Not only are Bush and Cheney fascist counter-revolutionaries, they're gauche and vulgar! Or so says this article.
Is America the empire of vulgarity? Many journalists would seem to think so. Within a single week in January, 2005, both the American Vice President and the President himself were hauled into the journalistic world court for alleged acts of grossness. Dick Cheney attended the sober Auschwitz Memorial ceremonies in "the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower," while George Bush’s demeanor at his inauguration a few days earlier inspired a tirade entitled “The Emperor of Vulgarity” which characterized him and his administration as aSo Mike Carlton gets a git of a guernsey there. Good for him. :)strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal. -- Mike Carlton, Sidney Morning Herald, January 22, 2005Granted, not all journalists take such a dim view of Bush & Co. But just about all have at one point or another held his Presidential table manners under scrutiny. The cowboy boots, ideal equipment for the Executive Swagger. The bungled language. The moments of apparent disorientation. And more seriously, the self-righteousness. The phobia to dialogue. The religious idolatry. The dirty tricks. No, George W. Bush may not be wrong about everything, and those who write him off as a mere fool are making a big mistake. But his attitudes and behavior firmly qualify him to be First Citizen of American Vulgar.
Why should the world’s leading nation have reelected a man of such debilitating limitations? First off, we must acknowledge the fact of life that Presidents who engage in global conflict have always been reelected unless, like LBJ, they chose to step down. But to stop with this explanation is to ignore a huge cultural phenomenon: millions of Americans support George Bush because they think like George Bush. They are bored by information and ignore learning. Their idea of wit is a bumper sticker. They seek macho leadership and easy answers to issues. They believe that they have been saved by the Lamb of God.
It is because of this mindset that news stations like CNN and Fox can devote most of their airtime to yellow journalism, that Larry King (the Archdeacon of Yellow Journalism) gets repeat performances daily, that evangelical extremists like Pat Robertson command national attention and that creationist insinuations like the “theory” of Intelligent Design make their way into our schools.
How did this state of affairs arise? Many causes might be adduced, but at the forefront I would like to suggest two factors which are especially compelling because they seem to be related to each other: the rise of the religious Right and the destruction, by the academic Left, of American education in the humanities. These two factors and their culturally-erosive interaction with each other are illustrated spectacularly by a legal issue that arose in Alabama and soon gained national recognition.
There's this perception out there that the Left prefer style over substance and that the Right prefer to "do the right thing" no matter how bad it looks. It's an idiotic dialectic created by the simpletons and simplifiers out there who would much rather not have to think about the subtle nuances of policy and politics. Were it only so that G.W. Bush was merely a strutting idiot Texan; or that the Chinese Communists were converts to the benefits of the market economy. These kinds of characterisations are used everyday by politicians who would rather reinforce the notion that the difference between Left and Right in our democracies are great chasms of ideology. Well, it is if you want to peddle "(un)Intelligent Design" in science classes, but really, politics in a Post-Modern media-driven 'demcocracy' is always going to be the neighbour to demagoguery - not that I'm advocating a dictator or a commintern rule here. it's just that democracy as intended, is a difficult ideal to achieve. That's why we ought to be more infuriated that G.W. Bush 'won' in 2000, much more than the fact that he got elected. You can see how people can lose patience.
However, that being said, this entry is pretty funny.
When The Levee Breaks
Katrina has come and gone in New Orleans and now people are asking which part of the disaster was preventable.
New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.Meanwhile Halliburtons and the Carlyle group are making a motza. Go figure. Pleiades asks is the Bush Government criminally negligent?
Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.
Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
Here's another report.
No comments:
Post a Comment