A Damned Good Start

“I have done nothing wrong. … I am innocent”

Tom DeLay

Tell it to the judge buddy, the prisons are full of those who are ‘innocent’ or otherwise victims of circumstance. Tom DeLay of course is not one to throw himself on the mercy of any court or to beg for contrition, after all, this is the same man who not too long ago boasted “I AM the government”. In what is a first for the slippery snake from Sugarland a Texas grand jury brought forth a conspiracy indictment against the capo of congress for his part in the money laundering, influence peddling scheme that allowed for the gerrymandering of Texas congressional districts to allow for the further packing of the House of Representatives with corrupt, radical, theocratic, fascists who would further assist with the sale of political access to the highest corporate bidders. A posturing DeLay practically spat at reporters while denouncing the ‘partisan fanatic’ prosecutor who would dare to hold the most powerful man in congress accountable for partisan fanaticism. DeLay should be more concerned about his involvement in other pending Federal probes that have already snared buddies Jack Abramoff and top White House procurement official David Safavian who was arrested last Friday in what appears to be an escalation of legal attention being paid to the vast GOP slush funds and illicit deals brokered by the aforementioned scum as well as ideological honcho Grover Norquist. How long until one of them rolls over on ‘Tommy Boy’ for a more lenient sentence or better yet, immunity. With the Patrick Fitzgerald grand jury about to wrap up and hopefully deliver more indictments as well as the recent stock dumping perils of Bill ‘HCA’ Frist it could get extremely interesting in the near future as the predators begin to eat their own in order to save their hides. As H.L. Mencken once said, ‘When the water reaches the upper deck, follow the rats”. There is no shortage of rats in the Republican money machine.

After failing to change the rules to avoid a formal removal from power in the event of an indictment earlier this year DeLay was forced to relinquish formal leadership duties. His ‘replacement’ will be Missouri congressman and GOP whip Roy Blunt, himself recently an honoree for his place on the list of the 13 most corrupt members of congress. Blunt’s ascendancy was announced after initial word that the majority leader position would be filled by California congressman David Dreier, a stand up member of ‘The Dick Army’ or the subgroup of the GOP that is composed of the single middle aged male Republicans who are rumored to be gay. This obviously didn’t sit well with the rubber fetus crowd whose assistance in defending DeLay will immediately be summoned as the cries go out that the godless liberals are pursuing a vendetta against a good and righteous man in order to suppress the Christian religion. Poor misled sheep that they are, they will rise up in outrage to defend a man more reminiscent of the Anti Christ than the man from Galilee who would be horrified at the abuse of his teachings to defend war, greed and the Pharisees, in modern day America it is the money changers who have run his long-haired liberal ass out of the temple and the armies of the stupid would all to willingly be duped into being participants in the passion play of his crucifixion were he to actually pull off a glorious reappearing.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan, himself long rumored to be high ranking officer in ‘The Dick Army’ weighed in with the following defense of DeLay:

“Congressman DeLay is a good ally, a leader who we have worked closely with to get things done for the American people,” McClellan said. “I think the president’s view is that we need to let the legal process work.”

Yet another dissembling of the truth and a defense of yet another thug and crook, both of which are as common as gay prostitutes in the era when honor and dignity were supposed to be restored to the White House. At least Bill Clinton had a woman smoking his stogie and wasn’t in the parlor with the candlestick with Jeff Gannon. Given the public fascination with oral sex I wonder if Bush’s lies about WMD would have attacted more media scrutiny had he been getting a blow job at the time.

Tuesday Tidbits

Brownie’s Blame Game:

Who better to trot out for a dog and pony show than a man whose previous job was in jerking off horses for a living, now Michael Brown, deposed head of FEMA is doing his duty for Rove Inc and jerking off the American people in front of a kangaroo court that is the mockery of a congressional ‘investigation’. Brown has been retained at taxpayer expense for the sole purpose of being both the lightning rod and attack dog of the Bush administration (the secondary is a similar role to Sunday morning media whore Tim Russert) which he did with aplomb during the jerk off circus that was the GOP packed House Katrina Committee, a despicable charlatan hoax of such obvious illegitimacy that it is astonishing that it was afforded any ‘media’ coverage at all. Brownie savaged the so called ‘dysfunctional’ Louisiana Democrats who dared to question the commitment of the king to his most threadbare and busted flat of peasants stranded in a disaster zone as well as the blatantly criminal fraudulence of the GOP controlled congress and FEMA in allocating enough money to shore up the failed levee system. The Republicans have the same cruel and inhumane pathological need to dominate absolutely and with as much humiliation to the victim as any garden variety pederast and this ridiculous sideshow of an investigation is akin to asking the Soprano crime family to conduct an internal audit into financial irregularities within it’s waste disposal subsidiaries.

The Phantom Menace Resurfaces…sort of:

The body of the alleged number two man to the alleged number three man of the alleged number four man of the alleged number three man of the alleged number one man (more turnover than at Walmart) in Al Queda (am I the only one to notice how many spelling variations are regularly used on this? Jesus Christ: which one does Osama have the trademark rights to?)was trotted out to much hullabaloo in the media as the violence in Iraq continues to escalate unabated. Very conveniently, the trophy ‘assistant’ of chief bogeyman and phantom menace, the dreaded Abu Musab Al-Zarquawi, a man who is both everywhere and nowhere and as big a nemesis as FOX TV’s 24’s Jack Bauer could ever hope to stalk was bagged in Baghdad exactly one day after Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal warned in a New York Times story that was picked up throughout the international media that Iraq was on the brink of disintegration and civil war due to the Oedipal Bush clusterfuck/Cheney-Rummy neo con crusade. Very convenient isn’t it? The Pentagon’s OSP propaganda unit has been has been furiously tit pulling on the old cow in order to milk the Al-Zarquawi ultra terrorist insurgency connection since the earliest days of the invasion and once again goes to the well. Does anybody other than the drooling idiots who are glued to the tube for the fantastically improbable 24 still place any degree of credibility in this horseshit? Where in the fuck is Osama Bin Laden? Continuing to trot out a straw man that likely doesn’t even exist as a distraction from the greater failure of the massive post 9/11 intelligence industrial complex of failing to capture the big kahuna himself is losing plausibility even faster than the even bigger fraud of George W. Bush’s strong leadership.

The ‘Values’ People:

Another day, another Republican slimeball scandal. This time it is Senate Majority Leader Bill ‘Justice Sunday’ Frist whose sleazy insider stock deals are drawing scrutiny from the SEC. Not to worry though, it is just another regulatory agency gutted by crony capitalism and phony appointments by the Bush administration and as emasculated as the Hillary Dems when it comes to doing the serious investigative work on GOP hacks like HCA scion and 2008 presidential wet dreamer Frist. Billy Boy, the man personally chosen by Rove to succeed the vile racist Trent Lott will more than likely get the preferential treatment along the lines of Dubya’s Harken wristslap than the bitchslap given to celebrity offender and faux homemaker Martha Stewart to prove that the Bushies mean bidness’ with corporate criminals. A bigger sham than the GOP one party government’s investigation of its own negligence in the Katrina fiasco……and as for those no bid reconstuction contracts, as in the infamous words of Bobby Knight… “If rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.” Republican politicans and their benefactors surely will.

The Silence of the Lambs:

In the next few days, Hillary’s temple eunuchs should be giving a free forty year pass to reactionary ultra wealthy former corporate attorney and right wing ideologue John ‘pretty boy’ Roberts to assume the position of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and will then prepare to collectively grab their ankles one more time in anticipation of Karl Rove’s next selection to ascend to the bench who will be a virtually guaranteed cinch to be an offer of appeasement to the rubber fetus crowd of Tim LaHaye dead enders who comprise the Bush regime’s base.. and once again the sheep in the DLC will be steamrollered. Never have so many failed so utterly as an opposition party at such a crucial juncture in U.S. History as the disgraceful cowards who are the feckless sycophants of the DLC congress, they can slink off to assume their place in history alongside the Vichy French and other appeasers and one can only hope that Dante was correct in stating that there is a special place reserved for those opportunists who chose to roll over without taking sides, concerned only for their own interests and may that afterlife be reminiscent of their existence as accomodators in the rancid and stinking purgatory of the Tom DeLay House of Representatives and the Bill Frist Senate… although both of those GOP ringleaders will ultimately be cast much farther into the pits of misery where they will roast on a pair of spits set up in a row alongside their beloved hero Ronald Reagan among others who have betrayed those who they were sworn to serve in the name of greed and hubris.

God: 2, Rove: 0

The sharp eastward turn of Hurricane Rita away from the metro area of Galveston-Houston and back towards a less populated spot along the Texas-Louisiana coastline has seriously pissed on the parade of the Karl Rove propaganda machine by depriving George W. Bush a shot at national redemption for colossally fucking up his response to Katrina. The White House has been scrambling to play catch up ever since and suffering the ultimate embarrassment of having a normally reliable spin machine of formidable proportions blow a fuse at the worst possible time.

Dan Froomkin’s wonderful Washington Post blog yesterday cited that Bush had already been positioned in Texas where he would wait perched like some predatory buzzard waiting to swoop in for the kill, throwing borrowed foreign dollars, spewing fake compassion and wading into the immediate chaos of the post hit debris for that one opportunity of the hitting the sweet spot of a killer photo op reminiscent of his post 9-11 bullhorn pep rally. As it became apparent that the weakening hurricane would bypass the Galveston-Houston oil metropolis and was spinning off to the east to make landfall in the Louisiana swamplands the king announced that he was leaving Texas so as to not interfere with the rescue efforts. Nice try Karl but your modus operandi is apparent to anyone with a larger brain than an ant, there is no such thing as a great photo op with the king mingling with newly homeless alligators, displaced swamp rats and a smattering of crusty old coon-asses who aren’t die hard GOP voters on the sparsely populated bayous.

As soon as it became apparent that Hurricane Rita would not be the mustard seed of salvation for the rapidly deteriorating Rove agenda the idiot king and his neo con fascist brigade were in full retreat into the mountain country of militant ‘Christian’ stronghold Colorado Springs, CO (HQ of James Dobson’s Focus on Family) as GWB issued the following weasel word statement to cover his ass:

“We will make sure that my entourage does not get in the way of people doing their job, which will be search and rescue immediately. Rest assured, I understand that we must not and will not interfere with the important work that will be going forward”

Even worse as far as a gathering storm for the Bushies is a story in the National Enquirer about the great, morally superior, Christian cowboy’s alleged tumble off of the water wagon. Granted the Enquirer is not normally a reputable news source, the tabloid is famous for stories of two headed celebrity alien love children, bigfoot sightings, Bill Clinton blow jobs and lurid tales of suspected drug trafficking by Republican moral icon Rush Limbaugh but since the latter two were dead bang hits maybe the whispers of Junior Bush’s covert juicing should at least be allowed further scrutiny. After all, this is a former rip-snorting, booze guzzling, whore mongering, bong sucking (and inhaling), cocaine addled reprobate son of privilege whose much ballyhooed conversion to Jesus had allowed him to emerge Simon pure from the river of sin and filth to assume his inherited position as the leader of the free world. This is an extremely bad omen for Bush as the Enquirer is as huge a must read among the utterly deviod morons who comprise his base as are the Left Behind novels.

So it finally appears that the tipping point is approaching and that the international man of mystery and war powers has completely lost not only his mojo but his talisman of invulnerability to criticism. The raging, purple veined, walnut cracking hard on of American nationalist virility has shrunken and dwindled into a pathetically bloodless, flaccid and limp little pee pee of impotence as the mighty avenging warrior of the attacks of September 11, 2001 has gradually morphed into the wretched, overmatched, detached, isolated and clueless little unempowered dry drunk of a fraud swept away and engulfed by the waves of reality that is post Katrina America. The days of post 9/11 heaven are a done deal.

This is an America where the Orkin men are slowly closing in on the army of Republican rats in congress and their fundraising machine, their lobbyists and toadies will soon follow as they begin to feed on each other’s malignantly slimy flesh that oozes the pus of corruption in desperate attempts to ward off the long coming and now ominously looming specter of justice. The light is finally being shown into the stinking dark nests of Reaganite cockroaches and exposing them for the predatory and ruthless vermin that they have always been as they cavorted lasciviously in orgies of greed under the cover of darkness. They will do what all cowards, bullies and braggarts do when subjected to the threat of accountability, they will roll over on each other and become finks. With any luck there will one day be hearings followed by trials followed by impeachments followed by imprisonment, it is the only way to fumigate the stench of the last five years.

This has not been a good week for Karl but I have a suggestion for some really good spin:

Hey…..he’s not stupid after all, he was just drunk !

Hindsight is a bitch and if Georgie Dubya had it to do over again he would probably rethink the entire fiasco and hire a college graduate and not some sorry-assed, latent pole-smoking, megalomaniac fuck-up dropout as a chief political strategist, especially one who your own morally repugnant daddy had fired for questionable ethical conduct.

Through The Glass Darkly

TV EVIL

“I am gross and perverted, I am obsessed and deranged, I have existed for years but very little has changed, I am the tool of the government and industry too for I was destined to rule and regulate you…I’m the slime oozing out of your tv set”

-Frank Zappa from ‘I Am The Slime’

“In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can’t spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can’t look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won’t be there. We won’t build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line.”

-Earling Carrothers ‘Jim’ Garrison

“We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true. But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube. You eat like the tube. You even think like the tube. In God’s name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion.”

-Howard Beale

As with all other things, television can be used for either good or evil depending on the intentions of those who control it. Karl Marx once said that religion was the opium of the people, he was only partially right, had he possessed the alleged ability of Nostradamus to glimpse into the future he would see that religion as powerful as it may be as an ‘opiate’ could be blown away by an innovation of technology that was still nearly a century away, a medium with the potential to become the ultimate societal drug, one far more powerful than any other: television aka, the electronic crack pipe

…..oooooh daddy, give me a hit of that e-crack!

Television has in the course of the last fifty years become such a potent force of the infinite possibilities of mass mind control and public manipulation that there is no way that the government could possibly ignore it as a tool to either suppress ideas and dissent or to manufacture consent and compliance as well as to destroy the will and the intellect of the people. It has been used by both corporate and government forces, by the former to sell an illusion that generates consumerism and by the latter to domesticate or otherwise distract, it is used by institutionalized religion to spread a militant fundamentalist version of Christianity. The television explosion has been accompanied by directly proportional explosions of mental health problems, violence, debt and most importantly of all, ignorance.

The CIA has always been obsessed with mental manipulation and used LSD in crude, early experiments with mind control but eventually found it to be unreliable. Acid you see would always eventually wear off, leaving the subject wrecked, confused and at times rendered mentally ill as a result of being ‘dosed’. LSD is indeed a very potent drug, it effects each individual differently and consequently each individual would not necessarily have a consistent reaction each time that the drug was administered. I experimented with this drug on occasion in my younger days and can personally attest to the unpredictability of the effects that ranged from euphoric king of the world confidence and insight to manic laughter and enhanced sensual perceptive capabilities to a horrible paranoid depressiveness where every demon from your past would surface to rip a hole in your mind at the very time that your consciousness was in its most vulnerable state, often leaving me mentally wrecked for days at a time and suffering debilitating flashes of guilt and insecurity…and this was only at very small dosages, nothing like that of which that the government regularly dosed subjects with during experiments, most often unwittingly so that a test subject could be observed while the subjects unraveled and at times went insane.

There is a whole history of this that the public is not necessarily aware of, the project was known as MK ULTRA, one of those that was actually leaked or otherwise declassified among other acronyms and those interested can find accounts of this particular testing online at several locations and this one is a good jumping off point as any.

But I digress…

The acid is the ticket to either a great or a really bad trip at the time that it is effective and in the bloodstream but it does eventually work its way out of your system whereas the constant stimulation of the brain by television has no limit. There is no recovery from the effects of the endless assault of advertising and public relations experts, only reinforcement. Television has provided a medium for mass marketing for big business ever since its inception, these people have been imbedding ideas in our minds from the earliest days of the development of our cognitive abilities, if you think that this is paranoia just ponder the marketing strategy of a corporation like McDonalds which directs a large amount of it’s advertising towards children to take advantage of the ‘nag factor’ where the children pester their parents into visiting the local Mickey D’s for the family friendly atmosphere, enclosed play area and movie tie ins. When I was a kid there were the characters Mayor McCheese, Big Mac, The Hamburgler and the Grimmace among others that were ubiquitous on Saturday mornings, the only time for kids to get a full load of cartoons prior to cable television. McDonalds is but one example of how television is used to create an image in the minds of the youngest and most impressionable in society in order to create lifetime customers. This is a marketing model that was immediately seized on by the public relations industry and the government, both of which were fully aware of its power and potential to mold minds.

It is certain that elements within the government immediately realized the mind controlling potential of television just as big business realized that the new medium could be harnessed for advertising and commercial purposes so did the power brokers realize that it could be similarly utilized to manufacture consent, a term coined by Noam Chomsky, a great social critic who is sadly confined to the fringes of the alternative media in this country.

The coming of the 1980’s, Ronald Reagan (product as president) and emerging technologies that would be able to prolong the mental assault 24/7 the American public slowly began to accept televised illusions as real life, revisionist historical entertainment as fact, the glorification of wealth over all else as attainable and realistic and the myth of Rambo as a realistic personification of American foreign policy. I do not have enough time or space to look at this topic here so as to do it justice. The 1980’s saw the spread of corporate nationalist propaganda delivered over hundreds of channels, each appealing to a particular segmentation of a populace too mired in the pathetic quality of the daily grind of their boring and irrelevant lives. Now whenever they needed a fix, the ability to click the little button on the black remote and to be transported into a different world, a world of escape from the drudgery, a world where they could collectively bond with role models test marketed to appeal to their particular fancies, to be politically socialized by talking heads spewing radical ideologies, unencumbered by the Fairness Doctrine which was repealed under Reagan and which would forever change their way of thinking as well as to demonize what had been the real America prior to January 20 1981. They were given everything and anything in order to keep them tuned in so that the propagandists could keep the stimulation applied, the indoctrination process could continue uninterrupted, the herd could be brought to order and shepherded in directions that were desirable to their masters.

Television in itself is a relatively new invention, having only gained mass exposure in the past half century or so but if you want to approximate a time when the demarcation line between fantasy and reality in American life began to become defined it would definitely be in the early 1980’s with the explosion in the satellite and cable television industries. This is the time that it became possible to pump 100+ channels of violence, filth, political opinion, anyone can get rich quick scheme infomercials, lurid sexual innuendo and whatever other flotsam and jetsam of the human spirit that could be mined for profit into millions of homes throughout the country. The rise of both the radical religious right as well as the rise of the political reactionary right can both be traced to the rise in the availability of cable television and how those movements were able to use the technology to brainwash the masses.

Thus began the dumbing down:

Children became more violent and dysfunctional.

Freak shows like Morton Downey and Jerry Springer drew mass audiences while pandering to deviates who would see their sorry lives displayed for public amusement.

Today more people vote on cheese talent shows like American Idol than in most elections.

Television also creates insecurity and mental illness, viewers of too much television are often unable to make the differentiation between fantasy and reality, look at the rise in school shootings and generally deviant violent behavior. They live vicariously through the imagery designed to sell them caricatures of a lifestyle that they in turn believe that must be lived up to in order to be ‘normal’. The barrage of imagery as well as its calculated usage to influence the psyche by those whose craft is manipulation has a devastating effect on Americans. The inability to detach oneself from television worlds breeds violence, insecurity, greed and other such undesirable behavior. This is especially true for children who are very impressionable, there are highly paid marketing firms who specialize in trying to get the products and or ideas of those who pay them seared into the minds of kids from the earliest age possible in order to create lifetime customers. Is this evil? If not outright evil it is certainly devoid of any sort of decent ethical principle but then again isn’t this exactly the sort of deviant behavior that unchecked capitalism is intended to produce?

Will there be a time when television fantasy, physical reality and dreams become indistinguishable to some? Is that time already here? The psychological dependence on television to create identity and loyalty should be a national shame. Generations that have been born into the cable television era have become more violent, more superficial, more unquestioning and most importantly, far dumber than those who were their predecessors.

The rise to power of the evil regime of Hitler was borne on the wings of massive public rallies, fantastic gatherings steeped in the power of nationalism, symbolism, fire, resentment and demagogic ravings of destiny. The most famous of the state sponsored bacchanalia being the 1934 Nuremberg rally, meticulously choreographed and captured on film by Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will would become the benchmark for all German propaganda. The national madness of the German people can be seen in these rallies and films, the unraveling and descent of a sophisticated society into primal and pure evil was facilitated by them.

With television there is no need for mass rallies, the demagoguery and imagery can be delivered directly into your very own living room.

ooh daddy….give me a hit of that e-crack…ain’t never comin’ back!

THINK FOR YOURSELVES!

TV Evil: Through The Glass Darkly

TV EVIL

“I am gross and perverted, I am obsessed and deranged, I have existed for years but very little has changed, I am the tool of the government and industry too for I was destined to rule and regulate you…I’m the slime oozing out of your tv set”

-Frank Zappa from ‘I Am The Slime’

“In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can’t spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can’t look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won’t be there. We won’t build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line.”

-Earling Carrothers ‘Jim’ Garrison

“We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true. But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube. You eat like the tube. You even think like the tube. In God’s name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion.”

-Howard Beale

As with all other things, television can be used for either good or evil depending on the intentions of those who control it. Karl Marx once said that religion was the opium of the people, he was only partially right, had he possessed the alleged ability of Nostradamus to glimpse into the future he would see that religion as powerful as it may be as an ‘opiate’ could be blown away by an innovation of technology that was still nearly a century away, a medium with the potential to become the ultimate societal drug, one far more powerful than any other: television aka, the electronic crack pipe

…..oooooh daddy, give me a hit of that e-crack!

Television has in the course of the last fifty years become such a potent force of the infinite possibilities of mass mind control and public manipulation that there is no way that the government could possibly ignore it as a tool to either suppress ideas and dissent or to manufacture consent and compliance as well as to destroy the will and the intellect of the people. It has been used by both corporate and government forces, by the former to sell an illusion that generates consumerism and by the latter to domesticate or otherwise distract, it is used by institutionalized religion to spread a militant fundamentalist version of Christianity. The television explosion has been accompanied by directly proportional explosions of mental health problems, violence, debt and most importantly of all, ignorance.The CIA has always been obsessed with mental manipulation and used LSD in crude, early experiments with mind control but eventually found it to be unreliable. Acid you see would always eventually wear off, leaving the subject wrecked, confused and at times rendered mentally ill as a result of being ‘dosed’. LSD is indeed a very potent drug, it effects each individual differently and consequently each individual would not necessarily have a consistent reaction each time that the drug was administered. I experimented with this drug on occasion in my younger days and can personally attest to the unpredictability of the effects that ranged from euphoric king of the world confidence and insight to manic laughter and enhanced sensual perceptive capabilities to a horrible paranoid depressiveness where every demon from your past would surface to rip a hole in your mind at the very time that your consciousness was in its most vulnerable state, often leaving me mentally wrecked for days at a time and suffering debilitating flashes of guilt and insecurity…and this was only at very small dosages, nothing like that of which that the government regularly dosed subjects with during experiments, most often unwittingly so that a test subject could be observed while the subjects unraveled and at times went insane.

There is a whole history of this that the public is not necessarily aware of, the project was known as MK ULTRA, one of those that was actually leaked or otherwise declassified among other acronyms and those interested can find accounts of this particular testing online at several locations and this one is a good jumping off point as any.But I digress…

The acid is the ticket to either a great or a really bad trip at the time that it is effective and in the bloodstream but it does eventually work its way out of your system whereas the constant stimulation of the brain by television has no limit. There is no recovery from the effects of the endless assault of advertising and public relations experts, only reinforcement. Television has provided a medium for mass marketing for big business ever since its inception, these people have been imbedding ideas in our minds from the earliest days of the development of our cognitive abilities, if you think that this is paranoia just ponder the marketing strategy of a corporation like McDonalds which directs a large amount of it’s advertising towards children to take advantage of the ‘nag factor’ where the children pester their parents into visiting the local Mickey D’s for the family friendly atmosphere, enclosed play area and movie tie ins. When I was a kid there were the characters Mayor McCheese, Big Mac, The Hamburgler and the Grimmace among others that were ubiquitous on Saturday mornings, the only time for kids to get a full load of cartoons prior to cable television. McDonalds is but one example of how television is used to create an image in the minds of the youngest and most impressionable in society in order to create lifetime customers. This is a marketing model that was immediately seized on by the public relations industry and the government, both of which were fully aware of its power and potential to mold minds.It is certain that elements within the government immediately realized the mind controlling potential of television just as big business realized that the new medium could be harnessed for advertising and commercial purposes so did the power brokers realize that it could be similarly utilized to manufacture consent, a term coined by Noam Chomsky, a great social critic who is sadly confined to the fringes of the alternative media in this country.

The coming of the 1980’s, Ronald Reagan (product as president) and emerging technologies that would be able to prolong the mental assault 24/7 the American public slowly began to accept televised illusions as real life, revisionist historical entertainment as fact, the glorification of wealth over all else as attainable and realistic and the myth of Rambo as a realistic personification of American foreign policy. I do not have enough time or space to look at this topic here so as to do it justice. The 1980’s saw the spread of corporate nationalist propaganda delivered over hundreds of channels, each appealing to a particular segmentation of a populace too mired in the pathetic quality of the daily grind of their boring and irrelevant lives. Now whenever they needed a fix, the ability to click the little button on the black remote and to be transported into a different world, a world of escape from the drudgery, a world where they could collectively bond with role models test marketed to appeal to their particular fancies, to be politically socialized by talking heads spewing radical ideologies, unencumbered by the Fairness Doctrine which was repealed under Reagan and which would forever change their way of thinking as well as to demonize what had been the real America prior to January 20 1981. They were given everything and anything in order to keep them tuned in so that the propagandists could keep the stimulation applied, the indoctrination process could continue uninterrupted, the herd could be brought to order and shepherded in directions that were desirable to their masters.Television in itself is a relatively new invention, having only gained mass exposure in the past half century or so but if you want to approximate a time when the demarcation line between fantasy and reality in American life began to become defined it would definitely be in the early 1980’s with the explosion in the satellite and cable television industries. This is the time that it became possible to pump 100+ channels of violence, filth, political opinion, anyone can get rich quick scheme infomercials, lurid sexual innuendo and whatever other flotsam and jetsam of the human spirit that could be mined for profit into millions of homes throughout the country. The rise of both the radical religious right as well as the rise of the political reactionary right can both be traced to the rise in the availability of cable television and how those movements were able to use the technology to brainwash the masses.

Thus began the dumbing down:

Children became more violent and dysfunctional.

Freak shows like Morton Downey and Jerry Springer drew mass audiences while pandering to deviates who would see their sorry lives displayed for public amusement.

Today more people vote on cheese talent shows like American Idol than in most elections.

Television also creates insecurity and mental illness, viewers of too much television are often unable to make the differentiation between fantasy and reality, look at the rise in school shootings and generally deviant violent behavior. They live vicariously through the imagery designed to sell them caricatures of a lifestyle that they in turn believe that must be lived up to in order to be ‘normal’. The barrage of imagery as well as its calculated usage to influence the psyche by those whose craft is manipulation has a devastating effect on Americans. The inability to detach oneself from television worlds breeds violence, insecurity, greed and other such undesirable behavior. This is especially true for children who are very impressionable, there are highly paid marketing firms who specialize in trying to get the products and or ideas of those who pay them seared into the minds of kids from the earliest age possible in order to create lifetime customers. Is this evil? If not outright evil it is certainly devoid of any sort of decent ethical principle but then again isn’t this exactly the sort of deviant behavior that unchecked capitalism is intended to produce?

Will there be a time when television fantasy, physical reality and dreams become indistinguishable to some? Is that time already here? The psychological dependence on television to create identity and loyalty should be a national shame. Generations that have been born into the cable television era have become more violent, more superficial, more unquestioning and most importantly, far dumber than those who were their predecessors.

The rise to power of the evil regime of Hitler was borne on the wings of massive public rallies, fantastic gatherings steeped in the power of nationalism, symbolism, fire, resentment and demagogic ravings of destiny. The most famous of the state sponsored bacchanalia being the 1934 Nuremberg rally, meticulously choreographed and captured on film by Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will would become the benchmark for all German propaganda. The national madness of the German people can be seen in these rallies and films, the unraveling and descent of a sophisticated society into primal and pure evil was facilitated by them.

With television there is no need for mass rallies, the demagoguery and imagery can be delivered directly into your very own living room.

ooh daddy….give me a hit of that e-crack…ain’t never comin’ back!

THINK FOR YOURSELVES!

California’s Raw Deal

“If I can sell tickets to my movies like Red Sonja or Last Action Hero you know I can sell just about anything”

-Arnold Schwarzenegger

Nearly lost in the torrent of post Hurricane Katrina news and spin was significant activity by current California Governor and former action movie hero Arnold Scharzenegger. Despite recent troubles regarding falling public approval ratings, sleazy deals and an unpopular special election designed to further weaken state Democrats the former Mr. Universe just announced that he would indeed seek a second term in Sacramento. A flurry of pandering to the extremist right wing base was followed up with the official announcement on Friday.

With growing public unrest over his stalled agenda and his attacks on teachers, firefighters, nurses and state employees who he has derisively referred to as special interest groups, Der Schwarz was faced with poll ratings that were sinking faster than Cyberdine Systems stock after their Los Angeles research facility was destroyed in Terminator 2. The Austrian ass-grabber, still reeling from embarrassing revelations of an unseemly $8 million deal with musclehead body building mags that sold so-called nutritional supplements (similar to the ones that he in his official capacity had recently vetoed a bill that would have regulated such substances) and the ensuing conflict of interest charges that ultimately forced him to cancel the arrangement after a torrent of negative publicity has taken one body blow after another, becoming even more unpopular in the state than George W. Bush himself.

Faced with the prospect of serving out the remainder of his governorship under a pall of shame, or even worse being the subject of a Total Recall himself, Der Schwarz did what any other Rove era Republican would do in a similar situation: he resorted to gay bashing. When state lawmakers passed a bill to officially make same sex marriage legal in California, he announced that he would veto the bill, therefore pandering to the very same intolerant theocratic bigots that have terrorized the country with reckless abandon over the past four years. Gay activists were understandably outraged at the latest maneuver of this calculating political chiseler, other than his denouncements of opponents as ‘girly men’ there is absolutely nothing to indicate that Der Terminator himself possesses any hostility toward gays and it is obvious that he is only seeking to curry favor with the dumbest segment of the populace that is the hard core Republican base of bitter and deluded haters.

Thusly, the self proclaimed moderate was running to the right so quickly that he was threatening to lap Hillary Clinton and her DLC cronies. Not only has he not been overtly anti-gay but when considering some of his past comments as well as his early choice of a career in a profession where manly men admire each others muscle tones and where there is a history of a notoriously sinister homosexual undercurrent he wouldn’t seem to fit the mold of a typical angry white gay hating male at all but would more likely be sympathetic to homosexuals. According to an infamous interview that a much younger and less ambitious Arnie gave to OUI Magazine in 1977 he spoke openly of participating in orgies like “..the guys who can fuck in front of other guys” did, he also was photographed by the late Robert Mapplethorpe whose explicit homoerotic artwork was the cause of national outrage, in the run up to the recall election some alleged explicit pictures that had never been released did not materialize despite rumors that they would appear in the days prior to the polls. The Gropinator also can’t hide behind the so called ‘protection of the sanctity of marriage’ shield either given his extramarital exploits and reputation as a giant horndog so the attack on the gay lifestyle is a strictly political as it is cunning and caluclated which are the two consistent traits of this ongoing retelling of the tale of the American dream.

When looking at Arnold’s political career it needs to be recognized that it was all built on fraud and chicanery. The egomaniacal former body building honcho saw an opportunity to one up former Predator co-star and Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura and damned if he would let it pass. Der Governator has seen his meteoric rise to GOP celebrity status floundering in the same manner that his Hollywood action hero career did after the succession of increasingly cheesy and hackneyed box office bombs that drove him into politics in the first place. The entire saga is permeated by shady back room deals, a maniacally sleazy national party backed usurpation of a sitting governor who was guilty of no criminal or ethical breaches of the public trust, corporate greed, the tawdry sleaze of celebrity, betrayal and hubris. The Bush-GOP machine, knowing all too well the fawning idiocy of the general public had their eye on Arnie for quite some time as there were private meetings arranged with their future real life action hero with Kenny Boy Lay from early in 2001. The agenda would be two pronged, first to allow the sleazeball Houston energy brokers to slither off of the hook of accountability for paying back the money that they bilked California consumers out of and secondly to put the state into play for GWB in November 2004. Republican power brokers determined that they were going to do whatever they could to get California to jump for George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election they realized that they had to get rid of one obstacle, the recently reelected albeit unpopular Gray Davis and what better way to slime him than to play the blame game by hanging the rolling blackouts around his neck…all that was missing was a patsy. To run Schwarzenegger outright would have been too obvious so Rove and company needed a dupe to initiate the recall and they could hardly have found a better candidate than the ambitious greaseball Darrell Issa to initiate the recall movement and then to be left holding a flaming bag of dogshit when his own gubernatorial dreams would be later dashed by Der Terminator.

The reign of Arnold has been a circus from the outset, cementing the idea for many Americans that the Golden State was indeed the U.S. capital for the bizarre. The Gropeinator played coy until using the nationally televised platform of longtime GOP sycophant Jay Leno’s Tonight Show as a jumping off point by announcing that he would indeed be running and was just the right man to come to the rescue of the public:

“The politicians are fiddling, fumbling and failing. The man that is failing the people more than anyone is Gray Davis. He is failing them terribly, and this is why he needs to be recalled and this is why I am going to run for governor.”

And it was with this sliming of Davis that the ambitious muscle man officially threw his hat into the ring where he would run as a populist ‘moderate’ Republican. The recall election was a garish spectacle, 135 candidates were on the ballot offering a veritable potpourri of freakitude with far more flavors than Baskin Robbins. The choices included a former baseball commissioner in Peter Ueberroth, a smut peddler in Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, a porn star in ‘actress’ Mary Carey, a washed up child actor in Gary Coleman, a commentator in Ariana Huffington, a sumo wrestler and numerous other disreputable opportunists seeking their fifteen minutes of fame. The rest as they say is history as Schwarzenegger’s name recognition, bankroll and Rove led backing allowed him to easily exploit the recall and to leave a slime trail along his way into the Governor’s mansion where his first term has been a collection of sleazy p.r. stunts, bad one liners, capitulation to right wing special interests and big time self serving promotional appearances like the one at the 2004 GOP convention in New York City where his muscle flexing was relegated to second banana status by the hateful and incoherent ravings of Zell Miller.

One wonders why the Gropinator is even bothering with the effort to retain his starring role, considering that his wheeling and dealing and influence peddling would have him fast tracked for a highly influential position in the House of DeLay were he to not run for reelection and instead chose to buy his way to a likely easy win for a congressional seat and an increasingly visible role in national government that he could use as a springboard to bigger things…like the White House which would likely be successful due to the power of celebrity on flake nation, he wouldn’t even be the first fraud of a bad actor from Hollywoodland to occupy the Oval Office and most likely and even more tragically wouldn’t be the last.

Not to accuse Governor Schwarzenegger of being an out and out Nazi because partying with Kurt Waldheim, acknowledging a one time admiration of Adolph Hitler and prancing around to Wagner marches while clicking his heels (albeit in his younger days) as well as having a father who actually was a real member of that most infamous of German regimes would be traits totally unbecoming of an American with big time political aspirations. Now if he wanted to pass a ballot initiative requiring that all California gays to wear pink stars on their lapels tomorrow he could be certain of sending armies of right wing Republican extremists goose stepping to the polls in November 2006 where the combination of celebrity and bigotry will likely be a winning formula for the GOP.

Raw Deal

“If I can sell tickets to my movies like Red Sonja or Last Action Hero you know I can sell just about anything” -Arnold Schwarzenegger

Nearly lost in the torrent of post Hurricane Katrina news and spin was significant activity by current California Governor and former action movie hero Arnold Scharzenegger. Despite recent troubles regarding falling public approval ratings, sleazy deals and an unpopular special election designed to further weaken state Democrats the former Mr. Universe just announced that he would indeed seek a second term in Sacramento. A flurry of pandering to the extremist right wing base was followed up with the official announcement on Friday.

Faced with growing public unrest over his stalled agenda and his attacks on teachers, firefighters, nurses and state employees who he has derisively referred to as special interest groups, Der Schwarz was faced with poll ratings that were sinking faster than Cyberdine Systems stock after their Los Angeles research facility was destroyed in Terminator 2. The Austrian ass-grabber, still reeling from embarrassing revelations of an unseemly $8 million deal with musclehead body building mags that sold so-called nutritional supplements (similar to the ones that he in his official capacity had recently vetoed a bill that would have regulated such substances) and the ensuing conflict of interest charges that ultimately forced him to cancel the arrangement after a torrent of negative publicity has taken one body blow after another, becoming even more unpopular in the state than George W. Bush himself.

Faced with the prospect of serving out the remainder of his governorship under a pall of shame, or even worse being the subject of a Total Recall himself, Der Schwarz did what any other Rove era Republican would do in a similar situation: he resorted to gay bashing. When state lawmakers passed a bill to officially make same sex marriage legal in California, he announced that he would veto the bill, therefore pandering to the very same intolerant theocratic bigots that have terrorized the country with reckless abandon over the past four years. Gay activists were understandably outraged at the latest maneuver of this calculating political chiseler, other than his denouncements of opponents as ‘girly men’ there is absolutely nothing to indicate that Der Terminator himself possesses any hostility toward gays and it is obvious that he is only seeking to curry favor with the dumbest segment of the populace that is the hard core Republican base of bitter and deluded haters.

Thusly, the self proclaimed moderate was running to the right so quickly that he was threatening to lap Hillary Clinton and her DLC cronies. Not only has he not been overtly anti-gay but when considering some of his past comments as well as his early choice of a career in a profession where manly men admire each others muscle tones and where there is a history of a notoriously sinister homosexual undercurrent he wouldn’t seem to fit the mold of a typical angry white gay hating male at all but would more likely be sympathetic to homosexuals. According to an infamous interview that a much younger and less ambitious Arnie gave to OUI Magazine in 1977 he spoke openly of participating in orgies like “..the guys who can fuck in front of other guys” did, he also was photographed by the late Robert Mapplethorpe whose explicit homoerotic artwork was the cause of national outrage, in the run up to the recall election some alleged explicit pictures that had never been released did not materialize despite rumors that they would appear in the days prior to the polls. The Gropinator also can’t hide behind the so called ‘protection of the sanctity of marriage’ shield either given his extramarital exploits and reputation as a giant horndog so the attack on the gay lifestyle is a strictly political as it is cunning and caluclated which are the two consistent traits of this ongoing retelling of the tale of the American dream.

When looking at Arnold’s political career it needs to be recognized that it was all built on fraud and chicanery. The egomaniacal former body building honcho saw an opportunity to one up former Predator co-star and Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura and damned if he would let it pass. Der Governator has seen his meteoric rise to GOP celebrity status floundering in the same manner that his Hollywood action hero career did after the succession of increasingly cheesy and hackneyed box office bombs that drove him into politics in the first place. The entire saga is permeated by shady back room deals, a maniacally sleazy national party backed usurpation of a sitting governor who was guilty of no criminal or ethical breaches of the public trust, corporate greed, the tawdry sleaze of celebrity, betrayal and hubris. The Bush-GOP machine, knowing all too well the fawning idiocy of the general public had their eye on Arnie for quite some time as there were private meetings arranged with their future real life action hero with Kenny Boy Lay from early in 2001. The agenda would be two pronged, first to allow the sleazeball Houston energy brokers to slither off of the hook of accountability for paying back the money that they bilked California consumers out of and secondly to put the state into play for GWB in November 2004. Republican power brokers determined that they were going to do whatever they could to get California to jump for George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election they realized that they had to get rid of one obstacle, the recently reelected albeit unpopular Gray Davis and what better way to slime him than to play the blame game by hanging the rolling blackouts around his neck…all that was missing was a patsy. To run Schwarzenegger outright would have been too obvious so Rove and company needed a dupe to initiate the recall and they could hardly have found a better candidate than the ambitious greaseball Darrell Issa to initiate the recall movement and then to be left holding a flaming bag of dogshit when his own gubernatorial dreams would be later dashed by Der Terminator.

The reign of Arnold has been a circus from the outset, cementing the idea for many Americans that the Golden State was indeed the U.S. capital for the bizarre. The Gropeinator played coy until using the nationally televised platform of longtime GOP sycophant Jay Leno’s Tonight Show as a jumping off point by announcing that he would indeed be running and was just the right man to come to the rescue of the public:

“The politicians are fiddling, fumbling and failing. The man that is failing the people more than anyone is Gray Davis. He is failing them terribly, and this is why he needs to be recalled and this is why I am going to run for governor.”

And it was with this sliming of Davis that the ambitious muscle man officially threw his hat into the ring where he would run as a populist ‘moderate’ Republican. The recall election was a garish spectacle, 135 candidates were on the ballot offering a veritable potpourri of freakitude with far more flavors than Baskin Robbins. The choices included a former baseball commissioner in Peter Ueberroth, a smut peddler in Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, a porn star in ‘actress’ Mary Carey, a washed up child actor in Gary Coleman, a commentator in Ariana Huffington, a sumo wrestler and numerous other disreputable opportunists seeking their fifteen minutes of fame. The rest as they say is history as Schwarzenegger’s name recognition, bankroll and Rove led backing allowed him to easily exploit the recall and to leave a slime trail along his way into the Governor’s mansion where his first term has been a collection of sleazy p.r. stunts, bad one liners, capitulation to right wing special interests and big time self serving promotional appearances like the one at the 2004 GOP convention in New York City where his muscle flexing was relegated to second banana status by the hateful and incoherent ravings of Zell Miller.

One wonders why the Gropinator is even bothering with the effort to retain his starring role, considering that his wheeling and dealing and influence peddling would have him fast tracked for a highly influential position in the House of DeLay were he to not run for reelection and instead chose to buy his way to a likely easy win for a congressional seat and an increasingly visible role in national government that he could use as a springboard to bigger things…like the White House which would likely be successful due to the power of celebrity on flake nation, he wouldn’t even be the first fraud of a bad actor from Hollywoodland to occupy the Oval Office and most likely and even more tragically wouldn’t be the last.

Not to accuse Governor Schwarzenegger of being an out and out Nazi because partying with Kurt Waldheim, acknowledging a one time admiration of Adolph Hitler and prancing around to Wagner marches while clicking his heels (albeit in his younger days) as well as having a father who actually was a real member of that most infamous of German regimes would be traits totally unbecoming of an American with big time political aspirations but if he wanted to pass a ballot initiative requiring that all California gays to wear pink stars on their lapels tomorrow he could be certain of sending armies of right wing Republican extremists goose stepping to the polls in November 2006 where the combination of celebrity and bigotry will likely be a winning formula for the GOP.

Bush in New Orleans: A Shameless Sham

The King’s triumphal resurgence in front of a national television audience on Thursday night had all of the typical hallmarks of a Karl Rove bullshit epic: the extensive attention to detail in the staging, lighting and angles that allowed Bush to be shown at the podium with the perfectly illuminated Jackson Square in the background as well as the absence of any extemporaneous activity or pesky reporters or audience members that could provide a distraction from the great and mighty leader. This was yet another meticulously crafted public relations achievement by a White House propaganda machine stocked with those highly influenced by the work of Leni Riefenstahl and given the fact that they had to truck in their own lights and generators to pull off the big con of putting the bloom back on the rose, polishing the turd or otherwise putting lipstick on the pig that any documentary footage could be transformed into a modern masterpiece that would totally blow away Triumph of The Will. Dan Froomkin’s most recent Whitehouse Briefing blog has an excellent bit on just how bogus that it all was but you will need to register in order to view it.

It’s a good thing that the reopening of the French Quarter and its legendary drinking establishments are the first and foremost priority in the plans for the rejuvenation of the Crescent City because you would have to be pretty fucking snockered to place any credibility at all in Thursday night’s shameless horseshit disbursement ceremony. In the speech itself there was the obligatory linking to terrorism and 9/11 although it was much more subtle than the fear mongering of the past. More predictably and perhaps more alarmingly there was a super sized helping of the usual red meat that is thrown to the radical ‘christian’ crusaders that comprise the majority of Bush’s base and the holy warriors can expect even more as Rove orders the government to spend like drunken sailors which is certain to alienate the fence sitting fiscal conservatives who are growing more nervous by the day at the profligate in chief maxes the national credit cards for present gain. The speech if anything was well put together, Rove’s screenwriters did a great job as is typical, especially the historical references which are rare for an administration determined to keep the public as ignorant of the past as humanly possible. I have absolutely no doubt that a good percentage of simple minded Americans have are thoroughly convinced that their divinely annoited emperor actually penned it himself with talent on loan from God, a real miracle from a man whose literary skills were most recently displayed while scribbling slips seeking permission to go potty, and he didn’t even use a crayon.

After playing the God and Terror cards, Bush’s dissertation also contained stunning promises of massive government largesse and the ensuing piling on of even more debt to an already unseemly deficit that is groaning under the burden of frivolous tax cuts (Bush later absolutely ruled out tax increases to finance the grand rebuilding plans put forth), an extremely costly foreign war (that for the time being much to Rove’s delight has been forgotten the mainstream media and consequently by the general public who are focused on New Orleans) and the government sanctioned graft machine that has become so overtly prevalent during the past four and a half years of Rove’s agenda and the unscrupulous reign of Tom DeLay. The massive expansion of federal government this time is sanctioned by traditionally anti-big gov’t ideological think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and underwritten by radical special interest groups who only hate government spending of goliath proportions when they don’t control the politicians who control the purse stings.

When examining the transcript of the speech keep in mind the following excerpt from a recent Wall Street Journal story:

“Congressional Republicans, backed by the White House, say they are using relief measures for the hurricane-ravaged Gulf coast to achieve a broad range of conservative economic and social policies, both in the storm zone and beyond.

“Some new measures are already taking shape. In the past week, the Bush administration has suspended some union-friendly rules that require federal contractors pay prevailing wages, moved to ease tariffs on Canadian lumber, and allowed more foreign sugar imports to calm rising sugar prices. Just yesterday, it waived some affirmative-action rules for employers with federal contracts in the Gulf region.

“Now, Republicans are working on legislation that would limit victims’ right to sue, offer vouchers for displaced school children, lift some environment restrictions on new refineries and create tax-advantaged enterprise zones to maximize private-sector participation in recovery and reconstruction.”

Surprise, surprise, the radical right is seeking to use the reconstruction efforts to further their own agenda, no wonder why their Republican prostitutes in congress are so disinterested in pursuing an independent inquiry over Katrina.

Bush’s earlier contrition and weasel word ‘apology’ is nothing but more of the same spin, if you need any convincing of this you only need reference the September 14th New York Times story by Elisabeth Bumiller and Richard W. Stevenson that states:

“Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush’s chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort, which reaches across many agencies of government and includes the direct involvement of Alphonso R. Jackson, secretary of housing and urban development.”

Karl Rove? Isn’t it just wonderful to be living in a country where yet another political hack albeit the king of all fixers is placed in charge of the reconstruction of a major American city that has been destroyed. ‘Brownie’ ended up as chum tossed overboard to attract the sharks and Michael Chertoff is poised to walk the plank for his gross ineptitude and clueless mismanagement if it comes down to it, despite rumors to the contrary there is no honor among thieves especially when a human sacrifice is required to protect the asses of those further up the food chain. The Bushies are desperately in need of a miracle right now but if Karl Rove has any credentials for the serious type of work that is needed to rebuild New Orleans then I should be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for this blog.

Not that the immersion of the public in the whirling typhoon of administration spin on Thursday is the final product, advance teams led by longtime Bush lackey Karen Hughes had already been laying the groundwork and broke through the line following the lead block of damage control queen Condi Rice, a woman so close to Dubya that he apparently even seeks her approval to take a leak as the earlier link demonstrates.

According to a September 9th Washington Post story by Dana Milbank:

Hughes picked up the theme. “We have to offer a positive vision of hope,” she began. As if preparing troops for combat, she described her plans for improving world opinion of the United States: a “rapid-response unit,” a plan to “forward-deploy regional SWAT teams” and create “a dual-headed DAS for public diplomacy.”

And if the involvement of longtime Texas crony and top operative Hughes isn’t bad enough, Rove himself told the audience at a North Carolina fundraiser that the full story of the disaster would be told : translated this means that the White House propanda operatives are now working overtime to not only take the blame game to the next level but to obfuscate and distort the truth to the extent that in short order ‘television lobotomized’ Americans will not be pointing the finger at godless liberal tree huggers in general and most likely traditional bogeyman Bill Clinton in specific for destroying the functional ability of FEMA and the storm itself will be renamed Hurricane Hillary.

Strangely enough the devastation wrought by Katrina as well as the indifferent initial response of the Bush administration, the GOP Congress and the Federal Government offered Americans a real life look at the true face of this country, the ugliness that is hidden behind the fantasy façade of consumerism and mass marketing, of television and advertising glamour. This drawing back of the curtain revealed the ugly little uber capitalist trolls pulling the levers of power and briefly exposing the true ugliness of the festering wound on the nation’s soul that was opened by the ‘Reagan Revolution’ and has worsened by over 20 years of the neglect of the poor and the shrinking middle class whose terrible plight has been held away as far from the public eye as technologically possible so as to allow the illicit transfer of wealth to the richest of all.

Excuse me but where is the honor or dignity in using yet another national tragedy to further a radical and corrupt political agenda? Then again, these are the same rat bastards who were using the agonizing deaths and suffering of the victims of 9/11 to advance their agenda before the first bodies were pulled from the rubble at Ground Zero and the smell of rotting flesh was freshly hanging in the Manhattan air. Ghouls exploit death and exploit it both callously and without regard to the long term moral implications that their pathological buzzard-like traits to elicit profit from the wreckage of the lives of the innocent represent. The stench of decomposing bodies was still heavy in the dank and fetid Louisiana air on Thursday, mingling with the malodorous bullshit scent of the same ole, same ole from Rove and his crew of crackerjack production experts in propping up the most pathetic excuse for a leader in American history yet again for the ever present cameras all while a large portion of the city was still underwater and the unrecovered dead lacking both the dignity and compassion that a truly humble god fearing man would marshall all forces within his power to provide.

This is the accountability moment America, do you seize this rare and maybe final opportunity to stop this insane dismantling of the social contract, of progressive government, of civil liberties, of our American legacy itself…or do you rub your eyes, change the channel and immerse yourselves in a comfortable world of familiar fantasy once again?

You decide….if two plus two equals four than everything else is a given but the moment that you allow yourselves to be duped into believing that two plus two equals five then you have already sold your soul to the company store.

ELVIS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING!

A Shameless Sham

The King’s triumphal resurgence in front of a national television audience on Thursday night had all of the typical hallmarks of a Karl Rove bullshit epic: the extensive attention to detail in the staging, lighting and angles that allowed Bush to be shown at the podium with the perfectly illuminated Jackson Square in the background as well as the absence of any extemporaneous activity or pesky reporters or audience members that could provide a distraction from the great and mighty leader. This was yet another meticulously crafted public relations achievement by a White House propaganda machine stocked with those highly influenced by the work of Leni Riefenstahl and given the fact that they had to truck in their own lights and generators to pull off the big con of putting the bloom back on the rose, polishing the turd or otherwise putting lipstick on the pig that any documentary footage could be transformed into a modern masterpiece that would totally blow away Triumph of The Will. Dan Froomkin’s always great Whitehouse Briefing Washington Post blog has an excellent bit on just how bogus that it all was but you will need to register in order to view it.

It’s a good thing that the reopening of the French Quarter and its legendary drinking establishments are the first and foremost priority in the plans for the rejuvenation of the Crescent City because you would have to be pretty fucking snockered to place any credibility at all in Thursday night’s shameless horseshit disbursement ceremony. In the speech itself there was the obligatory linking to terrorism and 9/11 although it was much more subtle than the fear mongering of the past. More predictably and perhaps more alarmingly there was a super sized helping of the usual red meat that is thrown to the radical ‘christian’ crusaders that comprise the majority of Bush’s base and the holy warriors can expect even more as Rove orders the government to spend like drunken sailors which is certain to alienate the fence sitting fiscal conservatives who are growing more nervous by the day at the profligate in chief maxes the national credit cards for present gain. The speech if anything was well put together, Rove’s screenwriters did a great job as is typical, especially the historical references which are rare for an administration determined to keep the public as ignorant of the past as humanly possible. I have absolutely no doubt that a good percentage of simple minded Americans have are thoroughly convinced that their divinely annoited emperor actually penned it himself with talent on loan from God, a real miracle from a man whose literary skills were most recently displayed while scribbling slips seeking permission to go potty, and he didn’t even use a crayon.

After playing the God and Terror cards, Bush’s dissertation also contained stunning promises of massive government largesse and the ensuing piling on of even more debt to an already unseemly deficit that is groaning under the burden of frivolous tax cuts (Bush later absolutely ruled out tax increases to finance the grand rebuilding plans put forth), an extremely costly foreign war (that for the time being much to Rove’s delight has been forgotten the mainstream media and consequently by the general public who are focused on New Orleans) and the government sanctioned graft machine that has become so overtly prevalent during the past four and a half years of Rove’s agenda and the unscrupulous reign of Tom DeLay. The massive expansion of federal government this time is sanctioned by traditionally anti-big gov’t ideological think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and underwritten by radical special interest groups who only hate government spending of goliath proportions when they don’t control the politicians who control the purse stings.

When examining the transcript of the speech keep in mind the following excerpt from a recent Wall Street Journal story:

“Congressional Republicans, backed by the White House, say they are using relief measures for the hurricane-ravaged Gulf coast to achieve a broad range of conservative economic and social policies, both in the storm zone and beyond.

“Some new measures are already taking shape. In the past week, the Bush administration has suspended some union-friendly rules that require federal contractors pay prevailing wages, moved to ease tariffs on Canadian lumber, and allowed more foreign sugar imports to calm rising sugar prices. Just yesterday, it waived some affirmative-action rules for employers with federal contracts in the Gulf region.

“Now, Republicans are working on legislation that would limit victims’ right to sue, offer vouchers for displaced school children, lift some environment restrictions on new refineries and create tax-advantaged enterprise zones to maximize private-sector participation in recovery and reconstruction.”

Surprise, surprise, the radical right is seeking to use the reconstruction efforts to further their own agenda, no wonder why their Republican prostitutes in congress are so disinterested in pursuing an independent inquiry over Katrina.

Bush’s earlier contrition and weasel word ‘apology’ is nothing but more of the same spin, if you need any convincing of this you only need reference the September 14th New York Times story by Elisabeth Bumiller and Richard W. Stevenson that states:

“Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush’s chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort, which reaches across many agencies of government and includes the direct involvement of Alphonso R. Jackson, secretary of housing and urban development.”

Karl Rove? Isn’t it just wonderful to be living in a country where yet another political hack albeit the king of all fixers is placed in charge of the reconstruction of a major American city that has been destroyed. ‘Brownie’ ended up as chum tossed overboard to attract the sharks and Michael Chertoff is poised to walk the plank for his gross ineptitude and clueless mismanagement if it comes down to it, despite rumors to the contrary there is no honor among thieves especially when a human sacrifice is required to protect the asses of those further up the food chain. The Bushies are desperately in need of a miracle right now but if Karl Rove has any credentials for the serious type of work that is needed to rebuild New Orleans then I should be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for this blog.

Not that the immersion of the public in the whirling typhoon of administration spin on Thursday is the final product, advance teams led by longtime Bush lackey Karen Hughes had already been laying the groundwork and broke through the line following the lead block of damage control queen Condi Rice, a woman so close to Dubya that he apparently even seeks her approval to take a leak as the earlier link demonstrates.

According to a September 9th Washington Post story by Dana Milbank:

Hughes picked up the theme. “We have to offer a positive vision of hope,” she began. As if preparing troops for combat, she described her plans for improving world opinion of the United States: a “rapid-response unit,” a plan to “forward-deploy regional SWAT teams” and create “a dual-headed DAS for public diplomacy.”

And if the involvement of longtime Texas crony and top operative Hughes isn’t bad enough, Rove himself told the audience at a North Carolina fundraiser that the full story of the disaster would be told : translated this means that the White House propanda operatives are now working overtime to not only take the blame game to the next level but to obfuscate and distort the truth to the extent that in short order ‘television lobotomized’ Americans will not be pointing the finger at godless liberal tree huggers in general and most likely traditional bogeyman Bill Clinton in specific for destroying the functional ability of FEMA and the storm itself will be renamed Hurricane Hillary.

Strangely enough the devastation wrought by Katrina as well as the indifferent initial response of the Bush administration, the GOP Congress and the Federal Government offered Americans a real life look at the true face of this country, the ugliness that is hidden behind the fantasy façade of consumerism and mass marketing, of television and advertising glamour. This drawing back of the curtain revealed the ugly little uber capitalist trolls pulling the levers of power and briefly exposing the true ugliness of the festering wound on the nation’s soul that was opened by the ‘Reagan Revolution’ and has worsened by over 20 years of the neglect of the poor and the shrinking middle class whose terrible plight has been held away as far from the public eye as technologically possible so as to allow the illicit transfer of wealth to the richest of all.

Excuse me but where is the honor or dignity in using yet another national tragedy to further a radical and corrupt political agenda? Then again, these are the same rat bastards who were using the agonizing deaths and suffering of the victims of 9/11 to advance their agenda before the first bodies were pulled from the rubble at Ground Zero and the smell of rotting flesh was freshly hanging in the Manhattan air. Ghouls exploit death and exploit it both callously and without regard to the long term moral implications that their pathological buzzard-like traits to elicit profit from the wreckage of the lives of the innocent represent. The stench of decomposing bodies was still heavy in the dank and fetid Louisiana air on Thursday, mingling with the malodorous bullshit scent of the same ole, same ole from Rove and his crew of crackerjack production experts in propping up the most pathetic excuse for a leader in American history yet again for the ever present cameras all while a large portion of the city was still underwater and the unrecovered dead lacking both the dignity and compassion that a truly humble god fearing man would marshall all forces within his power to provide.

This is the accountability moment America, do you seize this rare and maybe final opportunity to stop this insane dismantling of the social contract, of progressive government, of civil liberties, of our American legacy itself…or do you rub your eyes, change the channel and immerse yourselves in a comfortable world of familiar fantasy once again?

You decide….if two plus two equals four than everything else is a given but the moment that you allow yourselves to be duped into believing that two plus two equals five then you have already sold your soul to the company store.

ELVIS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING!

Hell Hath Frozen Over

“To the extent the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility”

George W. Bush

SHOCKING….UTTERLY SHOCKING!

I WONDER WHAT ROVE HAS UP HIS SLEEVE NOW