The Bush Cartel Massacre: Have You No Decency, Have You no Shame? "Of Course Not, We're the Sopranos from Maine."

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

There are moments when you cannot help but laughing through the outrage.

It was clear from the first question out of Matt Lauer's mouth that the White House had decided it was better to have Lauer try and kill the messenger than to have General Electric make Kitty Kelley disappear from the Today Show interview list.

What was clear was that Lauer was going to do Karl Rove's branded character assassination work of killing the messenger in order to discredit the message. Rove did it with Jim Hatfield in order to inoculate Bush from the apparently true charges of past cocaine use. He did it, one can speculate, with Al Gore by setting up "tapegate," in which an innocent secretary took the rap for Rove's effort to smear the Gore campaign by sending them a "Bush Debate Preparation Tape" (that would have been a laugh to watch). Rove did it when he bugged himself during a heated campaign and made it appear the opposition was the culprit.

Rove did it to Sandy Berger with the ludicrous charge that Sandy Berger stuffed secret documents into his sox. Rove did it by orchestrating or participating in the outing of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative specializing in tracking the illicit sales of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Like a mob enforcer with a baseball bat, he just wanted to bash up Joe Wilson's car and send a message to anyone that told the truth about the Potemkin Village dark side of the Bush Dynasty -- and this was his message: We will stop at nothing to silence truth tellers, even if it means exposing a CIA operative whose work it was to keep rogue nations from acquiring WMDs, the key excuse we used for going to war with Iraq. Protecting America comes second to protecting the carefully crafted image, power, and financial interests of the Bush Cartel.

Oh, we could name other Rove victims. The list is as long as the 1,000 plus American war dead in Iraq. Remember John DeIulio who called the Bush Administration "the Mayberry Machiavellis" and said that they had no policies that were not politically motivated? Well, Rove got to him right quick. Who knows what Karl had this one-time Bush "faith-based" czar threatened with? Maybe it was like the scene from the Godfather, where they bring the brother of an FBI informant in from Italy just to let the guy know that they can snuff his family out in a moment's notice. The informant does the right thing and commits suicide. Jim Hatfield did the same thing.

But DeIulio chose life and had a statement issued that he didn't mean what he had said and he had no further comment. (Actually he WROTE the comments, so they were pretty hard to disavow, but he looked at his relatives and swallowed hard.) The guy was never heard from again publicly, although he ended up as a Brookings Institution fellow, never to speak the truth about the Bush Cartel again -- at least on the record. But, at last notice, all his relatives appear safe and sound. So DeIulio got the message.

Well back to poor Kitty, Rove's most recent quail for dinner.

Kitty Kelley told Matt Lauer that the Bush family has carefully crafted an image of the Donna Reed family, but they are really more like the Sopranos. That's when we got our hearty laugh. You see, Matt Lauer was clearly under White House/General Electric/NBC instructions to slice and dice Kitty, so he indignantly asserted the following: how can you trash a family that has three distinguished decades of public service?

He kept accusing her of being overly "negative" toward the Bush family. Yes, there are moments when you just have to laugh. Otherwise you might toss a barbell at the TV set.

There it was, the Pro-Bush Cartel media Catch-22 in a nutshell. The media is the megaphone by which the faux Bush family image is transmitted, despite all evidence that they run a political operation that is more like a crime family than the ethical WASPS-turned-swaggering-Texas-fundamentalists that their handlers churn out like a Hollywood script. Kevin Phillips, Richard Clarke, Joe Wilson and countless others have exposed the dark mob underside of the Bush Dynasty, but Matt Lauer acts the naive pretty boy on behalf of General Electric and the White House, as if this were all sacrilege and he just has never heard such "nasty" things before. I mean, how can you say such things about a man who God has chosen to lead forth an army of Christian soldiers into a world of endless war, the bankrupting of the middle class, and endless corporate crony contracts (maybe to General Electric, owner of NBC and major defense contractor. Naw!)

Where has Matt been living, Mars?

No, Matt's just a guy who wants to keep living the multi-millionaire air head news celebrity high life, so he'll do what's he is told to do -- and, in this case, the word came down from on high to serve up Kitty, an easy target, for Karl's Thanksgiving platter.

Matt's not alone. Even the Chicago Tribune, which supports Bush in a knee jerk fashion on its editorial page, but tends to have a relatively (and we emphasize relatively) balanced national and international news front section, jumped on the "forged documents" bandwagon, citing postings on the infamous Free Republic website as legitimate sources. God, when has the Chicago Tribune picked up a story from BuzzFlash or another pro-democracy website? Let us know if you find one.

Not only that, the Tribune went on to say that this was "the second time in weeks that technology has overtaken a Kerry-Bush campaign story and powered it into the headlines." We thought that the next paragraph was going to be about how pro-democracy news sites had exposed the Swift Boat liars both as Bush campaign surrogates and as -- well -- liars. But, no, the Tribune was referring to the emergence of the Rove-orchestrated Swift Boat allegations themselves, not their debunking! We guess the Tribune missed the fact that the Swift Boat liars had been totally discredited. It's just damn hard to catch ALL the news nowadays, isn't it, especially if it actually exposes the truth about the Bush Sopranos, right?

And as far as the alleged "forged documents," wouldn't, as a recent pro-democracy web article by Mike Burke speculated, it be the perfect Rovian touch to have planted forged documents that actually contained the truth?

After all, you could discredit CBS and the nettlesome Bush National Guard facts in one fell swoop. It has, as Burke notes, the mark of Rove written all over it. If you have the media focus on memos that are essentially true according to a compilation of the facts surrounding Bush's record of service (and the secretary of the man who allegedly wrote them, even though she thinks the memos themselves may not be real as actual documents, they DO reflect the reality and basic facts of Bush blowing off his Guard service, she confirms), but get the press to focus on whether the memos are authentic or not, then you discredit the facts by discrediting the memos. How sweet a technique is that?

It's what Rove did with Jim Hatfield and the Bush cocaine use issue. Discredit the messenger and discredit the fact. And, you know what? Rove had Hatfield "exposed" about this time in the 2000 campaign cycle. It put to rest the cocaine use issue by pulling the rug from out under the messenger.

Remember when Sen. Kerry was overheard on C-Span, telling a voter "these guys are a lying bunch of thugs." Let's hope he remembers that every second of the day.

A BuzzFlash reader wrote us and said that he saw Zbigniew Brzezinski on Charley Rose. He had this summary of Brzezinski's evaluation of Bush foreign policy, "To win, you must divide your enemies and unite your friends. We have united our enemies and divided our friends."

It's the Mayberry Machiavellis alright.

As Kevin Phillips, the former Nixon aide and author of "The New Republican Majority" wrote in his recent book on the Bush Dynasty: "Few have looked at the facts of the family's rise, but just as important, commentators have neglected the thread -- not the mere occasion -- of special interests, biases, scandals (especially those related to arms dealing), and blatant business cronyism" Phillips writes in his preface. "The evidence that accumulates over four generations [of the Bush family dynasty] is really quite damning."

"Three generations of immersion in the culture of secrecy...deceit and disinformation have become Bush political hallmarks," Phillips notes.

(Click here for the BuzzFlash interview with Kevin Phillips.)

And Kevin Phillips is a guy who worked for and admired "Tricky Dick," so you know where his benchmark is.

To Phillips, however, the greatest threat to America posed by the Bush dynasty is not its inherent unfitness to rule. What most offends and angers Phillips is the threat that the imposition of the Bush dynasty on America poses to democracy itself. The American rebellion in 1776 represented the creation of a nation built on the foundations of a government elected by the people, not determined by the restoration to power of corrupt bloodlines.

No book makes a stronger case against an American sitting in the White House who believes that he is in power because of hereditary entitlement and divine choice. Patriots rebelled against King George in 1776. Phillips notes that Americans have the opportunity to dethrone the Bush dynasty at the polls in 2004.

The Bush Cartel victim most in need of resuscitation is democracy, civility and the rule of law itself.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL