Finally, the Associated Press Senses Untruth

Good God, it's about fucking time that a major news organization spelled out what we have been saying for years: this is an administration that operates on lies, repeating them endlessly with complete disregard for reality. Here's the money shot:

As New Orleans descended into anarchy, top Bush administration officials congratulated each other for jobs well done and spoke of water, food and troops pouring into the ravaged city. Television pictures told a different story.

"What it reminded me of the other day is 'Baghdad Bob' saying there are no Americans at the airport," said Rich Galen, a Republican consultant in Washington. He was referring to Saddam Hussein's reality-challenged minister of information who denied the existence of U.S. troops in the Iraqi capital.

Got that? A Republican consultant is comparing Chimpie and company to a guy we laughed at during the Iraq invasion, another one of those conscienceless shills who speak the party line up until it bends him over his desk and fucks him in the ass with the bitter truth.

Except there's absolutely nothing to laugh at here, as potentially thousands of lives are put at risk by this back-slapping circle-jerk celebrating imagined success because Chimpie finally was taken off sedation long enough to be told that there was a little problem along the Gulf Coast. You want that beady-eyed motherfucker to come face-to-face with reality? Drop his ass in the fecal soup that surrounds the Superdome, without Secret Service, without his hidden transmitter, just his manly-manliness (notice the way he holds his arms out on TV? He must watch a lot of wrestling) face-to-face with a man caring for five kids or a young mother whose newborn had to be spirited out of intensive care for who-knows-where. When I saw that fucking excuse for a "leader" back in a suit this afternoon, squeezing Homeland Security director Cherthof's dick, I completely lost it.

When, oh when will justice be served?

The Difference Is Black and White

If Chimpie needs your vote (and it also doesn't hurt for you to be white) then being in a disaster area doesn't have to be so bad. You see, last year after hurricanes hit Florida before the 2004 election, even though counties like Miami-Dade weren't badly damaged, the assistance in the form of dollars flowed like, well, water over a levee:

Florida did not sustain catastrophic damage, Gair said, and so did not devise a "blanket eligibility" plan.

FEMA acknowledged that in Miami-Dade County and in other areas of the state, however, the agency took the rare step, given the magnitude of the disaster, of awarding $726 in "expedited" housing assistance to people who asked for it, without immediately sending inspectors to verify damage.

Okay, so $726 may not be enough to buy a vote. However, as they say in those abs exerciser videos, "But wait! There's more!"

Other so-called "standard housing assistance," of up to $25,600, he wrote, is "liberally provided without significant scrutiny of the request made during the initial months; scrutiny increases remarkably and the package is far more stringent after an unspecified time."

Standard operating procedure, you might say. Nothing to get suspicious about. Perfectly normal. Oh yeah?

Even state officials were surprised at how quickly money flowed to Florida.

The day after Hurricane Charley hit the west coast, the state's labor chief, Susan Pareigis, asked for a federal grant for unemployment assistance for storm victims.

Four days later, U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao "was down personally" to award the money, Pareigis wrote in an Aug. 24 e-mail to the governor. "Please express our sincere thank you for such an instantaneous response."

So flash forward to September 2, 2005. No election on the horizon. A city is flooded. And this city has a long history as a liberal bastion. And this city has a large black population. And this city also has a 30% poverty rate.

The situation? Babies are dying from dehydration. Diabetics are going into shock and dying. People are being bused from a crumbling Superdome to Houston only to be waved away to some other location. Armed bands are roaming the streets.

Meanwhile, Condi Rice buys $3000 Ferragamo shoes and has an agitator physically removed from her presense, Vice President Dick Cheney finally comes off his vacation, and El Presidente Chimpie pretends he's mad about the delays in rescue efforts, although he's just come back from his own vacation a couple of days earlier. Homeland Security Director Michael Cherthoff stood alongside Bush and must have had the sudden realization that he was being painted as one of a series of fall guys for Chimpie. And FEMA head Michael Brown, seems to have mastered the notion of negative capability, claiming simultaneously that, "everything that we had pre-positioned and ready to go became overwhelmed immediately after the storm," and yet "people are getting the help they need."

As I write this, I am being bludgeoned with yet another club of Chimpie's extended recitation of syllogisms and dumb-as-dirt observations about the situation like "in order to make sure there's less violence, we need to get food to people."

Welcome to the Third World in your own backyard.

When Fantasy Kills

It's well understood that the regime of Chimpie believes that larding on words like cream cheese frosting on a shitpile will fool most of the dunces who blindly follow them, but there's a point where the hard reality simply will not be covered words that deny it. The Sun-Herald of Biloxi, Mississippi, a town crushed by Kartrina, ran an editorial today. You can read the whole thing at Editor and Publisher. It's heartbreaking, and when you think of Chimpie chirping yesterday how things are moving ahead, it's infuriating. An excerpt:

We are not calling on the nation and the state to make life more comfortable in South Mississippi, we are calling on the nation and the state to make life here possible.

We would bolster our argument with the number of Katrina casualties confirmed thus far, but if there is such a confirmed number, no one is releasing it to the public. This lack of faith in the publics' ability to handle the truth is not sparing anyone's feelings, it is instead fueling terrifying rumors.

While the flow of information is frustratingly difficult, our reporters have yet to find evidence of a coordinated approach to relieve pain and hunger or to secure property and maintain order.

People are hurting and people are being vandalized.

Yet where is the National Guard, why hasn't every able-bodied member of the armed forces in South Mississippi been pressed into service?

On Wednesday reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics.

Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!

When asked why these young men were not being used to help in the recovery effort, our reporters were told that it would be pointless to send military personnel down to the beach to pick up debris.

Litter is the least of our problems. We need the president to back up his declaration of a disaster with a declaration of every man and woman under his command will do whatever is necessary to deal with that disaster.

Given the astounding incompetence of this administration and it's failure to grapple with any unpleasant news that may splash on their political schemes, there seems to be little left but prayer for the poor people of Biloxi, Waveland, New Orleans, and the other afflicted communities.

Please give what you can to the Red Cross or other relief agencies, and also ask the question, why has this happened? This was not a disaster that came out of nowhere, like an earthquake or a meteor. Katrina was tracked for days, and yet we may be looking at thousands and thousands of deaths that were preventable. Why has this happened, and why is it getting worse each day that passes?

Living in an Irony-Free Zone

Chimpie on the stump in San Diego yesterday prattled on about Pearl Harbor, 9/11, the war in Iraq, and the need to keep the oil from falling in to terrorist hands. So WMD, democracy, mushroom clouds, Saddam trying to kill his daddy, and all the other dozen or so reasons used and discarded to justify his war were swept aside yet again. Then he comes up with the quote of the week:

At the naval base, Bush declared, ''We will not rest until victory is America's and our freedom is secure" from Al Qaeda and its forces in Iraq led by Abu Musab alZarqawi.

"We will not rest," Shrub-W says, and he says this while he is still on vacation after five weeks. I know he's not responsible for the words scripted by his ventriliquists, but don't any of them recognize the stupidity of such a declaration? Oy!

And then there's this:

''If Zarqawi and [Osama] bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks," Bush said. ''They'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions. They could recruit more terrorists by claiming a historic victory over the United States and our coalition."

So, had we not invaded, would there be a new training ground for future terrorist attacks in Iraq? If we had not invaded, what were the chances that bin Laden would have gained control of Iraqi oil? I'll give Chimpie one thing though: he's finally admitted that it is all about oil and only oil. We can't have them--al Qaeda or the Iraqis, god forbid--having oil to fund their ambitions because we so desperately need the oil to fund our ambitions. And what might those be?

Yesterday as I watched some coverage of the devastation of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama by Hurricane Katrina, and also heard reports of the effects of this event on gasoline prices, what sort of commercials did I see in between all the gloom and doom? Why they were for GMC trucks--Yukons, Suburbans, duallie and club cab pickups.

That's what I mean by life in an irony-free zone. Political leadership and their media butt-buddies somehow get it rubbed out of their psyches as they kneepad their way into the elite levels of power. Perhaps having to give so many blowjobs for access just erases irony. Wonder if I could get some funding for a study?

Okay, I Lied--Some Hurricane Stuff...

...but not without a Chimpie angle, of course. First of all, seeing helicopter footage of the flooding and devastation is pretty sobering. The scale of the destruction is beyond containment through conventional media reporting, to be sure, and the complete lack of eloquence by our mainstream pretty boys and girls manages to trivialize the disaster in a way that is only exceeded by Chimpie's complete cluelessness as to the disaster he's facing.

What the fuck happened? Couldn't they get Bush out of sedation quickly enough? He's off pretending to play the guitar and parroting his lines about Japan's surrender sixty years ago, while questions are being raised as to whether or not New Orleans will ever resurrect itself. I got a taste of what the Chimpie response may be when the Governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, when asked what people could do to calm the situation, said that we should all pray. Yeah, that's going to fish the survivors out, stop the looting, and repair the damage. And she's a Democrat. Good God!

Are there any fucking pragmatists out there in office?

I can hear it now: Chimpie trying his best not to smirk or giggle while he says he's praying hard for all those "good people" down there along the Gulf Coast. "Good people," of course, is Bush-speak for "poor fuckers I couldn't care less about." And maybe that's why the handlers are keeping Chimpie off the subject of the hurricane, because he may just lose it and start guffawing like a crazed baboon at all that suffering. Remember how long it took them to get his medication adjusted so he could address the tsunami last year. And no how, no way could they get him doped to the point that he could face Cindy Sheehan.

Let me ask you: if you were sitting on the peak of the roof of your house down in the Mississippi delta, waiting to be choppered out to ground high enough to keep you dry for the night, would you want Bushco running back to Washington to direct the rescue effort? As far as I can tell, he may be the only person on the planet who could actually make this situation far, far worse. If that's even possible, you know you could count on him to fuck it up even beyond your wildest dreams.

Quite a challenge, but I know Chimpie will try.

No Hurricane Coverage Here

I decided to take the day off from the blog yesterday because judging by the news coverage in the mainstream media markets, the only event was the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. For those who live in its path, it's a terrible thing, particularly for the poor who always seem to bear the greatest loss and suffering in any natural disaster. Of course, that's just the way the ball bounces, and I'm sure there are some theocratic Christo-Fascist idiots somewhere who believe that the poor are merely reaping the wrath of God for sins past. And of course, the condition of the poor has absolutely nothing to do with the distorted, rapacious capitalism that is practiced in this nation and soon coming to a neighborhood near you, no matter where you live.

However, it is hurricane season, and if you choose to live in areas that for millenia have been hammered by extreme tropical weather events, and particularly so in our own recent past, then I'm not quite sure that this is news worthy of special and total coverage by CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX (yes, I'm laughing), PBS, CNBC, MSNBC, and Headline News. So look, I'm not writing today from the eye of the storm with my Gore-Tex all-weather gear flapping dramatically in the driven rain that I'm too stupid to get out of.

Of course, someone like Chimpie loves this sort of occurrence because it gives him coverage from his real problems that the press should be pursuing. While gas surges to $3.00 a gallon (okay by me--I hardly drive anymore), more Americans and Iraqis die for lies, and the fragile matrix of credit and foreign bank indulgences grows increasingly brittle begging a financial collapse, Bush is busy trying to destroy what little remains that still actually works for the peoples' benefit--Social Security. Then he's off to address another hand-selected crowd to explain the insanely complex, expensive and generally useless Medicare prescription drug benefit . . . "explain"? did I write. Sorry. Chimpie can't even explain why he has to take a shit now and then, let alone a plan that not even the insurance industry can sell even as it benefits them at the expense of elders across the country.

Of course, why cover the rape of the financial security coffers yet again when there is a chance to put Lester Holt at the mercy of Katrina. Wow! Look at that! It's raining and blowing in the hurricane. A-fucking-mazing.

Meanwhile, over in Iraq--remember Iraq?--it doesn't look like Chimpie's sanguine view of the "noble cause" is connected to any reality in this universe. "We'll stand down as the Iraqis stand up." Yeah, well, the New York Times notes how well that transition is going.

Simply put, Iraq remains too fragile for any planner to know what shape the country will be in six months or a year from now - whether it will reach compromises and hold together or split apart in a civil war.

And that presents a conundrum for American military planners. With those questions up in the air, they have to fear that any heavy arms distributed now could end up aimed at American forces or feeding a growing civil conflict. And the longer Iraq's army has to wait for sophisticated weapons, the longer American forces are likely to be needed in Iraq as a bulwark against chaos.

Of course, Chimpie will be in San Diego trying to conflate his failed Iraq expedition with World War II in a celebration of the anniversary of the Japanese surrender, not that Bush even understands when, where, or how WWII occurred. He's just looking for political cover.

With any luck, that son of a bitch will find himself like one of the news clones when his hurricane hits this fall as Patrick Fitzgerald unseals his indictments. Maybe we'll get to see him blown into the raging seas right before our very eyes on all networks in real time.

Back to you, Pat.