No More Mr. Nice Guy!

The Potemkin Presidency

Several days after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, when his Royal Bushiness finally finished his five-week vacation and beamed down from his Imperial Starship Cruiser for some smirking photo-ops, foreign TV crews were aghast.

When officials received word that Junior was coming to a given location, there would be a sudden flurry of activity. Food distribution points were hastily set up as a backdrop for the Boy Wonder. Then, after five minutes and some anodyne remarks delivered with Monkeynuts' usual giggling and grimacing, his cavalcade would roll out of town and the food distribution points would immediately be torn down, the troops would disappear, and the local victims were left to fend for themselves. The "liberal media" duly maintained a blackout on this blatant, shameless deceit.

But even the usually invertebrate and fawning US media could not ignore what went on when Glorious Leader returned to New Orleans for his Thursday night speech. Power was restored for the occasion, and was cut off as soon as the presidential motorcade had departed. I guess Cheney the Dick had demanded that power be diverted to other priorities.

The events of the last few weeks have proven beyond all doubt just what kind of creatures we are dealing with in the Junior junta. They are totally corrupt, criminal and out of control. They regard - and treat - everyone else as dog dirt. They are a foul, venal, bestial brood of vipers without the faintest conception of honesty, integrity or principles. They are so infinitely far beyond hypocrisy and sleaziness, and beneath contempt, that one ransacks the dictionary in vain to come up with words to describe their utter loathsomeness.

Junior and his henchmen are a black hole sucking all light and life, all goodness and decency out of every situation. No hint of human empathy, of concern for others, can penetrate their event horizon. Just like a black hole in space, it's all a façade - behind the event horizon, there's nothing there. It's all about appearances, and there's no denying that they are brilliant at managing appearances, framing the debate, manipulating perceptions - in a word, lying. But when it comes to actually running a country, their berserk, drooling greed is matched only be their jaw-dropping incompetence.

They seized power by claiming to be conservatives, promising a return of honor and dignity to Washington, and decrying "liberal tax-and-spend" and "nation-building" politics. They then managed to turn a record budget surplus into an unprecedented deficit, oversaw the greatest (and least effective) bloating of the federal bureaucracy since Ronald Reagan, invaded two countries and turned them both into festering cesspits of fraud, waste and corruption. (At least they succeeded in their stated goal of turning Iraq into a reflection of America - that is, their version of America.) And their idea of "honor and dignity" is running a permanent campaign of swift-boat sleaze attacks, spewing despicable lies and distortions via anonymous briefings to a criminally complicit media which acts more like a stenographer than a watchdog.

There was only one object to this orgy of sleaze and depravity: greed. Looting and plundering the treasury on a massive scale, shifting the tax burden to ordinary working people (even while sending their jobs oversees), all for the benefit of themselves and their mega-corporate cronies.

When Katrina struck, the Bushites briefly showed their true colors; Junior kept on vacationing, and Condi Rice went shopping for $3,000 shoes. Let the peasants drown, was obviously their attitude. Only when their poll numbers started dropping as a result did they spring into action. Now they're forgetting that they're supposed to be "conservatives" and are blithely promising gazillions of dollars to rebuild the Gulf Coast. (Having previously slashed the budget of the Army Corps of Engineers, whose levee works might have greatly alleviated the risk of flooding, and given developers free rein to destroy the wetlands that protect the coast. When will people learn that environmentalism isn't some effete fad about spotted owls - it's an investment in the future!)

But guess who gets to head the reconstruction efforts? The most corrupt and despicable man on earth - Karl Rove! Nothing more need be said on the sincerity of Junior's claim that he wants to make the Katrina victims whole.

The chimperor is naked, and only the most willfully blind, stupid and ignorant can ignore this glaringly obvious fact. We have got to get those bastards out! We need a new, far stronger hurricane - one that will sweep away every last stain of their putrid, debased villainy and debauchery from our country.