I May Be Lazy or Just Worn Out

My apologies. I just can't get up the energy to rant or rave or analyze or anything lately. Part of it is a rotten cold that just won't go away, and the other part is that the tidal wave of evidence of criminality of the Chimperor administration still hasn't mobilized the kind of resistance and demonstrations nationally that I would have thought would have occurred. After participating in a massive demonstration against war in Iraq in 2003 in San Francisco, I would have thought that layering on torture, secret prisons, domestic spying, Katrina's aftermath, and every other example of malfeasance and incompetence on top of this idiotic war would have surely toppled any administration.

But I was wrong. Yes, the media is complacent or complicit in the fostering of this apathy, but I have to think that the trouble really does lie with us as individuals. Do we as Americans deserve this bastards and what they're doing to what's left of our republic?

Maybe we do. Maybe it's our turn to suffer the humiliation of downslide into the fascination of history along with Rome, Napoleonic France, and the British Empire, all done in by arrogance and overreaching and a failure to understand that the world is bigger than we are.

Maybe we do.

When in Doubt, Go Stupid

This is Bushit tactic # 13, when denial, refutation, and magic sideshows don't suffice. Remember Condi (I'm So Fucking Incompetent!) Rice said that no one could ever imagine anyone flying planes into buildings? Or that the title of that report, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States" didn't set off any alarms in the then-National Security Advisor's head?

Fast forward to Hurricane Katrina. Thanks to today's News York Times we have Chimpie clearly emulating the Rice model.

A Homeland Security Department report submitted to the White House at 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, hours before the storm hit, said, "Any storm rated Category 4 or greater will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching."

The internal department documents, which were forwarded to the White House, contradict statements by President Bush and the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, that no one expected the storm protection system in New Orleans to be breached.

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," Mr. Bush said in a television interview on Sept. 1. "Now we're having to deal with it, and will."

Apart from the startling lack of confidence he shows in his own administration, this is an outright lie, something like #349 by my count. And yet his popularity remains above single digits. Are there really so many wingnuts/clueless dummies/religious crazies out there? Are 38 percent of the people still convinced that Bush is anything but an utter disaster for the country?

Yeah, who is truly stupid here?