Hello again.

Well as you have noticed I have not been posting much of late. Between a crazy school schedule and Jack's being sick and both Genevieve and I just being so worn down by our mutual schedules and handling the sick Jack-Jack, just haven't had the time. So, just a quick hello. When I do have time to blog I usually spend it all on Jack's page because it is time consuming to convert all the pictures so they don't use up my picture quota, get them all posted and then add what commentary I can.

Anyway. Though my rage over the Katrina debacle has subsided some, I am still in a state in which I just cannot believe what a bunch of complete bastards we have running this country. If Brownie is any indication, they are all either seriously deluded dopes or just unspeakably evil, pathological liars. Take this excerpt from Brown's testimony:

BUYER: I would like to ask some questions about the pre- landfall. So I'd like to know why did the president's federal emergency assistance declaration of August 27th not include the parishes of Orleans, Jefferson and Plaquemines?

BROWN: Under the law, the governor makes the request for the declaration and the governors of the states specify what areas, what counties they want included in that declaration. And, based upon the governor's request, that's the recommendation that we make to the president. So if a governor does not request a particular county or a particular parish, that's not included in the request.

BUYER: All right. Orleans Parish is New Orleans. I was listening to my colleague, Mr. Jefferson's, questions about when they talked about, you know, they asked for this assistance for three days and then president responded the very next day, not the day that it was made -- the request -- but the governor of Louisiana actually excluded New Orleans from the president's federal emergency assistance declaration?

BROWN: Again, Congressman, we looked at the request. The governors make the request by...

BUYER: Let me ask this. Since you went through the exercise in Pam, was that not shocking to you that the governor would excluded New Orleans from the declaration?

BROWN: Yes.

BUYER: When that request came in excluding these three parishes, did you question it?

BROWN: We questioned it. But I made the decision that we were going to go ahead and move assets in regardless because we have the ability to add those parishes...

Just one problem. That whole thing is a lie. The request did not exclude any of those parishes, least of all New Orleans. It was, in fact, specifically singled out in Blanco's request. Enjoy this little tidbit from the Governor's actual formal request to the Feds:

Dear Mr. President: Under the provisions of Section 501 (a) of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 5121-5206 (Stafford Act), and implemented by 44 CFR § 206.35, I request that you declare an emergency for the State of Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina for the time period beginning August 26, 2005, and continuing. The affected areas are all the southeastern parishes including the New Orleans Metropolitan area and the mid state Interstate I-49 corridor and northern parishes along the I-20 corridor that are accepting the thousands of citizens evacuating from the areas expecting to be flooded as a result of Hurricane Katrina.

I single this out because it is a fine example of the absolutely shocking spew of lies and half truths and self-pitying bullshit this imbecilic failure of a man spewed during his hearing. It just doesn't get any more bald-faced than this, and I'm rather disappointed the actual request from the Governor was not thrown in his face with a request he personally read it into the record. He is either a perjurer or an idiot, or possibly both -- a failure at just about everything he has ever done, including lying. I really need to point this particular example out to people I meet who are right-wing dittoheads who just parrot out whatever they hear from Rush or that fat pathetic windbag Mike Gallagher or the twin douchebags of doom, Hannity and Colmes. I've actually heard people spout Brown's line of shit to my face. And when you quote the truth to them chapter and verse, they simply say, "well, that's just not true." And the conversation ends there. I mean, what? WHAT!?

I keep coming back to the only optimistic interpretation that I can: that people simply cannot believe that our country is under the thrall of the worst bunch of avaricious, venal, criminally negligent, worthless scumsucking bastards since the Gang of Four; it's just too horrifying for them. So in desperation, they turn a blind eye to the facts, to the evidence. Willful self-denial, because the truth is too much to bear.

When, Lord, when will it end?

Speaking of something being too much to bear, the impending release of far more detailed and lurid and vicious photographic evidence of the bruatlity at Abu Ghraib is, sad to say, welcome news. Not because I have any desire to have these images burned into anyone's mind, least of all my own; but because this not only is hard evidence of a foreign policy run completely amok, it is also evidence of how little respect George "Support Our Troops" Bush actually has for these poor fuckers stuck in the desert dying to establish what will, as it happens, be an Islamic republic. These poor guys and gals are risking life and limb and while I don't for a second think that anyone involved in the horrific scenes depicted should be cut any slack at all, I also believe they should never have been in that position in the first place. These people are not interrogators, not trained to be guarding hostile (or allegedly hostile) enemy prisoners of war. Why in the living hell would you put soliders on active duty in a war zone in charge of guarding the people who are trying to kill them?

But let's not be stupid, folks: either these soldiers all took the same Kool-Aid, or are all, by coincidence, depraved sociopaths, or they were all given the same orders: to treat these Iraqi men, women and even children in the most degrading and often deadly fashion, to assult them physically, mentally, sexually in a way that would make the most Saddam himself, no stranger to this behavior, blanch.

So I'd like to ask you, where do these orders come from?

Who is responsible for appointing the incompetent, heartless, selfish, whining boobs in charge of managing recovery from a national disaster?

At whose door do we lay the lies about weapons of mass destruction that led us into a brutal and costly desert war, where more and more American blood seeps into the sand daily, where now thousands of American kids have perished, all in the name of our "freedom," but ultimately for a cause none of them would volunteer for: replacing a secualr Middle Eastern dictatorship with an Islamic theocracy?

A dumpy, dimwitted little fucker by the name of George W. Bush gets the bill, folks. And when the Great Scorer comes to write against his name, what will be written will be in blood. I can honestly say I have never had less respect for any human being in my life. He is a worthless scag and those who fall in with him, from his hideous she-mantis of a wife to those who run his little crypto-fascist puppet show of a government are beyond saving. If you lie down with the pigs, you can't complain when your neighbors call you a swine.

I have friends who are conservatives. George W. Bush is no conservative. He is a filthy, pathetic little bag of ape-bones in a suit, who like his pal Brownie has literally been a failure at everything he has ever done in his life. Look it up. His wartime "service". . . his oil career . . . his governorship . . . the Texas Rangers . . . and now this revolting embarassment, this dark blotch of blood and shit on the American flag called the Bush presidency.

Ah . . . we seem to have gotten a little off-track here. I can't help myself once I get started. One more reason I don't post as much these days.