reconstruction."

Surprise, surprise, the radical right is seeking to use the reconstruction efforts to further their own agenda, no wonder why their Republican prostitutes in congress are so disinterested in pursuing an independent inquiry over Katrina.

Bush’s earlier contrition and weasel word ‘apology’ is nothing but more of the same spin, if you need any convincing of this you only need reference the September 14th New York Times story by Elisabeth Bumiller and Richard W. Stevenson that states:

“Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort, which reaches across many agencies of government and includes the direct involvement of Alphonso R. Jackson, secretary of housing and urban development.”

Karl Rove? Isn’t it just wonderful to be living in a country where yet another political hack albeit the king of all fixers is placed in charge of the reconstruction of a major American city that has been destroyed. ‘Brownie’ ended up as chum tossed overboard to attract the sharks and Michael Chertoff is poised to walk the plank for his gross ineptitude and clueless mismanagement if it comes down to it, despite rumors to the contrary there is no honor among thieves especially when a human sacrifice is required to protect the asses of those further up the food chain. The Bushies are desperately in need of a miracle right now but if Karl Rove has any credentials for the serious type of work that is needed to rebuild New Orleans then I should be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for this blog.

Not that the immersion of the public in the whirling typhoon of administration spin on Thursday is the final product, advance teams led by longtime Bush lackey Karen Hughes had already been laying the groundwork and broke through the line following the lead block of damage control queen Condi Rice, a woman so close to Dubya that he apparently even seeks her approval to take a leak as the earlier link demonstrates.

According to a September 9th Washington Post story by Dana Milbank:

Hughes picked up the theme. "We have to offer a positive vision of hope," she began. As if preparing troops for combat, she described her plans for improving world opinion of the United States: a "rapid-response unit," a plan to "forward-deploy regional SWAT teams" and create "a dual-headed DAS for public diplomacy."

And if the involvement of longtime Texas crony and top operative Hughes isn't bad enough, Rove himself told the audience at a North Carolina fundraiser that the full story of the disaster would be told : translated this means that the White House propanda operatives are now working overtime to not only take the blame game to the next level but to obfuscate and distort the truth to the extent that in short order 'television lobotomized' Americans will not be pointing the finger at godless liberal tree huggers in general and most likely traditional bogeyman Bill Clinton in specific for destroying the functional ability of FEMA and the storm itself will be renamed Hurricane Hillary.

Strangely enough the devastation wrought by Katrina as well as the indifferent initial response of the Bush administration, the GOP Congress and the Federal Government offered Americans a real life look at the true face of this country, the ugliness that is hidden behind the fantasy façade of consumerism and mass marketing, of television and advertising glamour. This drawing back of the curtain revealed the ugly little uber capitalist trolls pulling the levers of power and briefly exposing the true ugliness of the festering wound on the nation's soul that was opened by the ‘Reagan Revolution’ and has worsened by over 20 years of the neglect of the poor and the shrinking middle class whose terrible plight has been held away as far from the public eye as technologically possible so as to allow the illicit transfer of wealth to the richest of all.

Excuse me but where is the honor or dignity in using yet another national tragedy to further a radical and corrupt political agenda? Then again, these are the same rat bastards who were using the agonizing deaths and suffering of the victims of 9/11 to advance their agenda before the first bodies were pulled from the rubble at Ground Zero and the smell of rotting flesh was freshly hanging in the Manhattan air. Ghouls exploit death and exploit it both callously and without regard to the long term moral implications that their pathological buzzard-like traits to elicit profit from the wreckage of the lives of the innocent represent. The stench of decomposing bodies was still heavy in the dank and fetid Louisiana air on Thursday, mingling with the malodorous bullshit scent of the same ole, same ole from Rove and his crew of crackerjack production experts in propping up the most pathetic excuse for a leader in American history yet again for the ever present cameras all while a large portion of the city was still underwater and the unrecovered dead lacking both the dignity and compassion that a truly humble god fearing man would marshall all forces within his power to provide.

This is the accountability moment America, do you seize this rare and maybe final opportunity to stop this insane dismantling of the social contract, of progressive government, of civil liberties, of our American legacy itself…or do you rub your eyes, change the channel and immerse yourselves in a comfortable world of familiar fantasy once again?

You decide….if two plus two equals four than everything else is a given but the moment that you allow yourselves to be duped into believing that two plus two equals five then you have already sold your soul to the company store.

ELVIS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING!

In the Aftermath of the Storm

If anything has been laid bare in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina it is the long disseminated myth that America is a land of boundless opportunity and equality for all of its citizens. A land where the ability to prosper was limited only by the ability of each and every American to answer the knocking at their front door of Horatio Alger, to seize the roaring tiger named destiny by the tail and to ride on its back, roaring in unison in the pursuit of the American Dream and all of its optimism. Immigrants descended on this nation at one time literally believing that the streets were lined with gold only to find themselves trapped in hellish working conditions in factories, in fields or forced to build the railroads that would provide the infrastructure of commerce to the wealthiest of the land, to the capitalists, to the Robber Barons. The truth is that for too long the ugliness of the growing underclass has been ignored, the poor and the black are systematically ostracized from society by the adherents of the philosophy of unfettered greed that is the bastard fruit of the Reagan Revolution: the free market.

When the horrifying imagery of thousands of mainly black, poor, elderly and sick residents left to their own devices to survive in the anarchy filled streets of post Katrina New Orleans was broadcast to the entire world some very uncomfortable questions were beginning to be asked. Uncomfortable to the entire concept of an advanced egalitarian society that has for too long been accepted as gospel to ignorant, television addicted Americans and specifically troublesome for the Bush administration, whose reckless, ideological undercutting of the very foundations of the progressive social ideals that at one time had built this country into the shining city on the hill were beginning to be exposed as the nothing other than the all out class warfare with extreme prejudice that they are intended to be. Once the foolish Orwellian sloganeering is put under a microscope it is easy to see that it is all marketing, wrapped in the flag and promoted through political and media chicanery to disguise the true nature of the ideologies behind such radical assaults on American ideals as Healthy Forests, Clear Skies, No Child Left Behind, PATRIOT Act, Ownership Society and all of the other malarkey and folderol that spews forth from Rove Inc.

The very fabric of the social contract itself is being unwound, the constitution of the republic disemboweled so that the wealthiest can become wealthier, the tax cheats can continue to duck responsibility for paying their use of the infrastructure to reap profit, the tax code rewritten specifically to introduce mammoth loopholes to facilitate their willful noncompliance and the laws of the land themselves rewritten to limit the recourse of the less fortunate to hold accountable those in power. The law is also being changed so as to allow the ruling elite imperialists to loosely redefine that which constitutes terrorism so that the net becomes wide enough to entrap any dissenters to the reactionary reign of the fascist right. Corporations and the ultra rich now own congress, they subsidize the campaigns of those willing to defraud the public in their rise through the system and fully expect to be rewarded for their efforts. Corporate sponsored political organizations such as the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) carefully screen all potential candidates so as to root out any progressives who would seek to close the feeding trough to ultra capitalist pigs, this further strengthens the radical right and undermines the concept of democracy. The Democratic Party itself has become so inundated with corporate hacks and compliant appeasers that it has lost its ability to act as a check on power run amok, and its fecklessness in the face of aggression bears one hell of a lot of the responsibility for the current state of this country.

What did George W. Bush do when it became apparent that his lack of response to last weeks disaster was as abysmal a failure as his leadership of the country? He made public relations appearances, he sent Laura Bush out to appear on national television. He called out the guard three days too late and when the relief convoy finally rolled into flood and mayhem roiled Louisiana it was led by a cigar chomping general, an archetype figure and just the piece of stagecraft that would demonstrate to the T.V. stewpots that law and order would damned well be restored in the American way, it if as though Patton himself were arriving to lead the charge. He enlisted the assistance of the right wing media smear machine to once again muddy the waters regarding responsibility for the disaster of New Orleans and he pulled out the race card by sending forth loyal soldier Condoleeza Rice as an emissary to show that any suggestion that his administration and the radical conservative movement was insensitive to the needs of the poor or racially insensitive to the plight of black Americans was patently absurd.

Condi, who earlier in the week while shopping for thousand dollar shoes at Ferragamo, an exclusive New York boutique was shouted down by an angry patron who screamed "How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!", the woman who was understandably incensed at seeing a top administration figure splurging lavishly on vacation while the Big Easy was being engulfed was only voicing the frustration of the growing number of Americans who realize the extent to which the pyramid of bullshit that has been constructed by this administration. The former Chevron board member was sent to the front lines to slog through the trenches of public opinion. By Sunday, Dr. Rice had her pampered ass parked in the pew of a Mobile, Alabama church where she deflected mounting criticism by proclaiming "Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race". In reality, Rice has little in common with the poor inner city blacks that she is now directed by her boss and his handlers to champion, she has far more in common with other prominent Toms like Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas and O.J. Simpson who are so smitten with their presence on the master’s plantations that they dare not even dream about biting the hand that feeds them by actually trying to bring about recognition to the problems of the poor and black second class citizens of the land. Rather they ignore them at any time when it is not necessary for public relations purposes, like their elitist benefactors they themselves become advocates of social Darwinism through their inability to utilize their positions of influence to promote concepts of humanitarianism and dignity for those who are less fortunate.

As the long Labor Day weekend wore on, the unprecedented negative media coverage given the Bush administration’s criminal neglect of the suffering citizens of New Orleans was somewhat diluted due to the fortuitously timed death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, it began to become clear that the GOP strategy would be to triangulate and redirect the blame to local officials rather than admit the embarrassing truth that every agency in America is staffed by Bush loyalist lackeys like FEMA chief and former commissioner of the Arabian Horse Association Michael Brown. The king himself stated that 'Brownie' was doing “a heck of a job” on Friday, giving a pat on the back to his utterly clueless and overwhelmed compadre. The best quote regarding the mind boggling level of utter incompetence of Brown belonged to Kate Hale, the former Miami-Dade emergency management chief who eloquently summed it up: "He's done a hell of a job, because I'm not aware of any Arabian horses being killed in this storm. The world that this man operated in and the focus of this work does not in any way translate to this. He does not have the experience.". AMEN!

The damage from the aftermath is so severe that the master of double-dealing treachery, Turd Blossom himself would personally lead the efforts to slime and discredit those who would dare to speak out against the regime in the name of the preservation of the real ‘naked’ truth that not only does the emperor have no clothes but is a fucking delusional lunatic whose incompetence is only matched by his megalomaniac fantasies of being God’s own instrument of Earthly providence.

Another pathetic opportunistic vulture is the odious Senator Bill Frist (R) TN: The flip flopping Senate Majority Leader, never one to allow a chance for publicity and self glorification go by materialized in New Orleans as a volunteer medical assistant. The heart surgeon and scion of the HCA Healthcare empire, the man who made Terri Schiavo into a personal crusade and launching pad for the 2008 GOP nomination, busied himself in triage for the benefit of the cameras although his limited participation as a volunteer would not impede his return to Washington on Tuesday for the confirmation hearings of future Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Did you expect anything less from the spokesman for the radical religious right’s Justice Sunday assaults on the judiciary?

I will never forget how angry that I became when once many years ago a young woman named Dorothy who happened to be majoring in women’s studies at a local college proclaimed that “America is a land for rich white men founded by rich white men”. This was a statement which I found to be bordering on heresy at the time given my ignorance of how the system really works. Today, in retrospect, after time and education have enlightened me I am flabbergasted at just how this angered me at the time. But then I knew nothing of the true nature of our society nor of it's at many times gruesome and sordid history. I was as oblivious to that which is now as obvious as the light of day to any who are able to rise above the lemming like mentality of the bewildered herd. In a land where twelve former U.S. Presidents were also at one time slave owners, including eight who owned them while in office it is hard to look at any broad state condoned versions of history with anything other than a skeptical eye.

This statement now ranks as one of the greatest truths that has ever been told to me in a world that is sadly lacking of them…

Thanks Dorothy….and sorry…you were right !

Reap The Whirlwind

"When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind"

-Frederick Douglas

With the horrors of Hurricane Katrina on full display for the entire world to see the true horror is that which floats just beneath the surface: that the Bush administration has lost the moral authority to govern, at least to those who did not realize that it was already long gone. The idiot king was pickin’ away on a git’ar at yet another meticulously stage managed public relations appearance at a San Diego naval base where he was busy fraudulently comparing Iraq to WW II. The king turned minstrel while the city of New Orleans faced the wrath of nature as well as the ensuing collapse of a levee system that had seen federal assistance cut over the course of the administration and the reign of terror of the DeLay-Frist-Lott congressional wrecking crew. The money that was desperately needed to shore up the city’s last line of defense against raging floods that could, and now would destroy it were sacrificed on the alter of tax cuts for the richest of Americans, the failure of multi-national corporations unwilling to shoulder their fair share of the tax burden despite their use of the infrastructure that they utilize for profit at taxpayer expense, the war in Iraq and the depletion of the domestic tax base due to outsourced jobs. FEMA has been slowly stripped of the ability to respond to domestic disasters as it is swallowed whole by the all- encompassing wet dream of the surveillance society/police state: the mammoth Department of Homeland Security. The king strummed while the Big Easy drowned, this is the man who ran for reelection on the promise that he was the only one capable of providing strong leadership and defending against terrorist attacks while maintaining domestic order, a sales pitch that is as phony as his brand moniker of compassionate conservatism which is just another two letter word like bull shit.

Despite dodging the worst impact of the monster storm that wiped out the Mississippi coastline with mind boggling force, the images that I saw were beyond comparison with anything other than pictures that I have seen of Hiroshima shortly after the atomic bomb was dropped sixty years ago, New Orleans was doomed anyway. Katrina's pure primal savagery laid waste to the Mississippi town of Waveland which was completely demolished, Gulfport was also mostly gone, only devastation, ruins and bloated bodies left in place of the buildings and lavish homes that were once there. The gambling resort laden coastal city of Biloxi was pulverized, every riverboat casino was either destroyed or severely damaged. Former Senate Majority Leader and Jesse Helms acolyte Trent Lott’s home was destroyed although he himself was tragically not inside at the time. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, the former head of the Republican National Committee and former oil industry lackey lobbyist who in a caustic piece of irony was a key force in quashing U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol got to see firsthand what the effects of global warming are capable of through producing ever more powerful and destructive storms as the coastal areas of his state were annihilated by the vengeful bitch Katrina.

The worst-case scenario happened in New Orleans, the levees began to give way after years of being shorted of funding, money that the locals were begging for: an additional 71.2 million had just been hacked from the Corps of Engineers 2006 budget. The deterioration of the levee system was responsible for allowing torrents of water to flow unimpeded into the bowl in which the city has long sat as a catastrophe waiting to happen. As waters rapidly rose, those who believed that they had been lucky enough to escape from the full fury of the storm were suddenly trapped in their homes which were slowly engulfed by Lake Ponchartrain and the Mississippi River, being forced into their attics or roofs to await rescue or trapped to drown in their living rooms and bedrooms, the body count will have to wait until the city is pumped out in several months. The downtown area itself was largely spared from the biblical flood but tens of thousands of the city’s poorest residents who were unable to evacuate were driven to the Superdome and the Convention Center for shelter. It is the scenes of these unfortunate people and their horrifying predicament that are the most disturbing of all as well as the most graphic example of how badly that the Bush administration and government failed the people that it was at one time, prior to the rise of corporatism, created to serve and protect.

In one of the most shameful episodes in American history those stranded in downtown New Orleans without food, water, protection, medical assistance or even the most basic of human services were neglected by the government for four days as they begged for help. They were trapped in unimaginable squalor, amongst marauding thugs who were free to run rampant, raping, beating and looting, preying on the most vulnerable of the helpless poor, sick and elderly who were unable to make it out before the great flood, their despair and desperation mounting by the hour. In addition to being trapped in an existential Hell the victims of governmental neglect had one thing in common, they were overwhelmingly black. “We are out here like pure animals” stated the Reverend Issac Clark as he stood amidst the filth and dead bodies at the New Orleans Convention Center, the wailing of the suffering was audible, babies cried, people prayed in vain for help. The Superdome was stifling, its air filled with the stench of vomit, excrement and fear, there was no air conditioning, there was mayhem. In the flooded areas bloated bodies were borne by stagnant and toxic waters, filled with snakes, debris and disease. There was devastation everywhere, it is impossible to believe that this is happening in America, it resembled a third world country, this is our national disgrace.

Painful truths about this country are being exposed, the specter of racism is once again rearing its ugly head, do you honestly believe that these people wouldn’t have been treated differently if they were white? The poverty rate in Orleans Parish is a staggering 27.9 percent, mostly black, the national poverty rate is 12.7 percent, nearly thirteen of every one hundred Americans live in abject poverty per the latest study which like all studies in the age of radical Republicanism and the Bush junta are subject to being skewed, the actual numbers are probably much higher. The poverty statistics also don’t include the working poor, those Americans who are just barely getting by and are one event of bad luck away from losing what little that they have and joining the ’12.7’ percenters. There may be no statistics available on the number of the working poor but with skyrocketing oil and gasoline prices, the gross indebtedness of the besieged middle class, inevitable rises in insurance rates, spiraling health care costs and the fact that any and all rises in energy costs eventually are passed on to the consumer there will soon be even more descending into poverty. How does this happen in a wealthy and technologically advanced society?

Racism and class division are specialties of the current crop of neo conservative post Reagan Republicans. They regularly use divisive tactics thinly cloaked in the language of bigotry and fear that manages to push all of the right buttons for their base, they are masters at this art. I personally know people whose cult like devotion to the party is based on their longtime loathing for blacks whom they use as scapegoats for every evil and perceived problem with society since the sixties. They decry the welfare state and social programs, ranting on at length about the indignity of having to pay taxes to subsidize what they have been brainwashed into believing is laziness or those seeking to abuse the system for free handouts. They are never able to make the connection that it is corporate welfare and the revamping of the tax system to allow for the wealthy to escape paying their fair share that are the true culprits for their own declining living standards, it is always easier to seize on an easy target than to bother to think things through and reach the inevitable conclusion that the entire unregulated free market economic system is rotten and irredeemably corrupt. Those who were drawn to the GOP by the siren song of racism had to have been delighted to watch so many poor blacks left to fend for themselves in the streets of the Crescent City this week, with the threat of imminent violence as thick as the bayou humidity hanging like a pall over the city, it would have made for the ultimate in reality television. What is now being exposed is that The Republicans care about as much about saving black Americans as they do about the blacks being slaughtered in Africa by genocidal regimes far more vile than the one that the treasury has been looted to dispose with in Iraq.

The country is on a very dangerous downward spiral into uncharted territory and whether it emerges intact all depends on whether or not people are finally able to break free from the real life Truman Show that is the Bush administration's Potemkin nation, choreographed masterfully by image masters and party hacks but beneath the shiny, star spangled veneer there exist dark and revolting truths that peer into the very abyss of the American soul. Given the economic impact and ripple effect of this past weeks events on energy prices and the resulting shortages caused by a public that has for far too long been force fed a steady diet of fear and dread by the media, a public that panics and hordes gasoline and other staples depriving others of adequate supplies. The exposure of the very real racial and class problems that the last few days have driven home are certain to stir the boiling pot of resentment and hate that already exists in this most angry and divided of countries, who knows when it will ultimately reach the boiling point and what the repercussions will be but it will be likely be extremely cruel and brutal. The anarchy in the streets of New Orleans is a sight that Americans had better get used to, with the coming economic meltdown triggered by years of rampant free market greed, of capitalism cannibalizing itself through a massive redistribution of wealth, through the elimination of jobs, the monopolization of industry and the unwillingness of the federal government to act in a regulatory capacity is going to make rioting a common scene as the poor and desperate take to the streets. There are still three months left in hurricane season, what if another major city is destroyed? What if it is Miami, Tampa or worst of all Houston with it’s oil infrastructure? What will happen then?

Meanwhile, there is death, suffering and pestilence, it sickens me as an American to watch this, and the inability of this clusterfuck administration to deal with the situation is abhorrently lacking and devoid of even the most basic levels of human decency and compassion. George W.Bush has now had both the biggest terrorist attack as well as the most devastating natural disaster in U.S. history occur on HIS watch, will he hit the trifecta with global thermonuclear war?

What the fuck?

And despite Karl Rove’s likely delight at an event that would knock Iraq, Cindy Sheehan and Valerie Plame completely out of the news, the coverage of the suffering and trapped victims has replaced it and stoked public hostility. They can hide the truth about Iraq, but they can’t hide this. It is time for the people to realize the nature of the charlatans who have dragged this country to the very brink, and to respond appropriately by finally holding this administration accountable for something. Pay heed to the fact that while New Orleans was suffering and people were dying, Karl Rove celebrated the departure of Sheehan’s war protest camp from Chickenhawk Ranch in Crawford by slithering down the road to the organized group of extremist right wing counter protestors in order to shake hands and slap the good ole boys on the back for circling the wagons. I am curious as to whether Rove is experiencing similar glee today as world outrage continues to mount over New Orleans, this is something that Turd Blossom hadn’t bargained for. Unlike Iraq there are no imbedded journalists, no media filters, no public relations flacks that will be able to spin this….it affects too many people for that and the images are far too ugly. My wife says that maybe this is what will finally bring these bastards down, personally I don’t have that much faith in T.V. Nation but with any luck it just may be the spark that it takes to ignite those who are incensed by this nightmarish immersion of democracy in a pool of shit as well as to provide a much needed wakeup call to a slumbering populace. This is the time to put one hell of a dent into the neo conservative plans of empire, theocracy and totalitarian reign and trigger a beginning of the end to this most contemptible of periods in U.S. history, perhaps it will even mark the beginning of the end of reactionary one party rule and the diminishment in the power of their corporate masters.

The mostly disorganized attempts by the administration to engage in damage control may be a sign that they too realize that this could finally be the event that snaps America out of the irrational trance that it has been in since that awful Tuesday morning of September 11, 2001. The worst sign for the right wing movement in general and the Bush administration in particular is that the wreckage left by Hurricane Katrina has knocked the wall to wall coverage of missing teenager Natalee Holloway out of the non FOX news.

Could it finally be time for the Bush administration to reap the whirlwind?