Bad Daddy
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
The great downfall of America is not some sort of precipitous moral decline -- unless you take into account the behavior of the offspring of Jeb and George Bush -- but rather that the "theatrical presidency" has been uncoupled from any accountability.
How Bush "performs" on television is the criterion by which the media judges him, not how he performs for the people of America. Word and deed have taken two separate paths -- and the media may cover deed for a day or two, but is always diverted back to writing reviews about Bush's dramatic reading of scripts written by Rove and Hughes -- or airing visuals of carefully orchestrated photo-ops.
It doesn't take a brain surgeon to put together a pattern of Bush being unable to cope with disaster and protect Americans. There is a straight line going from Bush's paralysis after 9/11 -- sitting in a classroom for nearly 10 minutes reading "My Pet Goat" before his speechwriters could give him something to say, while Dick Cheney oversaw the response, followed by Bush's bizarre odyssey of flying away from Washington, D.C. -- to his failure to respond to the Tsunami disaster for days, to his failure to respond to the disaster in New Orleans for days. We won't even get into the bloody, bankrupting quagmire he got us into in Iraq by lying us into war.
Any corporate board would know
that they have a total incompetent on their hands and send him packing.
We didn't just have Michael Brown as head of
FEMA. Michael Brown is our President!
The fact is Bush is just a figurehead, with the domestic President being
Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney sharing the role of President
for
foreign affairs. The manner in which the media gobbled up the stage-managed
speech from Jackson Square -- in which tremendous resources, including
emergency generators to light the cathedral, were brought into a city that
had no electricity
-- was as reprehensible as it was revealing about how political "reporters" have
now pretty much become theatrical reviewers.
The whole idea that a man who committed treason, Karl Rove, is openly and
brazenly directing the "clean-up" of Bush's image after Rove and Bush failed
to rescue the citizens of New Orleans or provide any assistance for four
days is intolerable
and unacceptable by any norms of accountability, reason, or concern about
our national security and survival.
Rove is also being given full powers to oversee the doling out of profiteering contracts to campaign contributors -- and to implement a plan of dispersing the black residents of New Orleans around the country to dilute the Democratic voting base in the Crescent City. It is the full intention of Rove to make right wing lemonade out of another Bush Administration lemon.
That the
media seems to bring no historical context to Bush's continued history
of blunders and betrayals of America's national security is testament
to
the decline of a nation that used to value responsibilty, honesty, hard
work and
integrity. Now, all that counts is "the performance."
And Bush is the actor set out to read the scripts and appear "manly" in photo
ops, so that Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld can go about doing their business of
pursuing their megalomaniac, psychotic visions and rewarding corporate campaign
givers with taxpayer-funded contracts worth billions of dollars.
In the meantime, America's security and economic situation (forever intertwined)
grow perilously more dangerous. You have to remember one thing: the guys
behind the front man (Bush) have no idea how badly they are doing. People
forget this.
The Bush "Masters of the Universe" think that they are doing a marvelous
job and at some point reality will catch up with them. Only the reality that
is catching up with them is the weakening of America to the point that all
our lives are threatened by a government so incompetently run, it makes Enron
look like a "best practice" model for how to operate a transparent, honest
corporation.
You could have two theories about the disintegration of the ability of
the government to protect us and provide us with basic survival services
under
Bush.
One is that the Bush administration is full of total incompetents --
and is such a "spin" operation depending upon the press buying the latest
photo-op of Bush and speech written for him -- that they simply have
no idea nor do
they care how they are weakening America.
The other theory is that Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld are geniuses. This theory holds that they know exactly what they are doing by making government the scapegoat for being ineffective, because that helps them to further privatize services -- such as protecting people, rescuing people, policing, health care, social security, etc -- that should be efficiently offered by the national government.
This theory holds that what Rove is really doing in a situation like New Orleans is fulfilling the Grover Norquist goal of starving government and making it drown (PDF). Remember that the "break the bank" amounts of money Bush is asking for to make people forget his administration's negligent homicide in New Orleans will be going, in large part, to private contractors such as Halliburton. In making sure that FEMA is loaded up with hacks and party loyalists, Rove is ensuring its demise. So Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert can now sweep in and say that FEMA should be dissolved and replaced with private contractors who will do a "better" job.
Either theory is proving dangerous to our national security and increasing
the risk that we and our families are on our own in a national emergency,
because the Bush Administration -- as a governmental entity -- is unwilling
AND unable
to care for, protect or rescue us.
This leads us to what must be a horrifying reality for followers of
what George Lakoff calls the strict father protector model that Bush
is supposed
to represent.
The tradeoff for the dismantling of our Constitution, the bankrupting
of our nation, the start of an unending war through lies, the right
wing social
policies,
the defiance of the international community -- the tradeoff for all
of these for the Republican base is that Bush was to be the strict
father
protector,
the Good Daddy who kept all evils at bay.
But with the inexplicable
inaction of the White House after Hurricane Katrina, we have now clearly
seen the pattern over five years.
Good Daddy is not our president; Bad Daddy is.
We're on our own, because the Good Daddy has turned out to be nothing
more than a PR prop for megalomaniacs who couldn't care less about
our fate.
They have their agenda, and they are sticking to it.
Bush has run away from every crisis that he has faced. It is clear
that Cheney doesn't want him around when anything serious happens.
They didn't
even alert
Bush when they evacuated the White House and the Capitol awhile back.
Osama is still at large, as is the Anthrax terrorist. Cheney and
Rumsfeld have turned Iraq into a haven for terrorists. The country
is nearly
bankrupt. Our
national disaster agency is a dumping ground for unqualified political
appointments.
All we have is a national political theater in which Bush stars.
It is a play completely divorced from reality, accountability, and
real
deeds.
It's
a dream
world created by generators, lighting, scriptwriting, patriotic buzzwords,
lies, and imagery. The Hollywood image has replaced the naked reality.
Joan Crawford turned out to be Bad Mommy.
George W. Bush has turned out to be Bad Daddy.
But Rove and Karen Hughes just want you to watch the movie, while
the theater is burning down -- and the press is just fine with ignoring
the flames
licking around them as they write their latest reviews to meet their
deadlines.
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL