The ultra-right wing Heritage Foundation made the suggestion yesterday, and it turned out President Obama liked it. George what-me-Worry Bush will co-chair the Haiti relief committee! The New Orleans Katrina aid travesty qualified him to do what? Play guitar and go fishing? Instead of slapping the pathological miscreant in a set of cuffs, our commander in chief will no doubt soon be saying “Good Job Dubya” –if the Heritage Foundation dictates.
President Obama wants to “finish the job?” What job would that be? Are we talking about a job which Bush started? Because I am pretty sure Mr. Obama was elected NOT to do that. “Finish” Afghanistan? Where was Obama when the rest of us were learning what it meant to try to finish off Vietnam?
We don’t have to look further than Afghanistan to wonder what other jobs Barack Obama is already carrying water for. America is in some trouble if Obama is bent on finishing the job on our civil liberties. Guantanamo is still open isn’t it? Justice is still being obstructed, the Patriot Act still holds, the economy still crumbles; President Obama is doing George Bush’s job just fine.
Whether Afghanistan was about an oil pipeline, striking at Islam, or containing America’s rivals to superpower, it’s also the venture to break the back of the US middle class, and break all pretense of Democracy in America. We’ve gone from republic to empire, with citizens having no say in the matter. That job is done. What is the job Obama intends to finish when he promises to “finish the job?”
Supposedly it took Obama and Co all this decision-making time to come up with “Finish the Job TM.” It’s a branded meme, isn’t it? Like The Surge TM, the Financial Crisis TM and Nine Eleven TM. But like its forerunners, it’s probably no last minute inspiration, but a focus-group tested theme. Damn, who knew the American people wanted Obama to finish what they expended so much energy to have George Bush stop?
I read there were demonstrators at Texas A & M to greet President Obama as he arrived to participate in a community service symposium honoring former president George Herbert Walker Bush. I’ll admit I was surprised they were run of the mill teabaggers. Where was the indignant left, protesting LOUDLY at the dubious priority of this whistle stop, while health care reform withers in DC? So far, SNL survived a fact-check on a satiric Obama checklist, except: Kissing up to the Bushes. If the Saudi King shows up for some fealty, I just know Obama is going to hold his hand.
Was this event so important an honor to Bush 41 that it required a presidential visit? Not significant enough however, to draw Junior Bush to attend the ceremony?
Dubya defenders suggest it is too early in Obama’s term for the immediate predecessor to make an appearance with the sitting president. They overlook an unprecedented extenuating factor, the event was celebrating Bush 43’s dad.
The sight might have pushed us all over the edge to see Obama palling around with the Bush dynasty in abeyance, who should all be persons of interest in prosecutions of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Wasn’t it sickening enough to see Obama fawn over the “Thousand Points of Light?” Where was Obama when the rest of world could read H.W. Bush’s lips, teacups of bull pucky. At the Bohemian Grove they quote Bush 41 to the tune of Tiptoe Through the Tulips. TPOL is code for Let them eat light.
Seeing Obama and Daddy Bush together reminded me of Dana Carvey’s flattering portrayal of the senior Bush, before the 2000 election. Bush is hunting with his attention deficit son, and for a brief shining moment he considered accidentally shooting Dubya for the good of the nation, except that Barbara would be too upset. The fantasy practically redeemed the real Poppy Bush in my eyes, forgetting he went on to profiteer with the Carlyle Group and other crony deals. Now Obama is reconciling us against our will.
The thousand points of light was just Republican’s consolation prize for Americans who began losing their jobs. Minus the federal middle class jobs to administrate the service projects. FDR looked after the jobless by creating a welfare bureaucracy that boosted the middle class. Bush had nothing to offer but a road map of the stars. Make yourself useful, yada yada.
Now Obama is picking up the tune. Where in the hell are his constituents to say, by change, Obama, we didn’t mean spare change. Get up there with some handcuffs and make a presidential citizen’s arrest, or get off the stage. The fraternizing is making us nauseated.
Then our Nobel Laureate can restore Habeas Corpus, stop rendition and torture, repeal the Patriot Act, confess to illegal wars, war crimes and crimes against humanity, end all occupations, smash the weapons trade, pursue antitrust action against banks and multinational monopolies, abolish the Fed, IMF, World Bank and WTO, renounce globalism and free trade neoliberalism, own up to climate change and third world plunder, initiate restitution for US misrule, and #prosecutebushnowgoddamnit!
I’d like to revisit photographs of George Bush. On everyone pictured standing next to him, I’ll stamp “NOT AL-ZAIDI,” meaning, NOT A HERO. The tag would apply to all of us of course, but in particular, to those who had a chance -but didn’t- to confront the naked emperor. The single bravest man in the world, Muntadhar al Zaidi, was released from prison this week, to recount the torture he endured for his act. Is your courage bolstered or tempered by his example? We are inspired by the unbroken Al Zaidi, but his keepers, our governments, know how to repress our audacity. We’re let to celebrate Al Zaidi as a hero, but he has also been made an example, for rule by state terrorism.
Said al Zaidi: “What provoked me to a confrontation was the injustice that has befallen my people, and the way in which the occupation wanted to humiliate my country by placing it and its people—the elderly, women, children and men—under its boot. At the time the Iraqi prime minister appeared on satellite channels saying he would not sleep until he was assured of Bush’s safety, I found ample bedding and cover. As the prime minister was speaking, I was being tortured in the most cruel manner, being electrocuted, beaten with cables, beaten with metal rods.”
The latest of Phillip Garrido’s sex crimes occured in 1991, too far in the past to interest President Obama. Rehashing the injustices of 1990-91 would mean looking into American war crimes of the First Gulf War. To Obama’s reconciliatory way of thinking, this would open a can of worms which could only lead to redressing subsequent US bombings of civilians, including actions by the recently deposed administration, and now the ongoing state terror against a growing variety of Muslim populations.
David Swanson describes for Tomdispatch what a GW Bush third term would have looked like. He paints a horror story continuation of all the policies which drove voters in 2008 to elect anybody but Bush. But did we? ABB Obama is proving to be quite the reliable steward of Bush’s policies of war, torture, rendition, and mercenaries, minus the public outcry. It’s change we can’t quite put our finger on.
Cindy Sheehan may be glamping again. This time it’s Martha’s Vineyard, where Sheehan is prepared to lay siege to another presidential vacation. Which certainly highlights what’s become undeniable about Barack Obama. He heralds no change. And I’m not prepared to hope the effectiveness of petitioning our leaders has changed either. Bush answered to no one, Obama won’t even dance with them who thought they elected him. The antiwar message has no one’s ear. Let’s put it to the American people.
Who’s empowered our military commanders to direct their war crimes? We. Who’s encouraging our soldiers to execute their assigned tasks? We.
We “support the troops, not the war.” It’s the distinction between manslaughter and premeditated murder. In practice, we fully support the war effort. Of greater horror, by wishing to see the fighting wrapped up properly, we are prepared to condone the gravest brutality.
The war machine has coopted the word “peace.” The soldiers are “peacekeepers” after all. Peace has come to denote “world peace” actually, the Utopian spiritual quest. Like eternal salvation, world peace is paid lipservice, no one is so unreasonable as to expect its fulfillment.
In this life anyway, which defines the religious American’s aversion to participatory antiwar efforts.
I still am warmed when I see a peace symbol unexpectedly. They have become more ubiquitous, haven’t they? Now I see peace stickers on cash registers where cigarettes are sold.
We’re all for peace. It’s what America is doing abroad, via the Peace Corps or The Corps, pacification.
I remember the discussion in the nineties of what to name the coming decade. In a previous century yrs 1900-09 were aught years, but “the aughts” is an archaic term. Aught means: no thing; not anything: nil, nothing, null, zero, nix, zilch.
In bookkeeping terms, as with data processing, an aught with its diagonal slash helps the accountant differentiate a zero from an O.
I’m amused obviously, that O stands for Obama, optimism and Oprah; and figuratively it represents a zero. With a slash, we can make the distinction, and association, more pointed.
Admittedly, the 00 decade was defined by George W. Bush, and zero fits, doesn’t it, to describe his gas gauge, if not obviously his mileage? In 2008 Barack Obama promised a return from the brink of meaninglessness, this decade, not later, but how far has he got? His followers hold still plenty of hope, things being complicated in Washington and what not, but Obama is looking more like Bush’s fall guy than his arresting officer.
With his legislative majority, George Bush proved you can take a world to war, dismantle regulatory protections, rape the environment, eliminate rights, screw every last living earthly being, and raid the treasury for the bankers, each act performed faster than a Sotomayor confirmation.
With majorities everywhere, even with public opinion on his side, Obama can’t reform health care. And he didn’t have a stolen election behind him.
We’re fast approaching the anniversary of September 11, an impressive benchmark if you will, for George Bush’s first term. I’d be surprised if Obama could put a Cessna into the Hudson by then.
Of course I recognize that Obama is up against more than the Republicans. He faces the powers that be, the corporations, financiers and oligarchs, the “deciders” whose deciding Bush pretended to do by himself. But if the President of the United States is not the Leader of the Free World, is not the most powerful figure on Earth, as his office is held to be, what is he? Are we prepared to accept that our democratic election accounts for naught?
Obama was elected in aught-eight. Judging by the job he’s doing, the superlatives flying from the corporate media about how he’s turned world public opinion, brought change, ended racism, and pretends to be drawing down bad things, Obama will be a shoe-in incumbent. Come next election, we’ll still need someone to offer us hope for mini-versal health care. So from ’08 we have eight years of aught.
Word is out, confirming Seymore Hersh’s alarming report of last year, about the Cheney/Bush special forces tasked with assassinating terrorism suspects. Where others do it, such paramilitary raids are called “death squads.” While their existence is being admitted, Congress is upset they weren’t told sooner about the extra-judicial homicide plans. But didn’t President Bush put us all on notice in his 2006 State of the Union Address? What did you think he was snickering about when he said:
“All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.”
George Bush received an ovation from both sides of the aisle with that punch line. From the same politicians who are insisting they didn’t know the US was killing whoever they couldn’t imprison. The same Democrats and Republicans who are eager to report that the nefarious Bushco devices –being pinned on Dick Cheney– thankfully never went operational.
And we don’t have secret prisons. And we don’t torture.
President Obama is closing Guantanamo Prison. As soon as we figure out where to incarcerate its every last detainee.
UN head against new Somalia force ‘In December, Mr Ban had said few countries were willing to send peacekeeping troops to Somalia, as there was no peace to keep.’ That would be the United States’ fault since they tore the country apart along with the help of Ethiopia’s dictator.
Again ‘the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, warned against sending a UN peacekeeping force to Somalia.’ He was opposing a push by the US controlled ‘UN’ Security Council to gather yet more mercenary troops to occupy Somalia with, now that the Ethiopians have long gone arunning from the havoc they caused while serving George W. Bush.
Why is Barack Obama so eager to continue doing the same wrecking job? Are there now too many underage ‘pirates’ pestering the Buccaneer Emperor for him to pullout from screwing Somalia?
For more coverage, see the BBC’s report… On Board a White Pirate Vessel
Canada refused to bar entry to Ex-president George Bush, then declined calls for his arrest for war crimes and prevented attempts by others to make citizen’s arrests. But in the same breath, Canada denied entry to a prominent antiwar voice, British MP George Galloway, because HE was infandous. Clearly they have no standard at all.
The Canadian minister had to conjure an Old English word behind which to hide. And where hider handicap seekers with a countdown from an agreeable number, the Canadian obstructionist had to consult an Oxford Dictionary circa 1708, declaring Galloway to be persona-non-grata for unspeakably, unreference-able dastardliness. The trouble is, too many of us have seen Galloway’s un-despicableness on Youtube.
Galloway famously gave the Bush warmongers a dressing down rarely seen in the orchestrated political theater of today. Not only did Galloway show the emperor to have no clothes, he laughed at his teeny willy.
Galloway’s participation in RESIST WAR FROM GAZA TO KANDAHAR, seems most opposed by the Zionists. Here’s the letter which purportedly influenced the Canadians in their decision:
An Open Letter to the Government of Canada
Keep George Galloway out of CanadaIt has come to the attention of the Jewish Defence League that a UK MP George Galloway, will be speaking in Toronto. As you are aware, anti Jewish attacks are on the rise across the world. Some of our campuses have given platforms to proxies from Radical Iran. It is our hope that the Government of Canada will not permit George Galloway entry into Canada. I have enclosed some information about George Galloway below;
“I don’t think Hamas is a terrorist organization” — Galloway
“Hezb’allah has never been a terrorist organization” –Galloway
“there’s no compulsion in Islam” — Galloway
George Galloway has spoken in Canada before, in 2006, at Carleton University and Concordia University. Here is a link exposing the fact that his visit was partly financed by the Syrian Social Nationalist Movement: splatto.net
I remember seeing an on-line poster of this outfit, advertising Galloway’s visit, on the now defunct Judeoscope Blog. The poster had neo-Nazi trappings, in bright red and black.
Blog describing the Galloway visit, the poster, and the SNNN: splatto.netMr. George Galloway, what is your connection with the organization “Toronto Coalition to Stop the War” ?
“Toronto Coalition to Stop the War” is organizing this Galloway event and they are one of the groups which attended the conferences organized by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
“Canadian antiwar activists sat down with terror groups”
Hamas, Hezbollah delegates among those at Cairo Conference
Don Butler, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Tuesday, May 08, 2007“… Canadian activists were out in force at a recent conference in Cairo that sought to … Many of the Canadian delegates were from the Canadian Peace Alliance, … banned Muslim Brotherhood and Egyptian opposition parties,”
It is my hope that the Government of Canada will do everything possible to keep this hater away from Canada.
Thank You,
Meir Weinstein, National Director
Jewish Defence League of Canada
$173 billions of taxpayer money given to just one financial company, AIG! Thanks, Obama, you’re really doing great here. What has the American public gotten for this travesty of economics, as Obama and Bush (the Democrats and the Republicans) have taken from the poor and given to the rich?
Why, they have gotten absolutely nothing. Who has gotten anything besides AIG?
‘The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that about $50 billion of more than $173 billion that the U.S. government has poured into American International Group Inc since last fall has been paid to at least two dozen U.S. and foreign financial institutions.’ See Reuters… Who got AIG’s bailout billions?
What is this? Is there some sort of competition between American conservative loonies and America’s liberal loonies going on? Why don’t Americans call for nationalizing the banks since obviously the Feds can’t get the job done without all sorts of money being stolen from the poor? Enough of these Robbing Hoods! It’s time to nationalize the banks.
Some might argue that it began before George Dubya. Apparently the US public’s distrust of politics is placated by believing its fate is in the hands of someone they could feel comfortable having a beer with. I’d say it began in earnest with the cardboard figurehead Ronald Reagan, and continued through the wimp and slick Wimpy. The perceived acuity of the US president has since been diminished ad absurdum to an incoherent, uneducated, illiterate inebriate. The ascension of Barack Obama marks a change meant to refresh voter confidence, but clearly our government’s winning motif is taking a not so distant back seat. Americans need someone with whom to feel superior, if not in the highest office, at least among his foils.
We saw it in Obama’s purported campaign opponents Wrong-way McCain and the sans pareil Sarah the Plain. With Republicans willing to plumb heretofore unfathomable shallows to foist its characters, there appears to be no end of candidates for rodeo clown.
While I’m inclined to think these caricatures are fashioned by the media’s framework, mano a mano performance like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal make me a believer in the solo tour de force majeure, excuse me, grand malheur. Could Jindal’s rebuttal to President Obama’s congressional address have been any weaker? It’s hard for me to predict that SNL will give us anything other than the Palin treatment, lampooning Jindal’s insipid pitch by reprising it verbatim.
Now you’ve been to a doctor, you’ve watched your lawyer kick ass, you’ve taken the sage advice of accountants, you’ve been impressed by museum docents, grateful to police officers, seen miracles performed by plumbers. I’ve even found myself in the debt of cable installers, and more often then not, public clerks. Are we to then believe that Bobby Jindal and ilk are the best our public offices can offer?
I’m sorry, but I can no longer be awed by Barack Obama’s unfaltering eloquence, I’m too distracted. When our impressive speaker in chief addresses an audience, he looks from side to side, but never in between. Have you noticed that? We think he’s politely avoiding looking into the camera, but everyone sitting directly in front of him must feel like chopped liver, struck by how enamored he is of the teleprompters.
I’m beginning to wonder if Obama spoke this way from the start at the 2004 DNC, because now it seems he never doesn’t.
Press conference
Even at his first presidential press conference a couple weeks ago, Obama’s head swiveled from side to side, his eyes never panned. From other television camera angles we could see the reporters were arrayed right in front of him. Can you imagine sitting across the table from a dinner companion who can’t stop talking to his knife and fork?
A friend of mine was impressed that Obama’s answers were nine minutes long. I was starting to wonder at the inconsistency of the president choosing questions from reporters in the center, but then proceeding to mimic what I can only presume was a campaign whistle stop posture, speaking from the back of a train caboose, alternately addressing people on one side of the track, then the other.
Address to Congress
The image above, by the way, is grabbed from a network broadcast of last night’s address to Congress. This angle wasn’t shown on the White House streamed video, nor that of C-Span. Every TV director’s cut of our new president’s speech featured plenty of his DC audience, rising and clapping repeatedly, but the official version completely avoided this specific vantage point. As far as I could tell, it was the only angle they excluded.
Care to imagine why? I’m thinking it’s why I insisted on finding the sequence to illustrate this post. I caught sight of the tell-tale spectacle on an evening news recap, and then hunted until late for the footage. Throughout the address, from plenty of angles, the teleprompters were plainly evident. It’s not like the cameras avoided them. But this was the only view which showed Obama’s line of sight.
This shot makes plain what Obama was looking at, juxtaposed against the mass of legislators, cabinet members, and Supreme Court justices, at whom he wasn’t.
I’ll leave it to another time to question why the networks supplemented their coverage with this shot, three times, instead of going with the official feed.
It could owe also to the non-novelty of everything Obama is saying, but I’m just bored. Now his mechanical turning to and fro compels me to think we’re both watching a slow-motion tennis match. And instead of following the ball, our eyes linger on the players, as if the goal of this game is to compare what the players are wearing to determine whose tennis white socks were the ones bleached with Clorox and whose were not.
President Obama’s gaze was bouncing back and forth between the teleprompters obviously. And what’s wrong with reading a speech anyway? That Obama was reading was obvious by the occasional false starts he made. I noted the omission of a consonant which produced an incongruous word choice, and a missed punctuation, among others. Neither would be errors made in extemporized locution or a recitation of memorized text.
We can see the smoky plexi-glass plates on stands positioned at each side of the podium. Angled at 45 degree to the floor, they reflect whatever is transcripted from projectors below, without blocking the view of the audience, and creating the illusion that the speaker is looking through the glass. The panels bookend the podium at something like 60 degrees to either side of the speaker, which means his head has an approximate 120 degree range of motion, except really only at the two extremes. The entire panorama in between, as Obama’s quick head turns suggest, remains perilously unprompted.
Does it seem to you like Obama retrieves only a solitary phrase from each side? As near as I can measure, Obama turns his head with the same frequency that George Bush used to take a pause. Bush started to make fewer gaffs when he stuck to: short phrase, breath, short phrase, breath. Now it looks like Obama could have served as Bush’s metronome. At least Obama’s delivery demonstrates a stronger lung capacity; and I think we’re all thrilled with the more sophisticated grammar. But has the new president as limited an audio-memory as our previous idiot in chief? I’m afraid to think it.
I am still impressed by President Obama’s projected confidence, and I am not about to confuse him for a moron, but that first press conference worried me. Why is it, and how is it, that Obama would be fielding questions with the aid of a teleprompter?
Remember when simpleton Dubya was stumped by an unexpected question and told the correspondent that he wished he’d received his “written question beforehand?” It’s not difficult to imagine that questions are submitted ahead of time, nor might it be so unreasonable, when the Free World hangs on a US president’s every utterance. But I did imagine that Obama was up to the task of responding with an answer. He needn’t improvise one, but you’d think he could trusted to remember it.
Are the teleprompters there to assist the president with his phrasing, or are they there to enforce that his answers, like the correspondents’ questions, stick to the script?
I’ve been assured that those boots probably looked smashing standing in front of the bathroom mirror.
Okay, I’ve had enough of our readiness to believe, about the economy, that nobody knows what’s going on. Nobody will tell you what’s going on, is what’s going on.
Even my deepest thinking friend tells me, “Eric, they really don’t know” (The game theorists, the would-be global axis shifters, don’t know.) He may be right, but that’s not who we’re talking about. Between those guys, and you and I, who have no clue about where the economy is going, is a hand-basket courier. That composite abstraction at the handlebars knows the destination, he’s being paid cost-plus for the delivery, and he knows enough to collect his fee in advance.
We thought “it’s the economy, stupid” was directed at George Bush the Senior. Who is/was stupid? I’m finding the syncronicity of Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill song “Isn’t it ironic?” superlatively ironic. The era when a mass audience un-learned the meaning of irony, was when the joke was really on us.
Today the accepted theme to describe the economy is: nobody knows. I recently heard the governor of Colorado speak to the need for budget cuts in these hard times. He introduced the subject of the economic downturn by explaining, almost as a throwaway foregone conclusion, “Nobody saw this coming.”
I thought, really? This is what Americans are satisfied to expect for leadership? Elected authority figures return our system to us, broken, with not a mea culpa, but mea confuso. And we buy it.
For me, this no-comprendo motif doesn’t play well in Adagio. Today DC’s new lawmakers want to know what’s become of the first half of the TARP bailout money, and the good-enough-for-primetime answer is “nobody knows.” Don’t you just want to stand up and beg your fellow audience members for a collective show of incredulity? “NOBODY KNOWS?!”
Whoever pocketed the 350 Billion, KNOWS.
From explanations of the graft in Iraq, we the television public KNOW that just one million dollars in t-bills weighs more than you can get past surveillance cameras.
From nighttime video of the economic collapse in Argentina, documentary footage viewers know it takes a continuous train of armored trucks to do a run on the banks before the public gets there.
By the way, I’m certain Billion is always capitalized, out of respect for its size.
“Nobody knows” where went the 350 Billion? No. Nobody who knows, intends to tell us.
Either way, we don’t get to know, but the distinction makes a difference, don’t you think? The excuse we’re given for not dwelling on this incongruity, nudge nudge wink wink, is that all misdirection is for the sake of consumer confidence.
To look behind the green curtain is to become dis-illusioned. If you explain the slight of hand, instead of building confidence, you throw fuel on consumer doubt.
The better economists opposed the bailout. Hundreds of them signed a petition to tell us what’s going on is a heist. Under George Bush, bankers have been making off with the US treasury. What they couldn’t spend pay themselves to foist a war, or give themselves in tax cuts, they are having to abscond with under cover of an eleventh hour “bailout.”
The best of the honest economists, Paul Krugman, was given a Nobel Prize. At the same time, our president-to-the-rescue is saying he’d consider the advice of “even Paul Krugman,” like Krugman is a fringe opinion.
Do we empower the American public beast with a truer education about what’s happening to their finances, or do we narrow their peripheral foresight like the gangway to the abbatoire?
P.T. Barnum said no one ever went broke underestimating the American public. Barnum saw opportunity and he took it. I’ll bet he wasn’t satisfied to invest his winnings on the advice of the public’s broker.
The economy is tanking because the Bush investment banker free-for-all is over.
The cash heart of the consumer confidence fattened-calf is already in the bloody hands of the high priests. The American consumer is what’s being thrown off the wall. And the communal wealth of America’s middle class can’t be put together again because the pieces which formed Humpty Dumpty’s actual pre-confidence-ballooned size are going to come up missing.
Not missing, exactly. Look at the corporate jets, private skyboxes, enormous estates, private island kingdoms and advance ticket sales of quarter-million-dollar fares into space.
With much recent ballyhoo, George Bush set aside for protection some nature preserves in the Pacific. Unlike Yellowstone, or Yosemite, these parks of azure coral reefs are inaccessible. To you.
Barack Obama’s spread-the-wealth-around campaign lingo had nothing to do with the mad scramble to divvy the pot. Obama represents our non-insider’s reflexive grab for the fewer spoons. If Obama represents a wisening up at all.
Beyond buy low, sell high, here’s an example of how the scam worked: If a $100K house can be made seem worth $500K, a broker gets five times the commission, say $60K instead of $12K, and collects that money in cash. When the cows come home, you’ve got just a house, and let’s admit that value is arbitrary. But the broker is free and clear, his gleaning of a cash value done.
And actually, your house is not even worth the cost to build it. As the democratic capitalist apparatus downgrades, and the wealthy lose empathy for the lower classes, your house is worth just the value of the shelter it provides. Look at the concern they show for your health care. Your well-being, food and shelter wise, is worth only as much as the value you add to your landlord’s pleasure.
Today on the public radio, I heard PRI’s Matthew Bell pose a question for the program The World. “Is President Bush underrated?” His verdict: “Absolutely!” Well the answer wasn’t Bell’s, actually. But the attribution fell outside the sound bite: Bell went on to say: “At least that’s what President Bush believes.”
Now, did the story go on to be about Bush’s delusion? Or his weeble-wobbleness, take your pick? No. It was about whether Bush had been the worst president in the last 50 years. There followed some arguments:
Historians will judge Bush to have been right, etc, etc. “According to Bill Kristol.” Again the attribution was not prefaced, but footnoted. Nor was Kristol disclosed to have been a close friend and Neocon mentor. Etc.
Contrary opinions on the other hand, were introduced oppositely, by citing the source of the voice before the quote. To my ears, this has the effect of dampening the listener’s receptivity to an argument. It muddies the ear-waves to foil a pithy phrase. When you have no intention to deliver a clear sound-bite.
You tell me which grammar communicates the most vitality:
“It’s ALIVE!” says mad scientist and Island proprietor Dr. Moreau.
(or)
Avowed antagonist and legend in-his-own-mind Dr. Moreau says “It’s ALIVE!”
This technique resembles the leeway newspapers have with their headlines. Most readers won’t go past the headline, or read bellow the fold, so a newspaper can take liberties with the headline when there’s an editorial slant to deliver, warranted or not.
The newspaper business was founded for that advantage, and ownership consolidation continues with the mass media, precisely to consolidate that power.
I believe an extreme example of this unscrupulous literary device is the retraction. Newspaper publishers know they can print a falsehood, or an oversimplification, and run a correction in a later issue. Their audience for the former is a hundred fold larger than for the latter.
That’s what I think the public radio hooligans are doing with their manipulative grammar.
Here, I’ll compose an example they can use for Bernie Madoff:
Has Bernie Madoff earned our forgiveness? Absolutely.
At least that’s what Bernie Madoff believes.
Historians will ultimately look favorably at Madoff’s actions.
According to Mistress X, nephew Z, his friends and supporters.
[But] shirtless man, [a critic of Madoff], says Madoff’s scheme to defraud investors will have a lasting impact on… [trailing into complexities which exceed the bound of a sound-bite.]
Ponzi shmonzi. You be the judge.
Did Bush cause the financial crisis? is the question that the BBC’s North America Business Correspondent in New York, Greg Wood briefly explores and his conclusion is not surprising.
Here is a summation of his argument.
‘Deregulation started long before President Bush came to power, and it was enthusiastically pursued by both Democratic and Republican administrations. ‘
‘So the image of Mr Bush as the arch deregulator and the Democratic Party as the champion of stricter rules for business does not quite tally with the evidence.’
Why is it that so many liberals are deluded into thinking that one man caused the problems our country is now facing and that one man is going to fix them? It is hard to not think of the Democratic Party voting liberals as being as much the real problem as its solution. After all, they consistently vote for a now majority group of the problem makers, the Democratic Party politicians, and these liberals have not an ounce of desire to do anything more than this it seems.
Most of the ‘voters’ simply do nothing more than ‘vote’ for their one person solution, once every four years. Or perhaps to be fair, they ‘vote’ for subordinates too to their supposed Saviours, usually a time or two in the mean time between presidential elections. They are quite simply as deluded and lazy lot when you look at them rationally, rather than through their own rose-tinged sun glasses of CHANGE that ain’t.
So when you liberals begin to lose your jobs, houses, and your families begin to fall apart from the ensuing chaos, look in the mirror, will you? You voted for the problem instead of trying to change things for the better. Your acceptance of this single See-Saw American Political Corporatized System of ‘voting’ is what caused the financial crisis. Don’t just blame Bush alone, you are the problem.
LOOK AT THAT CHEEKY RASCAL! He’s wearing Bush’s tie, and Bush’s lapel pin, and he’s standing right in there between the blue-bloods; like he wants to be Bush 44 and not somebody who even knows those red-tied crackers! I’ve still got my fingers crossed that this is a ruse. The minute the inauguration’s over, Obama will put his arms over the shoulders of both the Bushes and lead them straight up a scaffold.
It seems to me that the wrong guy is being tortured right now, pre-Christmas.
I’m talking about the Iraqi reporter who threw the shoe at America’s smirking Clown President, George W. Bush. Why is he being tortured and not the clown named Dubya?
We all know, thanks to Dick Cheney, that torture is a useful ‘tool’ for pricks like Dick Cheney. It simply gives them a sense of worth. But let’s face it, these two, Dick and Dubya, endangered US National Security for eight years, and are hiding away in secret many more of their acts of international terrorism, many of which continue to endanger the American people ourselves. It looks to me that torture is just the right thing to do to obtain this vital information from these two criminals, and possibly stop yet more subversion from taking place even after they leave their criminal posts as head mafiosos.
Let’s face it, it would not take much to break down the clown Dubya’s resistance. He squeal like a pig if even the slightest pressure is applied to his nuts. Think of the amount of much needed information that could be obtained about his still hidden collaborators and their roles in spreading terrorism world wide. They’re still active you know, and America needs this information to stop yet more acts of terrorism from being committed by the US government in the days ahead.
Sure, I know! Squeezing Dubya’s nuts is an objectionable and dirty thing to do. Under normal circumstances it would be morally wrong to do it, but today National Security is at the stake. So let’s light the fire, squeeze the nuts, and get this useful information out of Dick and Dubya. It’s the right thing to do. Our country needs this information!
If they do not squeal after their nuts are squeezed (hard to imagine happening from pigs like them), then crush the nuts and light the fire around the stake! That’ll get them talking. Oh! And buy the way, this is not really torture at all, but just some rough handling, that’s all. But why do these criminals think that they have a right to be coddled?
Free Iraq! Free the Iraqi shoe thrower! Jail Bush, and go to work on him! It’s a National Security issue and we all need to write tot he Department of Homeland Security and demand that this information being obtained from Dubya and Dick… By any means necessary… it’s the pragmatic American way!
Muntadha al-Zaidi’s shoe may have missed George Bush, but it left a figurative black eye on the warrior emperor,
and, a literal shiner on White House spokes- gidget Dana Perino. She was hit by a microphone as secret service agents rushed to protect the president. Which could not have worked out better for the US media.
If the injured staffer had been a man, do you imagine the news photos of facial bruises would be so intimate? While the world media is focused on demonstrations to urge the release of al-Zaidi, the US media is zooming in close on Perino’s black eye. I’m thinking, you don’t have to be a wife-beater to admit to the provocative element in these pictures of a battered blond, about as tall as a child, female.
You need quite a distraction from the embarrassing imagery of world citizenry eager to kick Bush in the ass as he leaves office.
Perino was already familiar with USO Playboy Bunny cheesecake.
“THIS IS A FAREWELL KISS, YOU DOG!” –yelled al-Baghdadia news journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi, as he hurled his first shoe.
Finally someone brave enough to have at our obscene Reprobate-in-Chief! What does this say about reporters, officials and celebrities who have access to President Bush but take their shoes off only to show fealty? Homeland Security has all of us removing our shoes, but it took an Iraqi to know what to do with them. If the world needed a sign of hope, that someone would at last stand up to America’s miserable criminality, new-detainee al-Zaidi is the one.
Bush makes a last visit to a nation he destroyed, and gets: “THIS IS A FAREWELL KISS, YOU DOG!” Our news outlets initially censored the “you dog” bit. Al-Zaidi’s threw his second shoe yelling “THIS IS FROM THE WIDOWS, THE ORPHANS AND THOSE WHO WERE KILLED IN IRAQ.” Prompting a local Iraqi to write:
“Yes, you dirty motherfuckers, NO VICTORY for you in IRAQ. No victory as long as people like Muntather exist…
I’d like to compile a collection of letters from famous personages in which they decline to dance with the Bush Administration. Were there many?
Shouldn’t any artist/musician/author or intellectual/humanitarian of note have publicly refused to collaborate with the immoral tyrant and his saccharine-smile patronizing librarian wife?
I have some favorites:
Mr. Feiffer Regrets -by Jules Feiffer, 2002
Poets Against War -Sam Hamill, 2003
Statement of Conscience -by Jennifer Warn, 2003
Open Letter to Laura Bush -by Sharon Olds, 2005
Archived copies are below:
Mr. Feiffer Regrets
October 12, 2002
Mrs. George W. Bush
The White House
Washington, DCDear Mrs. Bush,
I wish that I could come to your National Book Festival breakfast at the White House on Saturday, but after giving it much thought, I can’t attend.
I was thrilled to be invited, along with other writers and illustrators, to help celebrate your campaign to inspire young people in the pleasures of reading.
But I find it unbearably ironic that, while the uses of language are celebrated by you and your renowned guests, elsewhere in the White House language is being traduced and transformed to nudge us into war.
There are honest arguments on both sides of the Iraq debate (such as it is), but it seems necessary on the occasion of a celebration of reading to press the point that words, at their finest, don’t set out to confuse or obscure. Their aim is to clarify.
But clarity is not what we’re getting from your husband’s White House. It seems that clarity would deny him a war.
I am a father and a grandfather. As every parent knows, most children can intuit whether the stories their parents tell them are true or if they’re making them up.
The American people are able to tell too.
I am delighted to participate in National Book Festival events scheduled for the Library of Congress and the Capitol grounds. But as for your breakfast, may I convey my regrets and best wishes to you and your guests.
Sincerely,
/s/Jules Feiffer
Sam Hamill
Dear Friends and Fellow Poets:
“When I picked up my mail and saw the letter marked “The White House,” I felt no joy. Rather I was overcome by a kind of nausea as I read the card enclosed:
Laura Bush requests the pleasure of your company at a reception and White House Symposium on “Poetry and the American Voice” on Wednesday, February 12, 2003 at one o’clock
Only the day before I had read a lengthy report on George Bush’s proposed “Shock and Awe” attack on Iraq, calling for saturation bombing that would be like the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo, killing countless innocent civilians.
I believe the only legitimate response to such a morally bankrupt and unconscionable idea is to reconstitute a Poets Against the War movement like the one organized to speak out against the war in Vietnam.
I am asking every poet to speak up for the conscience of our country and lend his or her name to our petition against this war, and to make February 12 a day of Poetry Against the War. We will compile an anthology of protest to be presented to the White House on that afternoon…
Statement of Conscience -Jennifer Warn
February 12, 2003
Mrs. Laura Bush
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C.Dear Laura Bush,
Thank you for inviting me to the White House symposium on Poetry and the American Voice. Your call to better understand and celebrate the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes led me and many thousands of American poets to find their voices of dissent.
Since January 30th poets in many countries have joined in an upsurge of conscience and compassion, submitting over [15,000] poems to the Poets Against the War web site (www.poetsagainstthewar.org), organizing hundreds of anti-war poetry readings around the world, and joining with millions of others in vigils, processions, prayers and intercessions, lobbying and rallying for peace.
You have inadvertently presented a gift to the American people and to the world by providing poets an opportunity to express their most passionately held beliefs about their vision for the world’s future. Your gesture has revealed the very relationship it was meant to deny: the connection between poetry and politics, between literature and reality. Another great American poet, Wallace Stevens, presented this relationship succinctly:
“In life what is most important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is most important is the truth as we see it.”
This wisdom is excerpted from “Imagination as Value,” an essay in the long tradition of poets puzzling over the power of poetry and asserting its place in a world primarily shaped by the machinations of politics and money.
What is poetry’s power? Why should you, vested with the power of the White House as First Lady, pay attention to such a rush of words at this late hour?
Poetry’s power lies in its perceptive ability to describe both inner and outer realities. In reading a poem we experience the paradoxical delight and anguish of human life. Poetry holds a mirror to the reality that our political systems and values create and in doing so reveals both the limitations of our current state and life’s endless possibilities. In its refracted light we see our intangible connections, the irrefutable unity of all people and beings on the planet.
We invite you to read this selection of poems which represents some of the most powerful in the Poetry Against the War Anthology. These poems were written by Pulitzer Prize winners, former U.S. poets laureate, and poets who work as professors, business people, homemakers and veterans. Those who have submitted poems or personal statements to register their opposition to ill-considered military action, including a pre-emptive strike on Iraq, honor a long and rich tradition of thoughtful and moral opposition by poets and other artists to senseless and murderous policies, including those of our own government.
We believe that the world is poised on the knife-edge of a decision between war and peace. It is our hope and conviction that peaceful American voices, conveyed in part and without historical precedent by the poets of this country, may help to avert a disaster of tragic proportions.
We call upon the Bush administration to halt the headlong rush toward war, to heed the voices of the people of the world, and to seek peaceful means of resolving conflicts in company with the world community.
Never before in history have so many poets gathered to speak in a single voice.
Sincerely,
Emily Warn
Poets Against the War
Open letter to Laura Bush -Sharon Olds
September 19, 2005
Laura Bush
First Lady
The White HouseDear Mrs. Bush,
I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.
In one way, it’s a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents–all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers.
And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women’s prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students–long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.
When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing. When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit–and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person’s unique story and song.
So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country–with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain–did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made “at the top” and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism–the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.
I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness–as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing–against this undeclared and devastating war.
But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.
What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting “extraordinary rendition”: flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.
So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.
Sincerely,
SHARON OLDS