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January 23, 2009

The Tattlesnake – Random Notes on Bush’s Exit, Obama’s Entrance, and the Dying of the Right Edition

Part the One

– Wow. Obama’s been president for three days and already he’s signed Executive Orders closing Gitmo; banning torture; suspending those odious ‘military tribunal’ trials; ending revolving-door lobbying; preventing lobbyists from occupying senior positions in agencies they once lobbied; requiring ethics courses for all of his staff (and he took the course himself); limiting the use of secrecy classification, even imposing Justice Department oversight on his ability to classify documents secret; and expanded government transparency, directing his administration to err on the side of Freedom of Information Act requests rather than the other way around. He also froze the pay of senior White House staff and informed them that as long as he’s president, none of them will quit and then turn around and lobby their friends still in his government, reversing years of Bush/Cheney corruption, sleaze, secrecy and illegality.

What’s more, he did all of this while acting like a grown-up, speaking in full, clear, grammatical sentences, and taking his job seriously. It will be difficult, but pleasant, to adjust to a president who doesn’t have a smirk perpetually playing about his mouth, doesn’t need someone else to run his brain, and can think on his feet. We’ve gone from Barney Fife to Denzel Washington, and the change is striking. I’ll be criticizing Obama in the future I’m sure, but for now all I can say is: Wow. I think he’s one of those rare politicians who really meant what he said when he was campaigning.

– The Dying of the Right 1: While the vast majority of America is celebrating our new competent president, the peevish drones over at Fox News, led by Chris “My Dad’s the Journalist!” Wallace, have been foaming at the mouth over whether Obama’s really president, since Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts bumbled the reading of the oath on January 20th and Obama followed him. This is the largest load of unprocessed fertilizer since the questioning of Obama’s birth certificate. (Hint to all the ‘reporters’ at Fox: As well as the certificate itself, long available online and sanctioned as genuine by fact-checking organizations, there was also a birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper welcoming Barack H. Obama Jr. into the world in 1961.) In fact, the law says that, as the victor in the last election, Obama was officially president at Noon last Tuesday, whether he was sworn in or not, and documents were signed after the inaugural ceremony signifying that official transfer of power. Just to head off frivolous lawsuits from tinfoil-hat pinheads, Obama had Roberts drop by the White House the next day and redo the swearing in. Incredibly, some of the bloviating scoundrels claimed this was a – oooohhhh — ‘secret ceremony’! Horse pucky. The press was invited in, still photos were taken and an audio track was recorded – it was as secret as an American Idol audition. Only the TV cameras weren’t involved, and that was likely because Obama wanted this formality completed quickly and didn’t want to get bogged down with silly questions from the Usual Media Meatheads like Fox News. (“Mr. President, will you now come clean about your place of birth? Weren’t you really born in Kenya or Cuba or Mexico? Isn’t it true that Patrice Lumumba is your real father and Squeaky Fromme is your real mother?” )

– The Dying of the Right 2: Rush “Rhymes with Limbo” Limbaugh, who once went apoplectic criticizing liberals as ‘unpatriotic America-haters’ because he had convinced himself they wanted the Little King to fail in Iraq, has now joined the ranks of unpatriotic America-haters, according to his lights. On his radio show the other day, he confessed openly, “I hope Obama fails.” Aside from the fact that about 83 percent of the public doesn’t agree with him, even some the brain-dead rubes who still give any credence to the great blubbery gasbag, suffering under the GOP economy and dying in the senseless Republican wars Rushbo helped peddle, had to be appalled by this statement. He wants the country to go down the drain to what – make the era of conservative Republicans look good? That’s some patriot; George Washington would be proud. Prediction: This is the sort of nasty, psychotic hypocrisy that is losing ratings for the neocon hustlers of the broadcast media and it’s going to result in Limbo being dropped from the airwaves across the country. In eight years, Rush will have lost his syndication deal and will end his miserable existence shouting through a tin can at a little 1000-watt daytimer in North Peckerwood, Alabama. (“Hey, Limbaugh, y’all forgot to take out the trash from the studio last night!” “I’ll get it, boss, I’ll get it!” “Yeah, and don’t forget to mop them washrooms extra good while you’re at it.” )

– Laugh-A-Bullroar: If you were watching the inaugural ceremonies on CNN or MSNBC, did you notice they cut the mics picking up the crowd sounds when Bush, Cheney and the Republicans were introduced? And the band was cranked up extra loud to try and drown out the tidal wave of booing. Earlier in the day, even addle-pated ‘Morning’ Joe Scarborough remarked on the two to three million Obama fans flooding into Washington that the GOP had better pay attention to this political shift or risk being the minority party far into the future. Forget Dimmy and Dick, they’re gone, but I wonder if those Congressional Republicans got the point? (Some of them nearly lost their safe seats last election.)

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January 20, 2009

The Tattlesnake — Bush: The Way of All Flash Edition

The End of An Irritant

Rational people, when faced with a massive failure of their own making, normally take some time for private circumspection and avoid further contact with the public, at least until the outrage of the torch-wielding villagers has subsided. But that’s not our Crawford Dauphin, whose capacity for realistic introspection is String Theory microcosmic while his unrefined chutzpah remains as large and lumbering as his political party’s logo.

Such is the case with this recent series of cringe-inducing Bush ‘exit interviews’ wherein Our Worst President Ever insists on trying to polish a turd that was flushed away years ago in the receding waters of 2005′s Hurricane Katrina. Even with the prodigious help of future cellmates like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, assiduously applying the spit shine of hastily rewritten history to the ‘Bush Legacy Project’ (a slim library containing the works of Niccolo Machiavelli, Chuck Palahniuk’s “Stranger Than Fiction,” a copy of George Orwell’s “1984″ annotated in red ink by Lee Atwater, tracts by Aimee Semple McPherson, the collected speeches of Father Charles Coughlin and Herbert Hoover, and, of course, the paint-by-number version of “My Pet Goat”) the Little President That Couldn’t continues to maintain approval ratings that read like an Iowa thermometer in January.

Bush, in his stubbornly obtuse inability to recognize the spreading stain when he’s wet his pants, admits to few mistakes and those that he grudgingly examples are of such a pathetic and hilariously off-target nature that he must be moonlighting as a monologue writer for David Letterman.

In his last press conference (thank you, merciful Jeebus), he assigned as one of his mistakes the “Mission Accomplished” banner that decorated the space behind his head during his ludicrous publicity stunt aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in May of 2003. Neglecting to apologize for the pusillanimous White House fib that the banner was created by grateful sailors and not Rove’s relentless propaganda machine, this was characteristic of Junior’s endless fusillade of misguided missiles: The mistake was the banner — not the phony and unnecessary Hollywood PR stunt, not declaring a premature end to combat operations, not the trumped-up unnecessary war itself – just the banner.

This event encapsulates the entire eight years of Bush’s failed residency in the Oval Office. There was no reason, other than Rove’s fevered obsession with primping his oblivious client as some sort of war hero, to dress up the graying Bush as a young fighter jock and have him ferried to the carrier via Navy jet. Past presidents handled such ceremonies with a modicum of dignity in a civilian business suit and relied on a helicopter for transport – but then they didn’t need a flight deck and surrounding throng of ordered-to-be-there fawning sailors to indemnify their masculinity the way Junior does. A touch of cosmic comedy was added as President Top Gun forgot to release the crotch straps on his Fly Boy get-up; although apparently too dull to notice, or too inept to unhook them himself, the imperial testicles were no doubt reminded of the pain of command.

So this was the repeated play that Americans have been forced to witness for nearly a decade; a shambling, awkward boy-child, insecure in himself, incessantly pretending to be a simple, resolute man with the experience, virtue and wisdom to make the proper decisions and perpetually foiled by the forgotten crotch strap of reality biting into his flesh. Every pretend heroic moment has turned into a tragic farce, the stage set by Bush’s own words when he occasionally slipped and uttered the truth. Recall when Candidate Bush said he would be the “CEO president,” and that he was basically “a media creation”?

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