The Thought of George W. Bush Is a Spiritual Atom Bomb of Infinite Power!

Jet Fashionranch reads Ben Stein--a horrible fate for anybody. Highlights "Bush's response has not been unusually bad, but amazingly powerful and swift." "No one has been able to point to a single instance in which black victims were mistreated because of their race by whites. In fact, just the opposite has happened." "George Bush... does not attack those who falsely accuse him of the most horrible acts and neglect. Instead, he doggedly goes on helping the least among us.":

TPMCafe: http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8726:

The American Spectator | Ben Stein: What is the real story of Katrina is (I suggest) not so much that nature wrought fury on land, water, people, property, and animals, not at all anything about racism, not much about federal government incompetence. The real story is that the mainstream media rioted.

They used the storm and its attendant sorrows to continue their endless attack on George W. Bush. Wildly inflated stories about the number of dead and missing, totally made up old wives' tales of racism, breathless accounts of Bush's neglect that are utterly devoid of truth and of historical context -- this is what the mainstream media gave us. The use of floating corpses, of horror stories of plagues, the sad faces of refugees, the long-faced phony accusations of intentional neglect and racism -- anything is grist for the media's endless attempts to undermine the electorate's choice last November. It is sad, but true that the media will use even the most heart breaking truths -- and then add total inventions -- to try to weaken and then evict from office a man who has done nothing wrong, but has instead turned himself inside out to help the real victims.

In the meantime, George Bush does not lash out, does not attack those who falsely accuse him of the most horrible acts and neglect. Instead, he doggedly goes on helping the least among us. I don't know how he does it, but we are very lucky he does. As for truth, it eventually may be salvaged from the flooded neighborhoods of The Crescent City, but not as long as there is a lie to use to hurt an honest man trying to do the best he can, and hundreds of thousands of brave, tireless men and women who do more than point fingers and tell tales. The Katrina story is a disgrace to the people who are "reporting" it while pouring gasoline on a fire. They and their crusade against George Bush are the real stories, and they are dismal ones.

George W. Bush "doggedly goes on helping the least among us."

He helps the victims of the disaster by straining every nerve to make sure that the best-qualified person in the country--nay, in the world!--heads up FEMA. He helps those who give him guitars feel good about themselves while the levees break two-thousand miles away. He helps those who couldn't get a relief convoy to the New Orleans Superdome in four days feel good about themselves by telling them they're doing a "heckuva job." And he helps firefighters stay out of the devastation by using them as props in his photo-ops:

I swear. This is as bad as Amity Shlaes. It's not the mainstream media that's the source of the stories that Bush is "fidgety, cold and snappish in private. He yells at those who dare give him bad news and is therefore not surprisingly surrounded by an echo chamber of terrified sycophants. He is slow to comprehend concepts that don't emerge from his gut. He is uncomprehending of the speeches that he is given to read." Its Bush's top aides--and some of them have been dining out on stories like this for years.

Comments

[paulo]

How absurd to say GW Bush doesn't lash out at others, when he has the nastiest people in the world under him -- foremost Karl Rove -- to do the dirty work. Stein would have us forgive the worst sex-abuse priests because they, after all, said prayers every day.

How much of a fraud is Stein? Only after the disaster -- not years before -- he preaches, in the NYT Sunday, that "We do not need to have 6,000-pound cars driving 100-pound humans to buy one-liter bottles of imported water. If everyone in this country had just two fewer cylinders in his car, we would save an immense amount of oil."

If only he had thought about that a decade or two ago. We don't need over-paid hacks to tell us to close the gate after the sheep are gone.

[RT]

Some responses to specific idiocies:

"Wildly inflated stories about the number of dead and missing": does Stein remember the initial estimates of the dead in the WTC? About 7,500, I believe. It took months to realize the true figure was more like 3,000. Was that also politically motivated? No. It was that where there's chaos in general, it affects information as well as everything else.

"totally made up old wives' tales of racism": Stein obviously didn't hear about the sheriff of Gretna.

"the long-faced phony accusations of intentional neglect and racism": Well, maybe from Kanye West. But most of us are simply saying that Bush probably would have reacted more swiftly if the hurricane had been headed at wealthy whites on Hilton Head. Nothing deliberate about it - just an absence of the automatic concern that would have more quickly kicked in had the victims been people like him.

"he doggedly goes on helping the least among us." Sure, by aiming billions in contracts at rich companies, then refusing to pay a $9/hour "prevailing wage" to the people who would actually do the gruntwork of restoration.

[LibertyGuard]

No GWB does not attack, he only lets his henchmen attack.... watch out for continuing stories of every little democrat and his uncle who ran off from Katrina...

http://abcnews.go.com/US/HurricaneKatrina/story?id=1123495&page=1
"Amid the chaos and confusion that engulfed New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck, a local congressman used National Guard troops to check on his property and rescue his personal belongings — even while New Orleans residents were trying to get rescued from rooftops, ABC News has learned.....

[ogmb]

"reads Ben Stein"

You misspelled "Karl Rove".

[Saheli]

Ben Stein? The Ben Stein? I'm sorry, I think I and everyone in my generation has a very hard time taking anything Ben Stein says seriously anyway. If he insists on being insane as well, well, that's his problem.

[JR]

Not only did Bush do nothing wrong. He did everything right! This reads like a perfect parody.

Mindboggling.

[christo]

I'm going to post a copy here of what Bush is doing right by Lupin on the Whiskey Bar site. If anything in the post looks tin foil hat-ish, I'll edit it out, but it is a list of current law and our strong and clear leader's administration actions:

Bush did not blew it. Well, maybe, at first, a little....

But overall, the "Katrina exercise" to quote our Vice-Blofeld, has been a smashing success, to the extent of making barrels of lemonade with the lemons nature handed BushCo.

Shorter version:
- NO has been ethnically cleansed for good ("Hallelujah!")
- Reconstruction $ will flow in friendly pockets (Halliburton)
- new eminent domain interpretation will enable to reconstruct a proper rich/white NO (one that will know how to vote correctly)
- poverty + new bankruptcy laws will drive the lumpen into the arms of the Army recruiters ("why should they get benefits if they don't enlist" talking point)
- hopefully, blacks will riot and/or loot somewhere, some more, so that white folks who were starting to lose confidence in the "Kill (the) Sand Niggers" Operation can be properly terrified again and made to vote White Power in '06 and '08.

If you call this a FAILURE, I have a bridge in NO I'd like to sell you.
The biggest trump card of the Right has is to make all the well-meaning naive folks like Armando on Kos feel like they're FAILING when in fact, *by their own standards*, they're wildly SUCCEEDING.

To quote "MADE IN CANADA" (a TV series), "I think this went rather well, don't you?"
Posted by: Lupin | Sep 13, 2005 1:57:25 AM |

Little bit lazy just doing this cut and paste but it is a good summary without being bug eyed. The Katrina Operation is going to be a success. Better than before. We're doing a heck of a job.

[putnam]

There's a reason that the former campaign chairman of Bush Cheney 2000 became the head of FEMA. And when Allbaugh left to become a lobbyist for Halliburton and other companies, there's a reason he left in his stead a pliable old pal who'd be beholden to him. After the photo ops are over and the former advance men in top positions at FEMA return to Washington, FEMA will provide a boundless fount of emergency procurement procedures, overflowing with non-competitive awards of massive contracts. Before long, Louisiana will be renamed Bushworld, at taxpayer expense. On this earth, that's success, buddy.

[boing!!!]

Baghdad Ben Stein denies that there are tanks in Baghdad! Baghdad Ben mocks your efforts to denigrate the GOP's chosen one, the fearless leader, great humanitarian, and ultimate leader! He laughs at you! He laughs very hard! He goes on vacation to spite you again!

[Mikey]

Off topic but did anyone see the item about a blogger being sued due to inappropriate comments (the sort specialized in here)?

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB112541909221726743-_vX2YpePQV7AOIl2Jeebz4FAfS4_20060831,00.html?mod=blogs

[christo]

Mikey:

Are you getting confused about the internet user in China that was arrested after being turned in by the "the internet changes everyting/American capitalism is dynamic" company Yahoo, or are you talking about the U. S.? I'd check out your story, but I'm afraid there are DoD monitors tracking who is visiting the site.

Are we revealing state secrets yet?

Just kidding. Let's get back to our tea party.

[christo]

Is this what your referring to, Mikey? From the juancole.com website:

No Comments: Raed

In a sad sign of the times, Raed Jarrar and friends, the Iraqi bloggers, have closed their comment section. They were alarmed by the recent launching of a lawsuit against a site for reader comments at the web page. They were also alarmed by a more draconian form of the phenomenon. What, they ask, would happen if one of the commenters made deep criticism of the US troop presence. They fear the new Iraqi government might hold them accountable if a commenter supports the guerrilla movement (Raed's brother was already detained for reader comments that appeared at his blog.)

Once upon a time, some of us dreamed that the internet and the blogging revolution could play a positive part in growing civil liberties there. In the end, the repressive apparatus of the state trumped all that.
posted by Juan @ 9/13/2005 06:20:00 AM

[Stephen Kriz]

Ben Stein is a pompous, self-righteous weenie who know a lot of useless facts, but is retarded when it comes to judging human qualities. His IQ may be 140, but his EQ is 0.

[Uncle Jeffy]

Ben Stein is an embarrassment to the memory of his father.

[kharris]

Ben has a certain tone, don't you see? He is useful because he has that "I come from a good family" sort of ethical judgement in his address which appeals to some. The "some" in question need to feel better about their voting habits, too. Ben's job is to employ his special tone to relieve them of any doubt they have regarding those votes.

But let's not mistake tone for reality. Ben says Bush is wonderful pretty much routinely, pretty much on any subject. If you can guess ahead of time what his judgement will be, then it isn't a judgement you need to take seriously. Instead, we need to take seriously the fact that there is a small army of people who do what Ben does, each for their own little slice of voter pie. Ben is a stinking spinner, but he has access to the press for reason, and the reason is very troubling.

[a different chris]

I think the real driving reason behind this twaddle is that Ben wants to get over on Ms. Shales.

[js]

"The *use* of floating corpses..."

Yes, planted there, no doubt tethered to anchors with invisible cord by the media for our conspicuous consumption.

Curiously, george 'apologized', as only he could do in that well_I_guess_that_wasn't_really_an_apology_
after_all type of way, coincidentally when the media discovered it could stand up on its very own with the use of its new found spine. Go media.

[Charles]

Gee, it doesn't look like anyone was suitably terrorized by brave little anonymous "Mikey's" covert threat. The country is dissolving into chaos! Declare martial law!

[trostky]

A pity, his game show was brilliant.

[nate]

http://djwinfo.blogspot.com/2005/09/guest-column-by-representative-paul.html