TWO MORE TARGETS FOR THE BUSH PROPAGANDA/HATE MACHINE: KANYE WEST AND PATTI SMITH, TRUTH SPEAKERS
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This morning my pal Danny sent me a piece from the St. Petersburg Times by Sergei Chernov about a press conference Patti Smith gave in Russia on Thursday. Wearing a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament badge and a small pin representing Commandeur of the Order of Arts and Letters, France’s highest cultural decoration, that she received from the French Ministry of Culture in July, Patti referred to Bush as an "asshole" and attacked the overarching power and unquenchable greed of American corporatism for the world being so "fucked up" right now. Patti got it right (as usual)-- and the Russians didn't censor her. Kanye West also got it right, the next night, but all-American NBC-TV did censor him.
Last week West was on the cover of TIME Magazine being hailed as "the smartest man in pop music" and this week it is widely expected that his new album, LATE REGISTRATION, will enter the BILLBOARD album chart at numero uno having shipped platinum (that means a million sales even before the official release). That's HUGE. I'm sure NBC was all excited that they got the handsome, personable, 28-year old, clean-cut rapper to co-host their Katrina telethon with comedian/actor Mike Meyers. Some corporate hack wrote some soul-less, inane verbiage for Meyers and West to read off a TelePrompTer. West balked and launched into an emotional, from-the-heart attempt to deal with the nightmare of Katrina's aftermath from a human and personal perspective instead of just reading the kind of sanitized crap we're all conditioned to hear 24/7 on TV. Nervously, he said what all African-Americans must have been thinking about the corporate media's portrayal of Black victims of Katrina as looters and Bush's cowboy warning to shoot on sight. "I hate the way they portray us in the media," he said. "If you see a black family, it says they're looting. See a white family, it says they're looking for food. ... They've given them permission to go down and shoot us." That probably got NBC execs a little nervous but they figured they could live with that. Meyers continued droning on from the TelePrompTer in a stiff whiter-bread-than-ever-in-his-life tone. When he threw it back to West, out came the big no-no: "George Bush doesn't care about black people."
I can't report that any NBC execs had heart attacks. But they did make an extremely inelegant quick cut to Chris Tucker. But it was too late for half the country. Someone-- someone HUGE-- said that "George Bush doesn't care about black people." They were able to cut it out of the West Coast broadcasts, although the internet lit up. The Bush Regime looked around for a house-slave to send down there to prove it just ain't so. They managed to drag Condoleeza Rice out of Ferragamo on 5th Avenue and ship her ass down South so she could testify for Master George. "Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race," she lied.
Meanwhile, Bush's famously insensitive mother, Barbara Bush, widely considered a Ma Barker type in this corrupt criminal family, had her own spin on this. A Secret Service agent friend of mine, no admirer of Ole Babsy's haughty-- some say vicious-- nature, sent me what the old bag had to say when touring a hurricane relief center in Houston with her husband and Bill and Hill. "Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we're going to move to Houston. What I’m hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this [she chuckles slightly]is working very well for them." Hey, what can I say? If you ever get a chance, go for it. You'll die a hero.
Addendum-
Al Franken's take on Ma Barker Bush: http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/gems/al-franken-barbara-bush.mp3
posted by DownWithTyranny @ 6:17 PM
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GEORGE W. BUSH STILL ROCKS!/STOP CRITICIZING! THE RICH MAN'S CEO PRESIDENT IS EXECUTING HIS JOB REQUIREMENTS PERFECTLY
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Everyone is slamming poor Dubya. Everyone is saying, oh my God, he's more
inept than we ever imagined, he has no idea what's really going on, he's
oblivious and in denial and he pretty much let all those poor black people
die in filth and misery, and he basically ignored the massive Katrina
disaster for days before finally being pressured into cutting his
umpteenth vacation short and actually taking action.
This is what they're saying. Kanye West was right, Bush doesn't care about
black people, or the poor, or anything that doesn't directly serve his
handlers' agenda or flatter his monochromatic ego or anything that isn't
spelled out for him in nice simplistic pie charts and reassuring matronly
tones.
And lo, the darts are slinging in from around the world, according to SF
Gate's own World Views column: "Maddening incompetence ... reminiscent of
a drought-stricken African state," says Britain's Daily Mail. "Can't get
it together," says a major paper in Italy. "A plethora of grim tales of
disaster," says the Scotsman. "Superpower or Third World?" asks the
Spanish daily Noticias de Álava. Why did BushCo fail its first
great national-security test since Sept. 11, despite having two days'
advance notice of Katrina's wrath? asks Le Monde. And on it goes, the
world's powers looking on in one part shock and one part disgust and all
parts repugnance for Bush's rampant ineptitude and America's apparent
inability to take care of its own.
But it's so unfair, isn't it, to attack poor Dubya like this? Just a
little misplaced? After all, Bush has always been the rich white man's
president. He is the CEO president, the megacorporate businessman's
friend, the thug of the religious right, a big reservoir-tipped condom for
all energy magnates, protecting against the nasty STDs of humanitarianism
and progress and social responsibility.
He has always been merely an entirely selective figurehead, out of touch
and eternally dumbfounded, a hand puppet of the neoconservative machine
built and fluffed up and carefully placed for the very specific job of
protecting their interests, no matter what. Repeat: No. Matter. What.
Flood hurricane disaster war social breakdown economic collapse? Doesn't
matter. Corporate interests über alles, baby. Protect the core,
reassure the base, screw everyone else unless it begins to affect the poll
numbers and then finger-point, deflect, prevaricate. All of a piece,
really. Because Bush, he was never actually meant to, you know, lead.
So maybe it's time to stop with the savaging of poor Dubya. He is, after
all, doing a simply beautiful job of kowtowing to his wealthiest
supporters while slamming the poor and running the nation into a deep hole
and creating the largest deficit in American history, all while his
cronies in oil and industry and military supply and Big Energy gain
immense and staggering wealth and pay less and less tax on it. This is
what he was hired to do. This is why he is in office. Hell, the day after
Katrina, Bush flew right by Louisiana and headed straight to San Diego to
party with his Greatest Generation cronies. Reassure the masters, first
and foremost, eh Shrub? Understood.
Is this not what we all expected? Can you reasonably say you thought it
would be different? Just look. All major social services are being gutted.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is a joke, second in line only to
the ungodly useless Homeland Security Department, which has become about
as reassuring and trustworthy and humane an organization as a prison in
Guantánamo.
The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for
$105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans just last
year. The White House hacked that down to about $40 million, even as it
passed the most bloated and nauseatingly pork-filled $12.3 billion energy
bill in recent history, one that guaranteed we'd be sucking at the tit of
foreign oil and kneeling before Bush's pals in Big Energy for decades to
come, even as more and more teenagers die in Iraq for Bush's inept and
failed war. Yay politics.
Why didn't National Guardsmen from Louisiana and Mississippi march into
New Orleans immediately after Katrina exited to take charge and keep the
peace? Why, because most of them are serving in that same violent and
brutally costly war in Iraq, silly. Fully 30 percent of the guard is stuck
over there, along with 50 percent of their equipment. Yay Vietnam 2.0.
Why did FEMA chief Michael Brown wait hours after Katrina struck to
timidly plead with his parent company, Homeland Security, for some backup,
not to actually get their hands dirty but rather to help "convey a
positive image" about the government's response to the victims? Why,
because he's an incompetent lackey Bush appointee who was fired from his
former job as head of something called the International Arabian Horse
Association. Yay pathetic nepotism.
Just look. Senate majority leader Sen. Bill Frist, icon of hollow
self-righteousness and the energy magnate's friend, has already leveraged
the Katrina nightmare to argue for more drilling in Alaska, much in the
way BushCo whored Sept. 11 to cram the Patriot Act down the nation's
throat and make fear and xenophobia a national pastime. And let's not
forget trusty profit-sucking sidekick Halliburton, which has already
scored a sweet deal to help repair Katrina damage, thanks to the fact that
the former director of FEMA is now a Halliburton lobbyist. Ah, war and
death and tragedy. They are just so goddamn profitable, right, Dubya?
And then, the kicker. Then you read that Bush has actually ordered an
official probe into the botched Katrina relief efforts, a formal federal
investigation into what went wrong, which is a bit like a shark ordering
an investigation into what happened to all the fish. Unless this probe
starts and ends in the White House, unless it hangs Bush himself up by his
monkey ears and dangles him over a river of toxic Louisiana sewage, it's
merely useless and insulting and more than a little sad.
Let's say it outright. The truest measure of any president, of any leader,
is how well he takes care of his own people. And Bush, well, Bush has done
a simply spectacular job of taking care of exactly his own people -- the
wealthy, the corporate, the extreme religious right, his core base of
supporters -- while happily and fiercely ignoring, restricting,
condemning, destroying the rest. Are you educated or progressive or
liberal or alternative-minded or sexually open or homosexual or anti-war?
This means you. Are you dirt poor and belong to a minority and don't drive
an SUV and contribute six figures per annum to the RNC and maybe live in a
flooded swamp in the Louisiana bayou? This means you, squared. Sucker.
Here, then, is the new American motto, as reimagined by BushCo: Give us
your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and we'll let them die in a
filthy and decrepit storm-ravaged American football stadium while our
president languishes on vacation and ponders his oil futures and fondly
remembers his good ol' days of getting drunk at Mardi Gras before going
AWOL from the military. God bless America.
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