The Sandspur

Issue date: 10/7/05 Section: Opinions

Ha! President Bush and his lackeys are finished! Does this fact make me happy? Not really, because it is reminiscent of Fredrick Nietzsche's proclamation in 1882 that, "God is dead."

During a quickie NBC fundraiser for Hurricane Katrina victims, rapper Kayne West said, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." I agree, but West's focus is a bit narrow in scope. I think it would have been more appropriate to say, "Dippity ole Dubbya doesn't care about the American people, especially poor American people." Either way, the man was right.

I say the comment would have been more apt by stating "poor people" because it is not just "black people" who are getting the shaft in New Orleans. The president's first move in the reconstruction process was handing contracts out to his buddies in typical Republican no-bid fashion, followed by personally pushing a bill to exempt those companies from paying prevalent wages; an effort to keep the multigenerational poor people, poor. It gets worse . . . .

When personnel, who are working at a fraction of what they should receive, are pushed to the brink after working 50-60 hours a week to make ends meet they start to slip. Accidents on the job rise causally with employee fatigue. But there's a nice soft safety net to catch them when they are injured, right?

Wrong. The next righteous step our half-bright primate president took was to propose poking a big hole in that net; he is opposing an expansion of Medicaid to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.

I was so proud when I heard that monkeyboy wants to spend billions in the Gulf region. I thought he finally woke up and came to the realization that his sole purpose is to serve the people of this Great Nation. Wrong. Instead, the majority of the funds are going to the people who need it least . . . the corporations.

Here's a snapshot of how predatory our government is: One of the no-bid contracts going to Cheney's crony corporation, Halliburton, authorizes them to extract the gold fillings from the dead. Our government is using 110 million of our tax dollars for this atrocity. Holy Nazi Germany! Outrageous! But I don't have to bastardize Halliburton in this situation, I'll let their president, David J. Least, take on the task, "The gold we recover from the human rubble of Katrina can be used to make fighter-jet electronics, supercomputer chips, inflation-proof A-grade investments, and luxury yachting watches."

Human rubble? Are you kidding me?! This is utter MaDnEsS!!! Not only disrespecting dead Americans by referring to their bodies as "rubble," but then mining their mouths for double profit. Let those people rest with the only riches they may have ever owned, or steal it from their dead bodies and put it in a Rolex? Which sounds like the more respectful, and humane thing to do? Hell, I bet there's a clause in the contract that gives Halliburton access to the teeth of people working to rebuild the region too . . . thus the justification for denying them access to Medicaid.

We must always consider the source; all things are propaganda in one way or another--like the quote above coming from The Onion may be poop--but either way this whole thing really makes my mudring pucker.

Declaring Bush as "finished" is much like declaring God as dead because we have no leadership-no one to look toward for assistance in a disaster-and it implies the grave responsibility we have before us. We owe it to ourselves, but more importantly our children, to hold this regime accountable. As former US Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, told me last week, "This should be self evident. We must go down the line and impeach every one of them [Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld]." How much corruption is acceptable America? We must do something to get our country back before one of our own radicals pulls the trigger, or worse yet, pushes the button.

I don't want our politicians wasting time with impeachment proceedings because I doubt they will ever be able to dethrone our Emperor, but the infractions are adding up to disaster. Bush and Cheney both had a hand directly in reporters Judy Miller and Matthew Cooper exposing Valerie Plame's undercover CIA agent status. The execs will be unable to strictly blame Karl Rove, Bush's chief of staff, and/or I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff for the leak.

The poo keeps pilling up. The Government Accountability Office has just declared that the Bush administration's purchase of the news was illegal (imagine that) declaring it "covert propaganda" as reported by The New York Times, "Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party." I think this was an obvious decision, but the question remains, what kind of propaganda are they generating now that we don't know about?

The Corporation of Public Broadcasting (CPB) is a non-partisan government funded organization that helps fund National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). It would be more apt to say it was non-partisan. The Bush administration, more specifically Karl Rove, appointed the United States' conservative propaganda minister, Kenneth Tomlinson, as chairman of the CPB while still serving as head of the Broadcast Board of Governors (our propaganda ministry). Tomlinson has been the misinformation machine for the Republican Party for decades.

It would be nice to review his credentials and discern whether or not he is qualified for the position, but it is illegal to broadcast any of his work in American airspace because it is all propaganda. So we cannot view his current hits like Voice of America, Radio Marti (distributed in Cuba), and Radio Sawa (distributed in the Middle East) because they are all government funded propaganda programs. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader what effect a cant chairperson in charge of CPB will have.

What's it going to take to get us in the streets America? How much more can we withstand? The Beat-style poem, "Thoughts from Within," by activist and actor Woody Harrelson expresses the current climate in our country best: "This government was founded by, of, and for the people/ but everybody feels it/ like a giant open sore/ they don't represent us anymore." ~Tschüss!

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