BUSH'S LITTLE TRIP TO SAN DIEGO (WHILE NEW ORLEANS DROWNED) REVISITED

Some years ago the then fledgling Right-wing attack machine/echo chamber manufactured some preposterous story about President Clinton holding up air traffic at L.A.X.-- to the cost of millions of dollars-- while he got a haircut on the runway. The idiotic canard spread like wildfire among the gullible and naive and when it was eventually shown to just be another right-wing lie, many people had heard it repeated enough times by the Limabughs and Coulters and Hannitys and O'Reillys that they either consciously believed it or had been deceived by a lasting subconscious impression that Clinton had done something bad... again. So far-- and not unexpectedly-- not a peep out of any of these media propagandists about a similar and far more egregious incident involving their ill-starred hero, George Bush. In late August, just as people were beginning to die in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and FEMA's criminally negligent response, Bush decided to fly off to San Diego to raise money for Republicans from wealthy bribers and to play a round of golf. Miriam Raferty reports in the SAN DIEGO UNION that this wasn't all that happened. The article, "San Diego hospital closed to accommodate Bush visit; No chemo," has had virtually no coverage in the mass media. San Diego's Balboa Park Naval Medical Center was shut down to accommodate Bush's Aug. 30 visit, forcing patients to cancel hundreds of scheduled appointments including chemotherapy treatments. They shut down the pharmacy, the emergency room and even told cancer patients who needed their chemo-therapy treatments that day that they would not be allowed on the base. All this for a photo-op (which is what BushCo has Bush doing to make him-- and everyone else-- think he's a "leader"). And the photo-op was canceled. The SAN DIEGO UNION found that although many staffers at the Naval Medical Center were concerned about the shut-down "none were willing to go on record by name for fear of retaliation, such as loss of jobs or revocation of healthcare privileges. Off the record, one hospital volunteer expressed shock and disappointment at the apparent disregard for patient welfare. "I think it's disgusting," THE UNION reported. "People who are getting chemotherapy or radiation are on a very set schedule. They are not supposed to miss a session or put it off by even a day, because it's based on the life cycle of a cancer cell," the volunteer said, adding that some patients had waited weeks for appointments. "Some had to postpone for quite a while, because the radiation and chemo rooms were full on other days," she added. "They closed everything down just so he [Bush] could have his photo op in the lobby with the corpsmen." This is what it must have been like is Tsarist Russia!

Supposedly Bush was scheduled to have his photo taken thanking medics who aided tsunami victims in Southeast Asia and visiting wounded soldiers back from his catastrophic war in Iraq. But when the Bush motorcade reached the hospital he refused to get out of the limo and after sitting around for 15 minutes he departed for the airport. A local television station, KNSD, aired footage of a physically impaired Bush (apparently either on drugs or drunk) straining to climb the steps of Air Force One, aided by his wife, Laura. (This is right after the now well-known scene of Bush strumming a guitar with the presidential seal at an invitation-only ceremony across town.) The TV reporter pointed out Bush's wavering gait and noted that it was unusual for him not to stop to shake hands with well-wishers at the airport. The station later denied that the incident had ever occurred, claimed Bush had been in the hospital, visited the soldiers and so on. Forget Tsarist Russia; now we're back in the pages of Orwell's 1984!

One possibility-- other than a drunken stupor-- that kept Bush from being able to perform even his one pathetic role as subject-in-chief at a photo-op is his violent hatred of all the anti-war protesters who were everywhere. They had been at the North Island Naval Station when he was strumming his guitar and there were as many as a thousand in Balboa Park. The night before several thousand had held a candlelight vigil outside the luxury resort where he was spending the night. Bush doesn't like American citizens protesting him and he is known to react very badly. He must have been plenty pissed when activists lined a nearby beach and sang anti-war songs while he was trying to rest up for the following day's photo-ops. A performance of Taps to commemorate dead American soldiers was interrupted by shouts and curses from a small but violent group of neo-fascist Bush supporters. All this hubbub disturbs Bush's rest time and makes it impossible for him to keep to the trials and rigors of all his photo-ops. No wonder no one told him that America's biggest port was washing away, that one of our great cities was destroyed and that the organization he had gutted and rendered useless, FEMA, was complicit in one of the worst catastrophes to have ever afflicted our country (not counting his own illegitimate ascension to the White House).