No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Reaping the whirlwind

As I've said before, there is plenty of blame to go around for the stunningly incompetent official response to Katrina. Race was undoubtedly a major factor, and if there is ever a proper accounting of what went wrong, very few officials whether federal, state or local, Republican or Democrat, will come out of this smelling of roses.

But we should never forget that the George Bush Junior regime has always been a major disaster waiting to happen. If it hadn't been New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, it would have been Los Angeles after the Big One, New York after a severe blizzard, or Chicago after a prolonged heat wave. The regime's attitude to government - "drown the beast in the bathtub" and gorge on the public treasury in the process - guaranteed it.

Junior and his puppetmasters believe that there is only one legitimate function of government: to make the rich, privileged and powerful even richer and more powerful, at the expense of everyone else. That's why they turned the largest budget surplus in history into the most astronomical deficit in history, in order to shower tax handouts and giveaways on the Paris Hilton set and on their mega-corporate cronies. That's why they rolled back decades of environmental and public health regulations, slashed enforcement budgets at the EPA and other agencies, and fired those public servants who did their jobs too well. That's the reason for their frenzied stampede to war against the people of Iraq, based on lies and driven by greed.

In particular, the Bushites' berserk avarice led them to strip and eviscerate any government agency that existed to serve ordinary people who have to work for a living - any arm of the federal bureaucracy that can't be exploited to make a billion or two for the regime's corporatist cronies. The regime has been doing to government what Ivan Boesky and Michael Milliken did to corporations during the eighties - take going concerns, tear them limb from limb, and bail out with their obscene profits, heedless of the destroyed livelihoods they left behind.

(I can't believe anyone still buys this "MBA Preznit" and "CEO Preznit" BS about Junior. Any idiot knows that the best way to run a corporation is not to liquidate it on day one! But then, when Junior's role model is close personal friend "Kenny Boy" Lay, I guess we can't be too surprised.)

After Katrina struck, the junta was shocked to learn that the great unwashed US public didn't share its "let the peasants drown" attitude. Urgent action (or the pretense at action) was required, so Karl Rove groomed his Boy Wonder to do a 180-degree flip-flop from his previous posture of "fiscal responsibility" (though in reality, all pretense at responsibility had been jettisoned years ago) and promise untold gazillions to rebuild the Gulf Coast. Needless to say, those gazillions will fly straight from our pockets into the coffers of Halliburton, Blackwater, Carlyle and the other members of the corporatist shadow government, with no oversight or accountability.

But let's not quibble over a gazillion here, a gazillion there. After all, it's a question of "whatever it takes" - that is, to restore a façade of competence around the naked chimperor.

However, once the mask slips, once you've seen the pathetic, drooling little simpleton behind the hologram of a semi-capable human being, there's no going back. When you don the reality-based sunglasses and see the smirking visage replaced by rotting, putrescent flesh and miasmic, maggot-infested corruption, you can never again look at the chimp or hear his inane, grating, faux-folksy twang without gagging at the foul stench of the noisome, feculent corpses who lead us in our national dance of death.

More and more people are seeing the light, pulling back from the brink over which this once-great country is stampeding, lemming-like, in a frenzy of religio-political mania. Chimpy's cowardly refusal to meet Cindy Sheehan was an "aha" moment for many people. His jaw-droppingly inept, blundering and apathetic response to Katrina was another such moment for even more of our citizens. I expect the "aha" moments to come more and more frequently, each one disillusioning a larger number of people, over the next few months. And with a bit of luck, we will finally reach the point where this foul, putrid necroarchy will collapse under the weight of its own cancerous corruption.

Katrina offers us a glimpse of our ultimate fate if we continue to let the Junior junta rule this land: trapped and drowning in a slowly rising flood of toxic waste and feces, as our lords and masters sit idly by, laughing at our fate. Let's stop being victims! Let us become the new hurricane, the storm of righteous anger that will scatter the bloated carcasses of the regime to the four winds, the healing rain that will wash away all stain of their venality from this land.