My Pet Goat Did It

It doesn't seem as if the guy who bought and/or stole that office in DC has any better learning skills these days than he used to. You'd think he could allow one non-sycophant near him. Admittedly the familiar bunch, Sleezzy, Rumfull, Chains-and-leather et. al. lack the wherewithall and perhaps the justification for suddenly tuning George's prompter to a reality channel.

But isn't there, say, a family member capable of calling him on his stupid-dity? I have this vision of Barbara urinating in his breakfast cereal in annoyance - though that seems to be giving her too much credit. As one with offspring in their 20's, I'm very sensitive that meddling and mucking about can permanently impair the maturation process. There's certainly a period when those natural parenting instincts must be throttled back.

However, we now seem to have on center stage, for all to see, a premier example that once you have as parents mucked it up good and solid to the point of having bought world power for a person with serious "accountability issues" and likely certifiable mental disturbance, it's time for Mom and Dad to get back in the game. Squatting over the cereal, while it might be satisfying, won't cut it here. Besides, that image is truly disturbing.

Even the mainstream press, for long now known to programmatically favor conservative, pro-business causes and rarely having the gumption to even vaguely challenge the Bush administration, have had trouble swallowing the brush-cutter's latest AWOL episode:

Questions About President's Response to Katrina

As the truth sinks in--this is the worst natural disaster in the nation's history--editorials in a wide range of newspapers have now raised critical issues about the lack of preparation, the effects of so many National Guard sent to Iraq, and the response of President Bush to the tragedy this week.

One of the most stalwart conservative newspapers in the nation, the Union Leader of New Hampshire, today blasted Bush's response to the great Gulf Coast hurricane.

"A better leader would have flown straight to the disaster zone and announced the immediate mobilization of every available resource to rescue the stranded, find and bury the dead, and keep the survivors fed, clothed, sheltered and free of disease," the editorial declared. "The cool, confident, intuitive leadership Bush exhibited in his first term, particularly in the months immediately following Sept. 11, 2001, has vanished. In its place is a diffident detachment unsuitable for the leader of a nation facing war, natural disaster and economic uncertainty.

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On Thursday, after the president returned to Washington, The New York Times mocked his speech: "George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end."

The Washington Post, meanwhile, called for a close look at what should have been done differently, saying "it will be extremely important to better understand the causes of this long-predicted disaster and to determine what, if anything, could have prevented it. This administration has consistently played down the possibility of environmental disaster, in Louisiana and everywhere else. The president's most recent budgets have actually proposed reducing funding for flood prevention in the New Orleans area, and the administration has long ignored Louisiana politicians' requests for more help in protecting their fragile coast, the destruction of which meant there was little to slow down the hurricane before it hit the city.

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A Sense of Humor is a Terrible Thing to Waste

How a person deals with setbacks, frustrating circumstances, or other opportunities for "education" ("if it don't kill you it makes you stronger") is reputed to be a pretty good litmus test of character. At risk of scaring off what little audience I have with terminology hinting even more at science (a taboo topic to most of your fellow citizens these days in case you didn't know), here are a couple data points to get you started calibrating that character scale:

Here's the Funny Part

Here we have Pat Robertson, ostensibly a Christian, judging by the number of crosses he surrounds himself with, calling for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Parsing the gibberish that pours forth from this fraud of a holy man has been a parlor game in my home for a while now. My favorite remains the statement made by Robertson in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when he said the attack was God's judgment on America for our tolerance of gays, feminists and the ACLU.

After you get past the immediate disgust that comes whenever you hear something so vile, you are left with the Robertson pretzel-logic. Think about it: If the attacks of 9/11 were the righteous judgment of the Lord, as the false priest told us, then the terrorists were acting on behalf of and to the purposes of God. In other words, they were doing holy and important work, and are therefore above reproach. Call off the War on Terra, folks, and let's bring the troops home. We're waging war on a bunch of dudes who were only seeking to follow Jesus' direct orders.

Yes, such is life in the la-la land of Pat Robertson. This newest one, the call to put a bag on Hugo Chavez, verges into equally bizarre territory. This televangelist is supposed to be a Christian leader, and the last I'd heard, Christ was the guy they called the Prince of Peace.

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Sometimes you just have to laugh when an entire nation takes seeming leave of its senses, when the appalling becomes the mundane, when normally level-headed people lose the capacity to be shocked. The problem, of course, is that there is nothing funny about any of this. The top leadership of this nation has gone barking mad, has enwombed itself in a fantasy world where dead people don't hit the ground and where no plan is the best plan, and that madness has trickled down over the rest of us.

George W. Bush coughed up his latest rationale for continuing the Iraq war - I think this is the fourth or fifth one of these to this point - by saying that because so many American soldiers have been killed, we have to keep sending American soldiers to get killed as a means of honoring the American soldiers who have been killed. Big talk from a guy who spends more time on vacation than a French aristocrat.

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You want to know the really funny part, the over-the-moon wacky part? Pat Buchanan has called for the impeachment of George W. Bush in his latest column. It seems Pat is put out by Bush's immigration policies. "Some courageous Republican, to get the attention of this White House," writes Pat, "should drop into the hopper a bill of impeachment, charging Bush with a conscious refusal to uphold his oath and defend the states of the Union against 'invasion.'"

Go figure.

Bush's Obscene Tirades Rattle White House Aides

While President George W. Bush travels around the country in a last-ditch effort to sell his Iraq war, White House aides scramble frantically behind the scenes to hide the dark mood of an increasingly angry leader who unleashes obscenity-filled outbursts at anyone who dares disagree with him.

“I’m not meeting again with that goddamned bitch,” Bush screamed at aides who suggested he meet again with Cindy Sheehan, the war-protesting mother whose son died in Iraq. “She can go to hell as far as I’m concerned!”

Bush flashes the bird, something aides say he does often and has been doing since his days as governor of Texas.

Bush, administration aides confide, frequently explodes into tirades over those who protest the war, calling them “motherfucking traitors.” He reportedly was so upset over Veterans of Foreign Wars members who wore “bullshit protectors” over their ears during his speech to their annual convention that he told aides to “tell those VFW assholes that I’ll never speak to them again if they can’t keep their members under control.”

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Bush’s behavior, according to prominent Washington psychiatrist, Dr. Justin Frank, author of “Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President,” is all too typical of an alcohol-abusing bully who is ruled by fear.

To see that fear emerge, Dr. Frank says, all one has to do is confront the President. “To actually directly confront him in a clear way, to bring him out, so you would really see the bully, and you would also see the fear,” he says.

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Dr. Frank explains Bush’s behavior as all-to-typical of an alcoholic who is still in denial:

“The pattern of blame and denial, which recovering alcoholics work so hard to break, seems to be ingrained in the alcoholic personality; it's rarely limited to his or her drinking,” he says. “The habit of placing blame and denying responsibility is so prevalent in George W. Bush's personal history that it is apparently triggered by even the mildest threat.”