White House Spin Cycle in Full Operation

It's open season on George Bush.

I don't think anyone is surprised, at this point, that the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will doubtlessly turn into a partisan slugfest. Everyone is trying to deflect blame when, in truth, there's more than enough of it to go around. Likely thousands dead over a four-state trail of destruction will almost always provide fertile ground for finger-pointing. Democrats are finally emerging from cowering in silence in the shadow of 9/11, and they're going after Bush like rabid pit bulls. As much as White House Spokesman Scott McClellan, who is just such a little namby-pamby fucking stooge that I can't even articulate it politely, wants to whine about this not being the time to point fingers, and that this president is more interested in helping people in need than assigning blame, blah, blah, snorrrre... well, folks, the reality here is that the Bush administration is very much to blame for a great deal of this mess, and Bush probably isn't nearly as interested in truly helping people as he is in counting the days until his next vacation.

Bush's presidency is really amassing a troubling body count, isn't it? God only knows how many thousands and thousands of people have been killed as a direct result of his blundering, stupid invasion of Iraq. Now, as a direct result of his refusal to give more than 2% of the Department of Homeland Security's budget to FEMA, and as a direct result of him ignoring repeated requests for funds to strengthen New Orleans' levees (in 2004, the Army Corps of Engineers' budget called for $22 million and Bush ponied up $3.9 million, effectively cutting almost 82% of their funding), we're about to heap a few more thousand corpses onto Bush's narrow little monkey shoulders. Additionally, there were surely plenty more people who died in the five days between the time the hurricane hit and five days later, when the first of any meaningful Federal aid arrived. And still, as you can tell by watching and listening to Bush speak, he just doesn't get it.

Quite contrary to Truman's famous saying that, "The buck stops here," Bush is so enmeshed in his world of fantasy, so completely detached and insulated from the world that the rest of us inhabit, that he has no issues at all not really passing the buck, but rather just ignoring it altogether. After all, this is the president who waited two days (on vacation, mind you) before remotely publicly addressing the devastation wrought by Katrina. I've been wondering where our arrogant bastard of a vice-president has been throughout all this; now I see he's been dispatched to the Gulf Coast to "assess relief efforts." Frankly, given Cheney's track record of assessing terrorist threats and the WMD situation in Iraq, I'm not entirely sure he can be trusted worth a damn to accurately assess and report on anything, particularly something that could be very damaging to the Bush administration. It should come as a shock to no one that Cheney says relief efforts are, "very impressive."

Continuing on, in a stunning repeat of their desire to censor and sanitize the consequences of their administration's actions (or inactions), Bush's people are disallowing any footage or pictures to be taken of the dead as recovery efforts get underway. Requests for journalists to accompany recovery teams have been rejected. The theory? If we don't show the endless parade of coffins coming back from Iraq, and if we don't show the hundreds of dead bodies floating in the putrid waters in New Orleans, it's almost like it didn't happen at all!

Finally, is anyone else just laughing at the prospect of Bush himself heading up the inquiry into what went wrong in the Katrina aftermath? Does that strike anyone as just completely preposterous? Wouldn't that be like Clinton presiding over the inquiry into his own Whitewater affairs? Here, Bush is the top dog, the ultimate symbol of culpability in this whole mess. For him to preside over any sort of formal inquiry is inappropriate in the extreme.

Naturally, Corporate America is as ready and willing as ever to coddle and protect Bush. NBC not only cut the live feed as soon as Kayne West said, "George Bush doesn't care about black people," on a Katrina victims benefit show, but they didn't air any of his speech at all to West Coast viewers, who got to see a recorded and censored version of the show. The NFL is warning all of its musical performers for opening games not to say anything disparaging about Bush, and is implementing a 10-second delay to ensure nothing negative is said. FOX--who really should just go on ahead and change their name to "GOP"--refused to air a paid political ad for a Democrat in New York because they say it's "disrespectful" to George Bush. What kind of a country are we turning into here? Because it's sounding more and more like a totalitarian dictatorship, in spite of Bush prattling on and on about democracy and freedom being so fucking wonderful that he'll start a war to foist it onto other nations. I guess my thought is that if freedom is so great, we should at least occasionally practice it here at home. Instead, George Bush heads up inquiries into the failures of... George Bush. Media outlets censor with impunity. Corporate giants tell people what they can and cannot say. TV stations refuse to air negative commentary about Bush.

Hope you're all paying attention... especially the knuckleheads who voted this orangutan back into the White House.