Guest blogged by Winter Patriot
The first few items on today’s menu at The Whispering Campaign provide a quick sketch of the so-called leadership we are seeing from our Chimperial Highness and his retinue of Chimperial Spin-Meisters:
They built a fake food-distribution center to use as a backdrop for the Chimperial visit:
Food Distribution Was Staged For Photo Op by Laura Rozen
and they even pretended they were fixing the levee, so the image of the Chimperor could be framed against such a comforting background
Levee Repair Was Staged For Photo Op by U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu
but in fact, the actual relief effort was shut down while the Chimperor was in the area:
Bush Visit Halts Food Delivery For Photo Op by Michelle Krupa
This Chimpire surely must be in its final throes.
We must end this Chimperial madness!!
Chimpeach!! Chimpeach!! Chimpeach!!
The Man Who Ate His Fingers – A Story About the Stupidity of War and The Idiots Who Glorify It
A powerful and graphic anti-war story narrated by a syndicated newspaper columnist about a homeless Gulf War vet who decides to eat a finger a day to force President Bush to bring home the troops and to speak out about war.
For the people of New Orleans, the folks here at AmericaBlog, and any real citizens out there. Cross-posted at "The DailyKOS", BradBlog, and ConyersBlog.
We are at a crossroads now.
The United States of America has – particularly recently – been acting more like "The Untied States" of America. The protection of our fellow citizens and our nation, as well as the enabling of a proper response to same when a great need arises, has failed miserably. Our politics and system of government, as well as the voice of the people and the capability of the main stream media to carry it, has been undercut to the point of incapacitation.
In response to this, the words of a poem by Dylan Thomas come to mind. Words that are oft-quoted, inspirational, and appropriate.
As we sit here now in the wake of Katrina and contemplate both the loss of life and destruction in her wake as well as our failure as a nation to support those of our brothers and sisters in their time of greatest need, and news of the passing of Chief Justice William Rehnquist begins to disseminate across the land, am I the only one who notices the growing darkness?
"Lady Liberty", our guardian of the gates of freedom, holds aloft a torch symbolizing a guiding light to the land of the free and home of the brave, now holds a flickering lights. Darkness now spreads across the land, and we are in danger of losing our way.
Are we so enveloped in our own "hearts of darkness" that we fail to see the cause of this? Do we stand aghast, uncertain of how we could be in this situation, and look to cast blame rather than take action to rectify the problems currently extinguishing that once bright and shining light? Have we taken leave of our senses, and become so dependent upon the media-based pablum constantly spooned into us that we are unable to stand up and fight this gradual descent into darkness?
I have faith in my fellow citizens that we have not yet sailed beyond the safe harbors of our founders’ vision for this nation. Take heed of the words written by Dylan Thomas, and follow the advice he provides: Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Do we need words of inspiration to gather our senses about us, and move us forward? Very well then. The rage against the dying of the light is already in place. Now what? Turn to Bob Marley’s words: Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, don’t give up the fight. Quote "Trooper", and Raise a little hell.
Get out into the streets with your fellow Americans on September 24th. Demand the immediate impeachment of the entire Bush cabinet, the firing of Michaels Chertoff and Brown, the arrest of Karl Rove, and the removal of Tom DeLay. Demand the rebuilding and restoral of FEMA.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
If you like it, please share it.
Would we expect anything less from these greedy pigs
Can’t let the poor out of the limelight
The people left behind show the blatant disregard that
is the cause from greed brought on by free market crony capitalism, by not fixing them dikes in the first place, I’d like to see Ted Stevens defend his bridge to nowhere now (just plain mad, thats all)
C’mon, Winter! That photo-op made for a beautiful design element at the White House website.
click here
#2 That is awesome. Thank you for posting it on this site.
I dunno, Greyhawk – it looks more like the Instead Stute of Murrika to me
Bush needs to be bitch-slapped in his lying mouth by every prson that was trapped at the Superdome and Covention Center. Then he should be put in jail for criminal negligence. On second thought, don’t do that. He would enjoy it too much as he would find a number of Bulldog Gannon’s buddies and that smirk of his would turn into an eternal smile.
BUSH NEEDS TO RESIGN…NOW!!!
May I suggest researching some sites having to do with Hurricane Charlie. Very interesting how areas were placed ‘off limits’ while bodies were found, loaded into trucks, and carted away…never to be found again. Sorry folks..can’t pay your loved ones life insurance. Would this government do that..nah. BTW, the trucks were on ‘standby’.
Here’s a link to a report by german TV ZDF on Bush’s visit in Biloxi:
http://www.heute.de/ZDFheute/in...370967,00.html
sry, german language only.
Not that I don’t believe our country would do this but can the fake food distribution story be confirmed? I don’t speak German so I can’t read their site.
#5 merifour – thank you. Feel free to share it wherever you like.
#6 czaragorn – Regardless of how it looks, can it be saved? 😉
#10 Jeff
You can use this Babelfish translation page to read the article in English. You can enter a URL or 150 words. Obviously, it doesn’t work perfectly, as you will see.
Original site for German news article
Translation via Babelfish:
snippet—-
Clearing work only for Bush?
Where the US president visited the disaster area, auxiliary troops cleared up before properly – however only there. From Biloxi quoted Second Channel of German Television correspondent Claudia Rueggeberg desperate inhabitants, Bush is to bring auxiliary goods here in his sedans instead of loud Bodyguards and assistant dear.
Along its route clearing troops would have cleared before Bushs attendance debris and would have saved corpses. Then Bush left again "and with it", so Rueggeberg, "the whole auxiliary troops". At the situation in Biloxi otherwise nothing changed, it is missing at everything.
——-
Well, we don’t have to preface disparaging remarks with , "I’m putting on my tinfoil hat." This was right out there plain as day. GENOCIDE
GreyHawk #2
Great post, I hope lots of people get to read it!
Bush boosts aid as fury grows.
Winter Patriot again provides us with news and ammo (can I say ammo, WP, or is that not PC?) for spreading the truth.
Here’s something I ask you to do- go to the link below, and print it out, and then report back on the thread—- does this print out as a ONE pager, or a TWO pager? WP intends these to be ONE pagers, but I get TWO pagers- a little bit of text on the second page. I’ve reported this to WC before now, WP has tried to help me figure out the problem, but some of the WC articles still come up as TWO pagers on my system. Please help me, and please help WP, so that he can figure out whether this is a common problem.
Levee repair staged for Photo-Op
snippet—
Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe.
Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment.
—-more at WC link—
Thanks,
VG
Thanks, Bushw@cker. 🙂
Feel free to pass it around.
Snippet from #14 Bushw@acker’s link:
There was widespread criticism of Mr Bush’s flying visit to the affected areas on Friday, both because it came so late and because, even while touring the destroyed Gulf states, he seemed unable to absorb the extent of the suffering, even joking with officials several times on camera.
———
I’ve posted this before, but He’s a Cunning Sociopath.
snippet—
Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon and professor of media studies at New York University, who also sees the darker Bush, said in a Nov. 28 (2002) interview with the Toronto Star, ""Bush is not an imbecile. He’s not a puppet. I think that Bush is a sociopathic personality. I think he’s incapable of empathy. He has an inordinate sense of his own entitlement, and he’s a very skilled manipulator. And in all the snickering about his alleged idiocy, this is what a lot of people miss."
—more at link, and elsewhere–
Just read the above link…"He’s a Cunning Sociopath"…absolutely chilling. All of the links on the site are very good, and they ring so true. Feelings that I have had about bush since 2000 were right there…feelings that have had to be kept buried because so many believed him to be such a "moral" leader, a "born again" Christian. Why is it that some people could see through his act and others couldn’t? Thank goodness the other half of the country is now beginning to get it…but at what a cost.
Let’s hope the thicker-headed among us do indeed see that the emporer has no clothes, never did and was over his head from day 1!! As is his mostly light-weight cabinet. While I have long thought Bush is a sociopath, I disagree with Miller though in that Bush IS a puppet and imbecile.
See great points made on CNN web-site. Sample here:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/0...nse/index.html
The big disconnect on New Orleans
The official version; then there’s the in-the-trenches version
Friday, September 2, 2005; Posted: 3:03 p.m. EDT (19:03 GMT)
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) — Diverging views of a crumbling New Orleans emerged Thursday. The sanitized view came from federal officials at news conferences and television appearances. But the official line was contradicted by grittier, more desperate views from the shelters and the streets.
These conflicting views came within hours, sometimes minutes of each of each other, as reflected in CNN’s transcripts. The speakers include Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, evacuee Raymond Cooper, CNN correspondents and others. Here’s what they had to say:
Conditions in the Convention Center
# FEMA chief Brown: We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need. (See video of CNN asking why FEMA is clueless about conditions — 2:11)
# Mayor Nagin: The convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies for the 15,000 to 20,000 people. (Hear Nagin’s angry demand for soldiers. 1:04)
# CNN Producer Kim Segal: It was chaos. There was nobody there, nobody in charge. And there was nobody giving even water. The children, you should see them, they’re all just in tears. There are sick people. We saw… people who are dying in front of you.
# Evacuee Raymond Cooper: Sir, you’ve got about 3,000 people here in this — in the Convention Center right now. They’re hungry. Don’t have any food. We were told two-and-a-half days ago to make our way to the Superdome or the Convention Center by our mayor. And which when we got here, was no one to tell us what to do, no one to direct us, no authority figure.
———————-
I do hope talking heads and others will talk about race and racism carefully. My belief is that there indeed was a role played by race and class in the treatment and lack of immediate action regarding the victims at the CC and Dome. But I think it was a more subconscious, ingrained prejudice and irrational fear of "dark-skinned" bogey men and "dangerous urban, inner cities." We have to address this in our country at all levels and often.
The unfounded fears and media hype regarding the violence kept help within arms reach but merely as witnesses to death not rescuers. And don’t tell me any excuses about "staging," safety of aid workers, passibility of roads, etc… (loved the stupid babble by chertoff Saturday about their debating legality of fed vs. local!)
If Barbara Bush or any administration relatives were in those two locations, they would have at least gotten water first then out of there a helluva lot faster!! NO ONE COULD HONESTLY ARGUE OTHERWISE. I DARE THEM.
I do not believe that the entire disaster response delay and failures had anything to do with race, however.
We need to motivate folks – particularly Congresscritters – toward snuffing the spin cycle before it gets up any steam. I don’t want the media to allow false claims by "a senior WH official" to be published without challenge, and – if those "senior White House officials" are purposely lying – I want their names demanded so the public and media will know they have been lied to.
I’ve already started some degree of this.
Congressman Conyers has an entry on his blog, "Better late than never", where he’s looking for more actions that Congress can take to help the victims of Katrina and ensure that such never happens again.
(http://www.conyersblog.us/archi...9.htm#comments)
I posted the following:
__________________________________
Congressman – Please post in all locations to which you have access (Here, DailyKOS, TPMCafe, BradBlog, AlterNet, wherever) a short and simple statement condemning the attempts by the Administration to shift blame to the Louisiana officials. WaPo and Newsweek both recently failed to validate (purposely?) stories reporting that the Governor of Louisiana failed to declare a state of emergency.
She not only declared one, she did it before the storm actually hit.
Here’s the link to the declaration on the State of Louisiana site:
http://gov.louisiana.gov/2005%2...aneKatrina.pdf
Joshua Micah Marshall over at Talking Points Memo relates the facts. Here’s the link:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.co..._04.php#006416
(the previous two items by him also elaborate on it.)
Please help kill the spin.
Only by direct, factual contradiction by yourself and any other Congressional members can the type of misleading malfeasance be nipped in the bud.
Without the help of you and your peers, and without calling for the revelation of the identities of those who planted these stories as well holding the media over the fire for not verifying them, more disasters on the scale of New Orleans cannot be avoided.
To all others who read this:
Help kill the spin. Spread this around.
This must stop. We must no longer permit the leadership and politicians to lie and make it sound legal and legitimate by misnaming it as "spin". They must now be held accountable.
We have let it go this far, but no further.
Excellent website. Incidentally, we know your father and mother, who vacation near us each summer. Say hi to them for us. They told us about your website.
Post #19, Iso
There are still plenty of thick-headed, moronic, lemming-like Bush supporters. Just listen to C-Span’s "Washington Journal".
The only thing that’s really keeping them tongue-tied at all is that Rush doesn’t broadcast on weekends.
He will take the left to task. Then, Brown’s lies will look like child’s play.
We should all be in the streets on Sept. 24.
#17 Valley Girl. I just went to the site and several of the links, am forwarding this site to friends, thank you for reposting.
Notice how NOW that people have complained about the flag being lowered to half-staff for the dead Rehnquist but not for the hurricane’s thousands of dead, NOW they’re saying it’s ALSO for the hurricane victims… Yeah how magnanimous, that’s why Bush ordered the flags lowered to half-staff when he got the news Rehnquist died on Saturday night and are only NOW getting around to "including" the dead hurricane victims. Are they TRYING to do everything possible to spit on these people or is that just the way it appears?
War Is Not Pro-Life in #22 said:
We should all be in the streets on Sept. 24.
I agree and I also think we should be prepared to stay there for a long time.
re #24 they don’t have any shame at all, do they, Kraig?
You are right Winter Patriot, they have no shame. To have shame they’d first have to have a conscience. The "compassionate conservatives" have no empathy for black people. The only thing that’s black this administration cares about is crude oil.
I’ve been thinking for a few days now that once
Rove started his spin and the Bushco thugs closed ranks, Bush would use this travesty for evil instead of good.
I’ve been watching as commentators in MSM and yes, even Robert Novak give scathing criticism of the administration’s handling of the disaster.
Behind the curtain, oil and insurance companies will get tax breaks, Haliburton got a new multi-million dollar no-bid contract and now Bush is suspending the prevailing wage (Davis-Bacon Act) in the Gulf states.
He may say this is temporary, but the prevailing wage for a current year is based on the wages paid in the area the previous year.
What does this mean? Union contractors will not get the work. Construction will be done by unskilled labor (at least illegal imigrants will get a job). It also means that people trying to regain their footing in those affected areas will not make a decent living wage for some time to come.
I fear Bush will use what has happened to make it easier for the federal government to usurp state or local authority.
Welcome to the New Deal, not like the old New Deal. This is really a bad deal.
Impeach, prosecute, convict, execute Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Ashcroft, Gonzolez and that also shithead Bolton just for general purposes.
Join Cindy Sheehan in D.C. or me in Columbia, MO or some other demonstration your town or a city near you on Saturday, September 24.
This will be my first demonstration. I doubt it will be my last.