The End of An Era: Orgy of the Dumb

Dubya the Liberal and Semi-Merciful ... The Chimperor has gone so far to the Right that he can now be called a French Socialist ... Chimpy takes center stage in the Gulf while Cheney is turning the screws with a Halliburton bullhorn ... They came to Washington to decrease the size of government, and little did the wingnuts and fundies know at the time - the Rethugs meant decrease our emergency services and say goodbye to the safety net ... And by the way, where is Osama Bin Laden and should we now call him Keyser Soze?

"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government. And to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility. I want to know what went right and what went wrong. I want to know how to better cooperate with state and local government."
- If you're searching for any degree of remorse from Dubya, this is about it, White House, September 13, 2005

REPORTER: Did they misinform you when you said that no one anticipated the breach of the levees?
DUBYA: No, what I was referring to is this. When that storm came by, a lot of people said we dodged a bullet. When that storm came through at first, people said, whew. There was a sense of relaxation, and that's what I was referring to. And I, myself, thought we had dodged a bullet. You know why? Because I was listening to people, probably over the airways, say, the bullet has been dodged. And that was what I was referring to. Of course, there were plans in case the levee had been breached. There was a sense of relaxation in the moment, a critical moment. And thank you for giving me a chance to clarify that.
- Like Team Gonzography, you're probably wondering if he would clarify who constituted the "lot of people", or what became of the plans for the levee breach, or perhaps just explain the "sense of relaxation"? New Orleans, Louisiana, September 12, 2005

ROGER "VERBAL" KINT: "And like that he was gone. Underground. Nobody has ever seen him since. He becomes a myth, a spook story that criminals tell their kids at night. 'Rat on your pop, and Keyser Soze will get you.' And no-one ever really believes."
DAVE KUJAN: "Do you believe in him, Verbal?"
ROGER "VERBAL" KINT: "Keaton always said, 'I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of him.' Well I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze."
- "The Usual Suspects" 1995

A man can convince anyone he's somebody else, but never himself.

For a while I was content to return to my quiet life away from all the commentary and outrage, living in a distant place where any sudden sound at night means that something is about to happen. When you hear it you jump up, alarmed - considering all the ruthless alternatives for a moment, what the hell just happened out there.

More times than I care to recall, it is nothing. But there are times ... it's so very hard to keep quiet when the world is sinking into level upon level of shit and swamp water, while most of us sit back with Cable TV beaming the days, hours and minutes until it slips into a comfortable routine. Bodies, national guardsmen, helicopters ... this is no time to relax; and while the message machine tries to drown out the failures of our disaster relief efforts with the most salacious methods of assessing blame - not seen since Donald Segretti used a faked letter on Democratic presidential candidate Edmund Muskie's letterhead, which falsely alleged that U.S. Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a fellow Democrat, had an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old and issued a bogus letter containing offensive comments about African Americans.

Segretti called these frathouse pranks ratfucking. Just another terminal whackjob who bypassed the Peace Movement and Love Generation altogether, he was nothing more than a tormented mutation who never developed a human conscience or an atom of regret. Segretti reportedly checked into the Benson Hotel in Portland, Oregon in September 1971 carrying $500,000 in cash with a plan to hire prostitutes to seduce Senator Jackson. A former military prosecutor and civil lawyer, Segretti operated a ruthless campaign of political sabotage against the Democrats in Nixon's 1972 re-election effort. In 1974, he served 4 1/2 months in prison after pleading guilty to three misdemeanor counts of distributing illegal campaign literature. Segretti, never long in the shame department, briefly threw his hat into the ring as a candidate for Superior Court judge in Orange County in 1995, but was forced to withdraw after only a week, stating that the shadow of Watergate hung over the campaign.

The old gang of ratfuckers is scattered in the wind today, blown into many directions and only resurface when the office of Preznut is in the balance. But the old standard still flies in the Big House - or at least in the West Wing where the newest ratfucker on the dance card is Ubermensch Karl Rove, who never missed an opportunity to burn an intelligence estimate or covert agent. Since the salad days of 9/11, when Dubya first discovered the power of bullhorns, his administration has been extremely successful at blowing off its citizens and misleading the country and treating the press like a serial rapist with a multi-colored mohawk haircut. All of his campaigns and all the meaningless rhetoric he used throughout his political existence were based on the simple and tired impression that Dubya was a high plains tough guy who went to Yale and stumbled repeatedly in life until he reached middle age, when he discovered that Laura had a vagina and then he found God, which transformed him into a studied world leader and he fooled roughly 51 percent of the nation that he could fix all of our problems by creating utopia in the Middle East. To question him on the facts and rationale was un-American, because Dubya could spell "noo-klear" and Cheney had control of the little red button.

And the preznut won re-election by terrifying soccer moms and by selling the God-fearing red states on the idea that the war in Iraq and the Homeland Security infrastructure would keep us safe from all the bogeymen around the globe.

How does that vote last November feel now, Sparky?

How could it be possible that these unfortunate Iraqis would bite the Democratic hand that feeds them? Didn't they realize that good old fashioned American Democracy requires a lengthy period of ethnic cleansing - just like we did with our Native Americans - while denying its women the right to vote for about a hundred years?

Believe me, even Ahmad Chalabi took copious notes from our history books.

How is it conceivable that an administration can sit back and watch an entire region (that lined up in lock step and voted for them ten months ago) wilt in the heat and humidity without so much as a drink of water or a bag of ice?

Well, these are the same deviants who transformed their incompetence into WMD, Iraqis greeting our soldiers with flowers, and "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here."

How is it possible that a dangerous terrorist who lives in the caves of Afghanistan, while tugging along a portable dialysis kit, can get a hold of four commerical airliners and ram them into buildings? And then get away with it while being elevated to the mythical status of Keyser Soze?

Please, somebody, explain these things to me. Somebody?

Or, as Maureen Dowd recently pointed out in the New York Times Op/Ed section, "when you combine limited gubment with incompetent gubment," as Dubya would pronounce it, "lethal stuff happens." All kinds of lethal shit, Sparky, and we are just beginning to see the light at the end of the idelogical tunnel - although the rest of us have been mortgaged right alongside Our Child Preznut's view of the world as Him versus His tinpot view of Satan.

In all of the dimwitted and tragic calamity, buried deep within the heart and soul of Dubya, runs a poisoned artery feeding a demented brain that despises nitpicky "liberals" and a cultural elite who want to examine the fine print before endorsing his bizarre plan, high-brow East Coast intellectuals who want to ask a few clarfifying questions at the risk of being called "non-patriotic" and those of us who just can't - or won't - jump aboard the co-dependent revival tent that has become America the Megalomaniac in the new millenium. Absent and mindless worker-ant hyper-consumers who jump in line at first sight of another ignorant mob, filled with a hyperbolic sense of self-love played out at a dizzying rate of narcissistic emptiness ... while choking on a hearty gulp of that toxic elixir known as Dubya's "culture of life" and "compassionate conservatism," as long as you reside in a tax bracket worth insulating.

But this time ... the bodies are decaying in plain view of NewsChopper Six - and not tucked neatly away in formations of flag-draped coffins that this Administration has turned into a corner game of three card monty. Now you see them, and now you can't.

"Who is Keyser Soze? He is supposed to be Turkish. Some say his father was German. Nobody believed he was real. Nobody ever saw him or knew anybody that ever worked directly for him, but to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for Soze. You never knew. That was his power. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."
- Roger "Verbal" Kint, The Usual Suspects

For reasons that will never be clear to anyone - and certainly not to the people who gladly voted twice for an abject buffoon and all the others who packed into the kiddie cars for Dubya's E-ticket ride to rapture - the national audience at home is operating once again with a few important questions, but the shelf-life for open thought in this age rivals the expiration warning label on a pack of seedless grapes. Average working people, the kind who watched Dubya and Ah-nuld and Rudi and McCain swagger around Madison Garden a year ago like New York City was the Alamo, are beginning to come to an even fresher conclusion on what really happened when we jumped before we looked at the Post 9/11 world. Certainly the comparisons between September 11 and Hurricane Katrina are erroneous - mostly because the latter can be predicted, and always more destructive and devastating - but the Rethugs still march on ratfucking free thinkers and those of us with questions while minimizing their own sheepish reactions in the face of actual forecasts.

But they missed, seriously, on both occassions - ignoring the Preznut's Daily Briefing - Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US on August 6, 2001 and then again with Hurricane Katrina which wasn't exactly a secret to the American public or Our Child Preznut himself, who was ostensibly warned also in 2001 by a report that landed on the front steps of FEMA.

The parallels to the movie, The Usual Suspects, serve as a prescient allegory to the retarded "how could we have known" explanations that have been served up on a daily basis - from Rove's mouth to the Right Wing talking points on ideology TV. Like Dubya's reign of terror, the movie begins with a terrible explosion which sets of a chain of tragic events. After a waterfront blast, Verbal Kint, a small time con artist who happens to be the sole eyewitness and participant, explains the story leading up to the explosion to a customs agent played by Chazz Palminteri. It begins when five men are rounded up for a line-up, and grilled about a truck hijacking - who are, essentially, the usual suspects for any metropolitan crime. The interrogation goes tolerably well until the influence of the legendary, seemingly omnipotent "Keyser Soze" is mentioned, a criminal bogeyman if there ever was one.

But the story is just that - a piece of fiction offered up by the master criminal himself, and he barely escapes by using his wit and pathological banter in a game of cat and mouse with facts that are more figment of his imagination, just like it went down with the intelligence estimates leading us into Iraq.

Verbal Kint is either Keyser Soze, the master criminal himself, or he created the image of the bogeyman in an elaborate con game designed to keep the rest of us distracted. And to that end, Dubya and his party hacks transformed Osama Bin Laden into his own version of Keyser Soze because either he is the master criminal hellbent on our complete destruction or Dubya's inner sanctum of party pimps and carpetbaggers needed him for an Administration that emptied the US Treasury through its own back doors.

There are not many senior political correspondents in Washington who could handle a scenario like that. Their minds would just refuse to accept the Nixonian potential ... for the same reason they still can't accept the patent and fearful truth that Our Dubya is as incompetent as the tinfoil hat crowd already believes he is - and that his handlers reach for any rationale lying about or make up the excuses as they go along. That clear and that simple.

This is the one vanilla fact, right now, in a story that will become so heinously apparent in the next several weeks that every reporter assigned to it will need both a smart constitutional lawyer and a fearless economist right alongside him when the TV cameras turn on.

There is no question at all - even now, in these last few days of calm before the fallout from both disasters mushroom into a cloud of regret - that this "Dubya incompetence" epic is going to destroy some of the best minds in political punditry before it's done. And that reality will just have to linger there for the time being; I reject any opportunity to explain it further. We have a ton of time to explore the alternatives, Sparky; and hundreds and thousands of hours of congressional testimony will expose the top players and the federal bench should remmand the rest. And Dubya will be left stammering and drooling at the gates when the end finally appears, and not even his family will be waiting for him at the end of that last helicopter ride to average citizenry.

For the rest of us, Hurricane Katrina has finally broken the "post 9/11 world" spell that used to hang over everything and our addiction to terrorism and terrorism alone as the significant menace in our time, just like the Red Menace of the 1950s. The post 9/11 shin-ding is over, my friends, the end of a dark and ignorant era in American Politics, Inc. - and whatever the final body count is from the disaster zone, it will be harder and harder for the WMD propaganda machine to invoke the memory of bull horns and twisted rubble from the World Trade Center and the 3,000 dead. Just like those seedless grapes, they, too, have found their expiration date for political arm twisting and gutter ball exploitation and swollen military budgeting.

Osama Bin Laden still runs free - probably morphing his limp into a fully crisp stampede for the exit, just like Verbal Kint at the end - Iraq is another Beirut in the making and our people and resources are stretched so thin that we couldn't get to the business of saving our people until - roughly ten - days after the tragedy.

Here's what I know, after all is said and done tonight, hoping that another sound doesn't pique my attention. Osama Bin Laden is not Keyser Soze, because Dubya and his Circle of Doom has been explaining the story with concepts that were handpicked and conjured out of nothingness - and his people controlled both the facts and the intelligence all along. Because if either him or his people learned anything from 9/11 it was that we were not prepared for that terrorist attack and it only took four years to discover that we didn't learn a thing from it. Keyser Soze does exist and it's not Osama Bin Laden.

It's Dubya himself, who tried convincing the rest of the world that the devil did exist.