That’s the song the White House is singing these days, at least in the shower of the Presidential Suite (I highly doubt that there is any music in Cheney’s lightless soul).
The mess that the Executive Branch is in at the moment is really of their own making, the result of trying to run a country from a Frat House, just one step removed from Animal House. Yes, the ugliest aspects of America are defining not only our world image but also our policies and some new & teisted version of the Constitution.
Rather than serve the American People and Constitution, the Bush Administration has constantly and with self-righteous indignation, operated as though the Democrats were the enemy. In fact, former Senate Majority leader Tom DeLay referred to Democrats as “the enemy” and refused to talk to any lobbyist who had a Democrat’s ear, stating, that he would not treat “with the enemy”. It is disturbing to think that the White House and its cadre of less-than-stellar thinkers have created and executed policy on an Us v. Them basis, as if their greatest concern were eliminating the competition rather than the terrorists.
Our Red State President and his entourage of mediocrity refuses to treat with the Blue State legislators, because in his White House the flag is not Red, White and Blue – it is simply Red, the color of Totalitarianism.
Tags:
Blues States, Bush, Bush Totalitarianism, Cheney, Gonzalez, Red States
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Posted on 3/22/2007
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Our President has been touring Latin America with an agenda of good will and a demand to be fed. While steering clear of Mexico’s most famous export to American college campuses (Tequila), Bush used his “Feed Me Now” exit to escape reporters’ questions regarding the nefarious behavior of his henchman (oops! I mean devoted employee) Alberto Gonzalez.
It pains me to say it, but our highest ranking Latino/Hispanic member of the Executive Branch is now the progenitor of yet another of tank-roll of fascism down Blunder Boulevard.
In an effort to continue the Rovian dream of a Bloom-inspired political Valhalla, Gonzalez fired eight Federal Prosecutors in one fail swoop. This mass-firing was an unprecedented Executive move against the Judicial Branch.
Since Congress is no longer in Cheney and Haliburton’s back pocket, and since Haliburton has absconded to Dubai, the new Rovian strategy is to seize control of the Judicial Branch, through fear & intimidation, and of course the usual character assassination so favored by the Bush White House strategists.
And our beloved President has found new ways to evade difficult questions: answer by demanding dinner – “la cena” and ask for extra salsa on your goddamn tortillas.
Tags:
Bush, Cheney, Fascism, Gonzalez, la cena, Rove, Rovian Valhalla, tortillas
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Posted on 3/14/2007
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Alegra’s very disturbing story (see her blog http://www.nyc.com/people/AlegraDemos/home.aspx ) got me thinking about what a truly misogynistic land this country has become. Aside from the fact the young girls are not only willing to objectify themselves for their fifteen seconds of fame, they will stand on line in order to do it, they will beg, borrow and steal and behave very, very badly for it.
It is exceedingly difficult for young girls to see that they have a worth beyond that which is tied to sexual gratification. The fact that very young girls (and sometimes their mothers) will refer to pre-pubescent clothing as “sexy” or “hot” is an indicator of how wrong things have gone when it comes to the role of the female in this society. While is true that there are more jobs out there for the professional woman (the highly educated middle class), there are fewer and fewer for the underclass female outside of some sort of menial job or one that engages in some form of sexual exploitation. This is surely an indicator that the US is moving away from an economic model based on a strong middle class and more towards one of social and economic disparity, with a very powerful elite class at the top. Economic disparity always has a disastrous effect on women – witness the unbelievably cruel and institutionalized prostitution in Eastern Europe.
But are we any better over here in the land of the Free and the Home of the Brave? Our female leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, and Condoleeza Rice, are routinely made fun of for their unglamorous qualities, and yet someone as physically repulsive as Dick Cheney is never qualified based on his looks or his sexuality. Under the guise of political commentary, pundits can attack the very womanhood of a female leader in a way that these same pundits would never attack a male leader. The same holds true for wives and daughters of Presidents: it is okay to view them as sexual objects, be they attractive or repulsive. How do we value ourselves as females, how does society value us and how do we let these values live or die in our daily lives?
If in our interpersonal lives we can reduce our partners to needless objects worthy of discards, how are we treating our brethren on a wider social level? If a man and his lover can plot to have his wife committed to a mental hospital, what does that say about this culture? It says that this is the same culture where “girls gone wild” and reality TV feed us a steady stream of objectified young women willing to undergo surgery, humiliation and perversion in order to see their faces on television.
While the so-called press and the so-called news networks are busy with the salacious details of the lives of tartlets and dead centerfolds, our country’s leadership is growing ever more fascist.
Something is terribly, terribly wrong here.
Y que lastima Alegra que tuviste que sufrir así; vas mejorar, seguro que si.
Tags:
deception, fascism, misogeny, pop culture, sexual objectification, sexuality
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Posted on 2/27/2007
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Bush , in a speech marked more for its clarity than its jingoism, proposed to the Nation that we send 20,000 more soldiers to Iraq in order to clean up the mess that can barely be described as a functioning Nation. There is really no “Nation of Iraq” at the moment; there are only vestiges. But the Bush Plan was clear and the text of the speech marked a departure from the tired speech-making tactics that have gotten us where we are.
We are now officially quagmired, as we were in Vietnam in 1968. The rock and the hard spot are waiting to crush us. An exit now would mean certain death for hundreds of thousands of people in the region; it would mean the destruction of what little is left of the Iraqi infrastructure. The violence and rage that would ensue would be worse than what pundits have “civil war”. But to surge the troops does not seem to the answer, either. We have cornered ourselves.
An increase in the number of troops serving in Iraq will do several things. First, it will only aggravate an already difficult diplomatic position while continuing to foster hatred worldwide. Second, it will strain a military already stretched to the maximum. Third, it will require troop to endure longer postings, and repeated postings with little time to recover from the stress (for which we will continue to pay for generations). Third, it will require a full court press of military recruiters in our Nation’s most impoverished areas. At least they are not (yet) being drafted to die in a war that promises them nothing.
That fact is that the military relies on new recruits from the very people of people it once drafted. Incentives, which including signing bonuses and hazardous duty pay, constitute hard currency that many of these potential recruits could otherwise not imagine. Why work at a minimum wage in a job with little potential for growth or education, when you can sign on for a couple of grand and have someone 24/7 to give and to tell you everything you need? Why struggle in poverty if someone is offering you a sure way out?
The Minimum Wage in many areas of the country is $5.15 per hour. If an hourly worker works a full 40 hour week for 51 of the 52 weeks of the year, he/she will barely enough to be above the official poverty line (around $500 above the official number), and that is pre-tax. While military pay is so low, it barely keeps the soldier in the lower middle class. Many military personnel take part time jobs at the minimum in order to stay afloat. If you earn the minimum wage and the Military offers you $2,000 to sign on, it’s like getting a 20% bonus.
The Congress wants to increase the minimum wage to $7.25, which would put a much greater distance between the full-time worker and the poverty line. While many business owners claim that such an increase will put them out of business, the reality is that it will increase their total labor burdens by between 10% and 12%. That increase means a decrease in profits, and that means the big investment firms will be unhappy. Any pushback on the minimum wage will come from these people who buy and sell stock like a bunch of bookies. In a time when CEO’s receive shameful severance packages of 200 million dollars, our soldiers live barely above the poverty line. This is an outrageous situation and a great and shameful fistful of greed that no one else in the world can understand. And it has nothing to do with the Constitution or the Bill of Rights or Free Enterprise or Free Market Capitalism; it has everything to do with greed and American hypocrisy.
The sad fact is that the war in Iraq rests largely on the grossly underpaid shoulders of the poor and of the immigrants to the United states.
Tags:
Bush, Civil War, Hazardous Duty Pay, Iraq, Iraq War, Minimum Wage, Poverty Line, Quagmire, Surge
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Posted on 1/11/2007
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With the execution of Saddam during the Hajj, and on the Sabbath, the New Year starts out with the ominous sounds of Death and the Co-opting of Death. ANd then there were the long and ornate funeral services for Ford.
Both Bush and Cheney inserted themselves into the public halo that now surrounds Ford (and while he was an honest man, he was not a saint), almost as if they were part of that halo. Cheney’s comments at one of the commerations were sickening, as is almost every word that drops from his scheming mouth. Bush, no doubt after consulting Manhattan’s best-performing and most expensive PR firms, managed to link himself and all that has touched to the legacy of Ford. Bush is most certinaly trying to take advantage of the Nation's mood, and trying to insert himself into what good Ford did. Designating today as a National Day of Mourning is one example - how great to start out 2007 with a day of mourning. What does that portend for the future?
Bush’s new theme: No matter what a president has done, public opinion about him will soften and upon death he will get his halo.
Message to us: I ain’t so bad; support me. What can you lose? You’ll forgive me in a few years anyway. The Lord says you have to. Forgiveness is in our Christian fabric.
So now Bush & Cheney can claim part of that nimbus and its light as theirs while they start the New Year out touting their great achievement: the hanging of Saddam on a holy day.
The implications of all this will surely be missed by the great majority of American who, still nursing their hangovers and watching the football results, will be more turned into the sordid lives of inexplicably celebrated celebrities and their periodic displays of bodily areas now commonly referred to ask “junk” (how wonderful it is that the female reproductive organs are now referred to as “junk”).
Morally, the last week of December 2006 underscored what the whole year and indeed what the whole Bush administration has always been about: connecting even the most unrelated of events, pushing the most vainglorious of ideas, excusing onself from the most un-Christian of actions. Bush continues to try to convince us that his plans were necessary, wanted and beneficial. He and Cheney have convinced us that we need to lower our moral standards ever closer to Hell, that they will always know better and that in the end the country will benefit.
What we have benefited from is an amoral war, character assassinations, lower standard sof living, prevaricating politicians and their lobbyist camapaign financerss, and of course higher gas prices. While Bush and Cheney cling to Ford’s halo, they must remember that Saddam’s ghost is not far behind.
Tags:
2006, 2007, Bush, Cheney, death of Ford, hajj, hanging of Saddam
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Posted on 1/2/2007
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