Lies of the death-monkey

A depressing, if informal gauge of the effectiveness of the the slime machine's blame-the-governor, blame-the-mayor, blame-the-blame-game, blame anybody but the President and the malignantly incompetent sad patronage clowns with which the President has staffed FEMA, is the information my daughter got yesterday from the shuttle driver on her way to the airport in Denver, namely that Bush himself spoke with the Mayor of New Orleans two days ahead of the hurricane and insisted that the Mayor mandatorily evacuate his city, and the Mayor _refused_. Hence, the catastrophe was all the fault of local officials.

This must be true, said the Denver shuttle driver, because he got the information in front of his own tv set from the "liberal" CNN. (The word liberal seems to have drifted far from any coherent meaning, thanks in equal part to the efforts of Karl Rove and his helpmeets, and thanks in part I suppose, to the degradation of even basic civic education in the public schools under the guidance of the bathtub strangler, Grover Norquist, and his legion of willing flat-earth and intelligent-design Republican accomplices.)

My daughter's man on the street additionally volunteered that Bush was ready and willing with the National Guard, but that he could not send them because the Governor had not requested help.

The saddest part of this, I suppose, is the unwillingness of a large part of the population, about 1/3 adult Americans, according to a poll I saw today, to let the reality of what they saw with their own eyes interfere with what they willfully believe, eyes tight shut, seemingly wishing on a star with ever greater intensity that the animatronic figure descending from a helicopter whose photo-op facial tics are perpetually out of sync with the emotive content of his words, is actually not what he seems but is really a president.

Their wish is as usual guided by the Rove Spin Machine and abetted by, or perhaps despite, the uncertain whitewash Fox News tried without success to splash over the President and his men, given that several Fox reporters on the ground openly rebelled on live tv before a national audience, to speak truth to a horrified Hannity and a nonplussed O'Reilly.

The good news is that, according to the same polls, a majority of Americans think the President's disaster performance is wanting. Well that's a start. It's a long way to impeachment, but for a majority to actually see the President's incompetence and neglect does actually give me some encouragement.