a great editorial

Bad Daddy

September 19, 2005 A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

The great downfall of America is not some sort of precipitous moral decline -- unless you take into account the behavior of the offspring of Jeb and George Bush -- but rather that the "theatrical presidency" has been uncoupled from any accountability. How Bush "performs" on television is the criteria by which the media judges him, not how he performs for the people of America. Word and deed have taken two separate paths -- and the media may cover deed for a day or two, but is always diverted back to writing reviews about Bush's dramatic reading of scripts written by Rove and Hughes -- or airing visuals of carefully orchestrated photo-ops. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to put together a pattern of Bush being unable to cope with disaster and protect Americans. There is a straight line going from Bush's paralysis after 9/11 -- sitting in a classroom for nearly 10 minutes reading "My Pet Goat" before his speechwriters could give him something to say, while Dick Cheney oversaw the response, followed by Bush's bizarre odyssey of flying away from Washington, D.C. -- to his failure to respond to the Tsunami disaster for days, to his failure to respond to the disaster in New Orleans for days. We won't even get into the bloody, bankrupting quagmire he got us into in Iraq by lying us into war. Any corporate board would know that they have a total incompetent on their hands and send him packing. We didn't just have Michael Brown as head of FEMA. Michael Brown is our President! The fact is Bush is just a figurehead, with the domestic President being Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney sharing the role of President for foreign affairs. The manner in which the media gobbled up the stage-managed speech from Jackson Square -- in which tremendous resources, including emergency generators to light the cathedral, were brought into a city that had no electricity -- was as reprehensible as it was revealing about how political "reporters" have now pretty much become theatrical reviewers. The whole idea that a man who committed treason, Karl Rove, is openly and brazenly directing the "clean-up" of Bush's image after Rove and Bush failed to rescue the citizens of New Orleans or provide any assistance for four days is intolerable and unacceptable by any norms of accountability, reason, or concern about our national security and survival. Rove is also being given full powers to oversee the doling out of profiteering contracts to campaign contributors -- and to implement a plan of dispersing the black residents of New Orleans around the country to dilute the Democratic voting base in the Crescent City. It is the full intention of Rove to make right wing lemonade out of another Bush Administration lemon. ...............