The privilege of gaping at piles of twisted metal and gawking at long-suppressed videos of people jumping to their deaths from the Twin Towers will not come cheap. So decree the people running the Atrocity Exhibition 9/11 Museum at the site of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. Tickets will go at about $25 a pop. It's the high cost of fetishization. It's the overhead of building in the underground. Touring Ground Zero cannot come at zero cost to the public. This is America. The site, after all, is adjacent to Wall Street and Club Cipriani, home of the $25 hamburger.
Profound sanctimony and solemnity also become very expensive when the people in charge of perpetuating it are earning six-figure salaries, and the billionaire shrillionaire named Bloomberg is only lending -- not donating, mind you -- a few million of his own stash to the museum. First responders may have paid with their lives, their blood and their health. But everybody will be paying Hizzoner, with interest.
The profit motive and ticket info were not mentioned in a 60 Minutes puff-piece ("Curating Moments of Terror and Tragedy") that aired last weekend, in which Lesley Stahl got the grand tour of the Grand Guignol. Making horror tasteful, making necrophilia seem like respect.... it's hard out there for people profiting off the mass murder of others. But Alice Greenwald, museum curator, is experienced, having just come to 9/11 from the Holocaust Museum. Here's a maudlin sampling of the transcript:
Alice Greenwald: Welcome to Foundation Hall.
Lesley Stahl:...that takes your breath away.
Alice Greenwald: It's haunting and a little chilling knowing you're in the belly of ground
zero. In the place where so many innocent people lost their lives.
Lesley Stahl: So here we are, we're right where the buildings collapsed.
We're in it.
Alice Greenwald: Most museums are buildings that house artifacts. We're a
museum in an artifact.
Lesley Stahl: Where we are is almost sacred.
Alice Greenwald: I think you are become super conscious of where you're
standing. And that's a powerful thing. It's a very powerful thing.
It devolves from there -- trust me. But watch if you must.
Even though Stahl managed to scrounge up a few survivors to shill for the museum, other family members are not so sanguine. Sally Regenhard, mother of a firefighter who died in the attack, calls the for-profit mausoleum a "pay-to-grieve national disgrace". She just penned a scathing New York Daily News op-ed:
None of the 9/11 family members that I have worked with ever wanted a billion-dollar money pit; all we hoped for was a simple, uplifting, honorable and patriotic memorial for all who were lost that terrible September day.
Instead, we have a “money is no object” monstrosity inflicted upon us — a design we did not choose, and which we bear no responsibility for — that was incredibly expensive to build and even more logic-defying to maintain.
(snip)
How dare they charge visitors to pay respects to those lost on 9/11, including my son, a firefighter and recon Marine sergeant?
If his USMC brothers and friends from all over the country want to pay him respect, they have to pay Bloomberg & Co. $25 first.
What a crime! How many families could afford to pay that?
Answer: judging from the ever-increasing income gap between rich and poor in America generally and in New York City particularly, not very many. In the Big Apple, the poverty rate has reached its highest point in more than 10 years. Median earnings for working people fell to $32,210 from $33,287 — much more than the national decline, according to the Census Bureau. The bottom lost ground, while the top gained. That includes Mayor Bloomberg, whose net worth of $25 billion climbed by another $3 billion just in the past year. He wants every penny of that $15 million museum loan repaid, by the way.
The CEO of the 9/11 Museum, who is paid a relatively modest $400,000 a year to decide such things as how much to charge the public, also came under criticism last year when he ditched the ceremony commemorating the 1993 WTC bombing to go on a Colorado ski trip with his tycoon father. Joe Daniels, a former private equity manager, had previously blamed his absence on a personal obligation. But when he was caught out, he just shrugged. "I have one of the best dads in New York," he gushed to a local reporter, adding that the unpaid volunteers had it all under control anyway. You really can't make this stuff up. The rich really are different than you and me. If there is such a thing as a gene for shame, it seems to be sorely lacking from the DNA of the pampered wealthy. The plutes are brutes.
*****************************************************
Postscript:
I was curious about other atrocity exhibitions/mausoleum museums and whether they, too, are run by the Grifters of Grief. Some results:
Oklahoma City Memorial: ticket prices range between $10 and $12. I found this surprising.
Holocaust Museum, Washington: free admission.
Auschwitz Holocaust site, Poland: free admission.
Arlington National Cemetery: free admission.
Gettysburg Civil War Battlefield: admission is $12.50 for adults.
Dresden Cathedral museum, site of World War 2 bombing: one low-priced annual ticket gains you admission to all German museums.
Wounded Knee massacre site, South Dakota: adults are charged $5 admission.
Tiananmen Square Massacre museum, temporarily located in Hong Kong: free admission.
Moro Crater in the Philippines, site of the slaughter of more than 500 Muslim civilians by the United States Army under the direction of Gen. Leonard Wood: Admission is free, because no memorial was ever built.
Museum of Chemical Weapons (yeah, there is such a place) and other Army tourist traps at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri: admission is free, but photo ID, vehicle registration and proof of insurance (!) are required. That pretty much leaves out non-drivers and un-Americans. And if you're disabled, forget about going as well, since the exhibits are not wheelchair-accessible. Some parts of the military-industrial complex apparently are exempt from the Americans With Disabilities Act as well as from the Geneva Conventions article against torture.
Party on.
Oh, no! A randomized controlled trial reveals that when poor people get medical insurance because they won a lottery, they don't instantaneously shed their ravaged, neglected bodies and become pictures of robust good health overnight. The wonkosphere is going nuts. Pseudoliberals worry that the "bombshell" results of an Oregon study on insured and uninsured poor people could put a damper on Obamacare's Medicaid expansion. Republican nihilists are crowing "we told you so" -- you give a bunch of takers gummint health care and they still get sick, so why waste money on them?
No matter that 10,000 lucky ducky Medicaid sweepstakes winners reported feeling a whole hell of a lot better mentally, just knowing they no longer had to pick between going to a doctor and eating. They may feel better, but they still have diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol. The punditocracy is shocked, shocked that after lifetimes of living on the edge of mortality, the Medicaid study group did not immediately regain its health when accessing health care. These policy experts are not taking into account the continuing poor diets of the poor, that often the only food affordable to them is laden with sugar, salt, fat and chemicals. They're not taking into account the irreversible effects of environmental pollution on people. They're not taking into account the lingering, unaddressed scourge of income disparity. They are of the exceptional American mindset that a pill and a doctor visit should cure everything, overnight.
Zeke Emanuel, former health care advisor to the Obama Administration, calls the study results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, "disappointing" -- not inconclusive, mind you! --which means they'll have to tinker with "the system." (code, probably, for privatizing it.) This is what happens to physicians when they turn into deficit-obsessed technocratic policy wonks, controlled by numbers instead of focusing on real people.
Slate's Ray Fisman writes:
Now that the clinical results have started to come in, it’s time for liberal media types like myself to eat some humble pie. Today’s New England Journal article presents a set of findings showing that Medicaid had no effect on a set of conditions where you would expect proper health management to make a difference. There are effective treatment protocols for hypertension, cholesterol, and diabetes, yet insurance status had no effect on blood pressure, cholesterol levels, or glycated hemoglobin (a measure of diabetic blood sugar control).
(Liberal media types like Fisman obviously buy into the insta-cure messages spewed over cable by Big Pharma snake oil salesmen.)
Conservatives, of course, are gleefully twisting the study results into their own toxic pretzels. They argue that since expanded Medicaid coverage means more people will finally be diagnosed with disease, it naturally follows that Medicaid actually makes people sick! The Cato Institute's Michael Cannon writes that the Oregon study should throw a huge stop-sign in front of Medicaid expansion:
There is no way to spin these results as anything but a rebuke to those who are pushing states to expand Medicaid. The Obama administration has been trying to convince states to throw more than a trillion additional taxpayer dollars at Medicaid by participating in the expansion, when the best-designed research available cannot find any evidence that it improves the physical health of enrollees.
The study itself is unfortunately behind a paywall. But the lead author does caution about reading too much into it, suggesting we need to take the long view, that other studies show that people's health improves over time when given adequate medical care.
Tell it to the politicians. One side of the duopoly panics and caves, the other side smirks, and the private insurance predators controlling both parties laugh all the way to the bank.
Thought I'd paste my two New York Times comments in this space tonight, since the subject matter is interrelated. I was so busy writing my rich people post this morning that I missed Obama's presser, and didn't catch a replay of the sadness until later in the day. This guy is not only a lame duck, he's damn near a dead duck. All flapping wings, whiney quacks and absolutely no soaring flight to the oratorical heights. It apparently marked his 100th day of his second term in office. So, does that make him the ill-fated Barry of the Hundred Days, starring Daniel Day-Lewis? Is there actually any difference between Hollywood and Washington? I'd also caught a little hint of the new Obamian Defensive Dejection Syndrome in clips of the Co-respondents' Ball, a true parody of a parody of a parody if ever there was one. Or, if you took it seriously, mutual masturbation porn.
My first Times comment was in response to a pretty scathing editorial on Gitmo:
What was appallingly missing from President Obama's statement was any sense of
empathy for the prisoners who are essentially being tortured.
HE doesn't
want the prisoners to die. The hunger strike hurts US, champions of freedom that
we are. It diminishes OUR standing in the world, "lessens cooperation with OUR
allies on counterterrorism efforts" -- in other words, the almighty USA no
longer has the moral standing to issue any sanctimonious "we deplore this" and
"we condemn that" protests when other nations perpetrate their own human rights
abuses.
It's not just the medical torture at Gitmo. It's the criminal
failure to prosecute the torture of the Bush administration. It's the ongoing
program of drone assassinations that is another prime recruitment tool for
"extremists" or militants, defined by our leaders as any person in the prime of
life, who dares to exist in the wrong place at the wrong time. The wrong place
can be a wedding, a funeral, the site of a medical rescue attempt of drone
strike casualties in the first round of attacks, farmers tending their crops,
families sitting around the dining room table.
The president talks a
good, self-serving game. Whether he walks the walk and now uses all the
executive tools at his disposal in the face of some long overdue public pressure
remains to be seen.
And as far as Lindsey Graham and his fellow GOP
scare-mongers are concerned, I suggest they be sent to Gitmo immediately and
force-fed a battery of psychiatric tests.
***************************************************
Now, on to Maureen Dowd. I felt compelled to pre-empt the usual veal pen criticism of her Obama snark, nip the usual bullshit in the bud, as it were:
I know Maureen Dowd will take plenty of heat for this latest column on Obama's
lack of parenting skills. She has obviously gotten under his skin, even earning
a rueful mention at that dystopic celebrity bash over the weekend. She will be
accused of such atrocities as sharpening her literary nails on thin presidential
skin, jamming her stiletto heels into a good man when he's down.
When
she criticizes Obama, she becomes the word that rhymes with what Babs Bush once
called Geraldine Ferraro. Amazingly, every time she disses Bush, she deserves
another Pulitzer. Like Obama, she just can't win. But she gets props for not
bowing to the liberal blogosphere the same way Obama perpetually bows to
Republicans.
What irked me about Obama on this particular day was his
passive- agressive posture, joking about quitting and showing absolutely no
empathy for the prisoners of Gitmo. It was all about our standing in the world,
his personal need not to have them die on his watch.
Attempting to
distance himself from his own policies, he insists that Gitmo is "Not Who We
Are". Uh.... actually, it is. It's like his calling the cruel cuts to Meals on
Wheels for seniors "stupid" and suggesting we replace them with "smart" Social
Security cuts. Does he really not hear his own cognitive dissonance?
If
Obama is feeling that beleaguered, he should take Mitch out for a drink, slip
him a mickey, then render him down to Gitmo for a time-out in the naughty chair.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that rich people have an outsized influence on politics. The wealthiest Americans and corporate persons just financed a two billion dollar presidential campaign, after all. That their weighted votes have borne fruit is most recently evidenced by the Congressional stampede to liberate the plutocrats who were mistakenly and outrageously caught up in the sequestration dragnet with meal-deprived old people and evicted preschoolers and ousted chemo patients.
On Friday, our legislators restored FAA funding to air traffic control towers. By Monday, frequent high-flyers were soaring unimpeded while the lesser people remain grounded in their economic gulags.
A group of Northwestern University researchers recently sat down with some 80 Chicago-area multimillionaires to find out just what else they expect from the politicians they purchase. The results are both exhaustive and exhausting, both predictable and surprising. For example, the revelation that only the tiny minority at the pinnacle of the wealth distribution pile pretend concern about Duh Deficit and yammer away for austerity is old news. Regardless of party affiliation, rich people tend to be fiscally conservative. Wealthy Democrats differ from wealthy Republicans mainly on social issues, such as reproductive rights and gay rights. (That's probably why millionaire faux liberals like the Clintons are falling all over themselves to Tweet their joy at the coming-out party of a millionaire gay basketball player while simultaneously ignoring Sequester cruelty to poor people.)
Other findings:
-- Only 16% of the millionaires surveyed think climate change is "very important."
-- More than 80% of the ultra-rich Chicagoans are self-described political junkies, spending at least five days a week "attending" to political issues. A full two-thirds give money to political campaigns. Twenty percent bundle large sums of money for politicians.
-- Half the Windy City multimillionaires report enjoying regular face-to-face contact with their representatives, and are on a first name basis with such heavyweights as Mayor "Rahm" and "David" (former Obama adviser Axelrod).
-- Compared with a dozen spending priorities of the general population, the wealthy respondents favor increased government investment in only three: infrastructure, scientific research and education. In contrast to two-thirds of the public at large, only one third of rich people favor a Medicare for All national health insurance program. The rich favor spending less money on the SNAP (food stamp) program.
--While the majority of wealthy people are fully aware that income disparity is getting worse, only 19% believe the government should be responsible for providing jobs to the unemployed (as opposed to 68% of the general public). Less than half favor raising the minimum wage. Less than half think it is the government's job to see that nobody goes without food, clothing and shelter. While favoring cutting, rather than expanding, Social Security, the majority of the rich would not be averse to raising the current FICA contribution cap.
--The Chicago millionaires surveyed tend to favor teacher merit pay and charter schools. Only 35% think the federal government should spend whatever is necessary to ensure that all children get a quality education. Asked if it is the responsibility of the government to make sure that minority children get the same educational opportunities as white children, "even if it means you will have to pay more in taxes", only slightly more than half replied in the affirmative.
--While most wealthy people intellectually accept Keynesian economics (the government should run a deficit during times of recession and war), they paradoxically still prioritize cutting rather than spending. So much for the debunking of Reinhart-Rogoff.
-- Surprisingly, two-thirds of the wealthy and the general public alike favor progressive taxation. But paradoxically once again, the rich are adamantly opposed to actual income redistribution -- despite their intellectual awareness of the hazards of extreme income disparity. No amount of education can overcome that deep, ingrained greed. They're willing to pay taxes as long as those taxes go to pay for programs valuable to them. (safe highways for their Bimmers, safe buildings for their coddled bods, public money for charter schools, scientific research to cure their future diseases.)
-- The richer the plutocrat, the less he or she favors government regulations. The study's authors conclude:
The data show a significant tendency for wealthier respondents to take positions more toward the “cut back”than toward the “expand” end of this index. Each additional $10 million in wealth corresponded to a drop of nearly half a point on the 10-point scale. There was also a tendency for the wealthiest respondents to tilt even more than the less wealthy toward cutting back Social Security. ... If a similar or stronger tendency carries through to the highest levels of wealth in the United States as a whole, and if the wealthiest Americans wield especially large amounts of political power, this finding may help explain why cutting these popular programs has remained on the political agenda.
The influence of the rich and the donor class also explains why neither party gives a rat's patootie about campaign finance reform. Wealth begets power begets more wealth begets more power, ad infinitum. President Obama himself long ago abandoned any pretense of caring about the issue, despite constant pressure from public policy groups. From today's Washington Post:
But for many former allies, Obama’s decision to convert his campaign operation into a political advocacy group with unlimited funding was the final straw.
“The president has engaged in uncharted waters that open the door to influence,” said Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer, a longtime activist who describes Organizing for Action as “a precedent that other federal officeholders are likely to follow.”
The article notes that Obama has failed to fill vacancies on the Federal Elections Commission and even failed to replace his former counsel for ethics and government reform, a position he created during the early hope-and-change phase of his administration, and which lasted about as long as his plans to close Gitmo. That door to influence? It's not only been open for a long time, it's flown off its hinges.
Ergo, the continuation of austerian policies and a Democratic president's continued desire for a Grand Bargain of social safety net cuts despite their terrible tolls on the economy and the health of ordinary people. Read the entire Northwestern report linked above, and marvel at how the selfish preferences of his rich Chicago backers uncannily mirror those in his budget. (the exception to the rule is in defense spending. Chicago millionaires want the Pentagon budget slashed right along with the Medicare budget. Except for the General Dynamics Crown Family, those war profits must not be trickling down to the Windy City!)
"Let me tell you about the very rich," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. "They are different from you and me."
Yeah, replied Ernest Hemingway. "They have more money."
You might think that the long-overdue and comedic debunking of the Rogoff-Reinhart debt study, which had served as the prime rib basis for the austerity agenda of the deficit hawks, would have stopped President Obama from pushing for even more austerity. Well, harrumph to that, proles! His weekly address to the "Nation" (aka, the Plutocracy) should disabuse you of that notion, pronto.
If we had to give this week's presidential propaganda a title, it would be "Sequester Dumb. Cutting Social Security Smart."
He comes not to cancel the Sequester. He comes to replace with something just as bad, if not even worse. He calls it a Balanced Approach. We call it a Grand Betrayal.
The irony, of course, is that he could easily have vetoed Friday's Congressional bill that restored FAA air traffic control staffing, thus gaining a ton of leverage over the GOP. He could have used inconvenienced travelers as bargaining chips, to begin his longed-for destruction of the social safety net. The Republicans would have caved under all that plutocratic pressure. But Obama serves the same masters as all the other bought-off politicians of the Duopoly. And Pete Peterson and the Koch Brothers and the Waltons -- as much as these billionaire psychopaths hate the thought of poor people having a comfortable retirement and health care -- absolutely cannot, must not, be kept waiting on the tarmac in their Lear jets.
So, in a weird sort of way, I guess we can count ourselves lucky. The Tea Party saved us from his Grand Bargain before. This time, the supreme selfishness of the Masters of the Universe got in the way.
Obama disdainfully calls the vote a "bandaid" approach, sequestering the part of the Sequester that made the Richie Boo-Boos feel bad. But as other commenters have pointed out, Obama is not about to pull a stunt using displaced PreK kids, Medicare chemo patients and the homeless as bargaining chips in a veto threat. That is not who he is. His backdrops are the military stoics, the first responder-uniformed, the beaming factory workers happy to earn a low wage instead of a no-wage, the attractive students who haven't had the chance to become unemployed yet and still have a ways to got before the onslaught of student loan collection agents, the well-dressed, coiffed and dwindling denizens of the monied Beltway burbs. You won't see old people, impoverished children, untreated and emaciated cancer patients, depressed people in rags, anyone obviously sulking or suffering, anywhere near him at his carefully scripted events.
The people truly being hurt by the Sequester were never really part of his base to begin with, even though it was their votes that propelled him into a second term. He merely used them as occasional actors in campaign films in order to display what a mean son-of-a-bitch Mitt Romney was. Bit players are as expendable as they are interchangeable.
Besides implementing the sneaky chained CPI method of both cutting Social Security and raising middle class taxes, the other pressing reason Obama wants to end sequestration is because he desperately wants to stop the cuts to the Pentagon budget. Notice how smarmily he hides the operation of a thousand military bases, billion-dollar weapons systems, drone operations, fighter jets and welfare for defense contractors under the weasel term "military communities" --- immediately juxtaposed with "families" to make you think that it's only the low-paid grunts and the spouses left behind he's concerned about:
Because of these reckless cuts, there are parents whose kids just got kicked out
of Head Start programs scrambling for a solution. Th ere are seniors who depend
on programs like Meals on Wheels to live independently looking for help. There
are military communities – families that have already sacrificed enough – coping
under new strains. All because of these cuts.
And while he admits the deficit is shrinking, he still calls for "responsible" cuts. Why? Because, they're in response to the ruling class. Because the Pete Peterson Fix the Debt crowd representing the richest 1% who've raked in almost all of the gains in the economic "recovery" want it that way. They don't want FICA taxes imposed on their unearned wealth.
Obama never once mentioned chained CPI in his speech today, never once acknowledged that his budget would reduce the lifetime benefits of military veterans right along with those of disabled civilians. He knows his ideas are not popular. So, the austerity and the pain are disguised by more weasel words:
A couple weeks ago, I put forward a budget that replaces the next several
years of these dumb cuts with smarter cuts; reforms our tax code to close
wasteful special interest loopholes; and invests in things like education,
research, and manufacturing that will create new jobs right now.
So I hope Members of Congress will find the same sense of urgency and
bipartisan cooperation to help the families still in the crosshairs of these
cuts. They may not feel the pain felt by kids kicked off Head Start, or the
750,000 Americans projected to lose their jobs because of these cuts, or the
long-term unemployed who will be further hurt by them. But that pain is real.
He feels our immediate pain, but will do nothing to stop it unless we agree to a lifetime of it. And make no mistake. The kind of long-term pain he wants to impose will smart like hell.
Obama may well already be a lame duck, as he quacks out marching orders to the masses, urging us to goose-step happily to our own destruction.
Surprise, surprise, surprise. Congress and Barack "Red Line in the Sand" Obama will only cancel the part of the sequester that inconveniences rich people. And just in time for the weekend, as they all blow town without waiting on the tarmac. Also just in time for the Hollywood celebs to blow into town for the horrific White House Correspondents Dinner after first blowing off the TSA security lines just because they can.
Don't get mad. Get even. And while we're thinking about how on earth we will actually accomplish that, here's a little ditty, sung to the tune of Johnny Cash's "I Got Stripes" (video here)
On a Monday, their flights got arrested (uh huh)
On a Tuesday, those plutocrats got mad (oh crap)
On a Wednesday, they found they'd been sequestered
On a Thursday, the Senate met and blurted out "Our Bad!"
So they got flights
Flights in all their Lear Jets
While we got chains
Chains around our feet (CPI!)
They got their rights
But we still got no jobs, yo.
And those chains, those chains
Are about to drag us down.
On a Monday, the kids still had no Pre-K
On a Tuesday, the cancer clinics closed (oh boy)
On a Wednesday, the Navy cancelled Fleet Week
On a Thursday, we still were getting hosed.
But they got flights
Flights in all their Lear Jets
And we got chains,
Chains around our feet (oh my corns!)
They got their rights
And still we have no jobs yet
And those chains, those chains
Just keep on draggin down.
On a Monday, they cut the AIDS relief off
On a Tuesday, the schools they got de-staffed
On a Wednesday, they even turned the heat off
On a Thursday, the politicians laughed. (hee-haw)
'Cause they got flights
Flights in all their Lear Jets
And we got chains,
Chains around our feet
They got their rights
And we still got no jobs yet
And those chains, those chains
Just keep....on....draggin.... d-o-o-o-w-n.
(Feel free to add more lyrics. Inspiration can be found here.)
A mighty wind, about an F-5 on the narcissism scale, bore down on Texas today. It was a nationally televised club meeting to which you weren't personally invited. If you did have the effrontery to show up anyway, and you got just a little too close for their comfort, you got your ass kicked. No matter that you were an Iraq veteran whom the club members all professed to love and honor. Besides, the corporate media were more interested in FLOTUS's couture and what Babs and Barry were burbling on about than in the hundreds of protesters gathered outside the gates.
The wind soared mellifluously -- Barack Obama blew them all away:
When all the living former Presidents are together, it’s also a special day
for our democracy. We’ve been called “the world’s most exclusive club” — and we
do have a pretty nice clubhouse. But the truth is, our club is more like a
support group. The last time we all got together was just before I took
office. And I needed that. Because as each of these leaders will tell you, no
matter how much you may think you’re ready to assume the office of the
presidency, it’s impossible to truly understand the nature of the job until it’s
yours, until you’re sitting at that desk.
I, I, I, I. Couldn't help noticing convicted felon Silvio Berlusconi, the bada-bing Italian president, in the audience. He's not in our club, you know, we American presidents are all family men. We don't own strip clubs -- we just help private equity vultures strip assets. We don't cheat.... on our wives. Hmmm.... Bubba? It depends on what the meaning of is, is. But back to Barry Windrip. Absolutely right, the post-presidency thing is like a support group; the club really is confronted with the Herculean task of serially holding each other up and holding each other unaccountable for high crimes and misdemeanors. And I-I-I Obama, even more than Bush, desperately need the next guy (or Hillary) to never hold me accountable for drone assassinations, for Gitmo, for continuing to outsource torture to black sites. Today's homage to Bush is nothing less than a dog-whistle plea for clemency from future club members.
The first thing I found in that desk the day I took office was a letter from
George, and one that demonstrated his compassion and generosity. For he knew
that I would come to learn what he had learned — that being President, above
all, is a humbling job. There are moments where you make mistakes. There are
times where you wish you could turn back the clock. And what I know is true
about President Bush, and I hope my successor will say about me, is that we love
this country and we do our best.
Sorry, should have said the presidency is a humbug job. We all make mistakes, which is Newspeak for politicians committing felonies. I know this is true about Georgie. And he knew he was he and I was him even before I knew it myself. His gut told him. So here's hoping that my successor will tell the same lies about me at my own special lie-berry day.
So we know President Bush the man. And what President Clinton said is
absolutely true — to know the man is to like the man, because he’s comfortable
in his own skin. He knows who he is. He doesn’t put on any pretenses. He
takes his job seriously, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He is a
good man.
But we also know something about George Bush the leader. As we walk through
this library, obviously we’re reminded of the incredible strength and resolve
that came through that bullhorn as he stood amid the rubble and the ruins of
Ground Zero, promising to deliver justice to those who had sought to destroy our
way of life.
President Bush, he is the man. I lifted that part about his sheddy reptile skin directly from the puffball interview he gave to the Dallas Morning News last week. He is one comfortable lizard brain, is George. If we weren't all comfortable with who we are and the crimes we commit in the name of freedom, we couldn't sleep nights. And please, folks, forget everything I ever said against the Iraq War when I was running for my first term. George, as he stood in the rubble that day at no personal risk to himself, was salivating over what a perfect excuse 9/11 would be for the invasion, what a lucrative opportunity for Big Oil, for Bechtel and Northrup Grumman and Boeing and Blackwater and General Dynamics and Halliburton. As my old pal Rahm once said, "Never let a crisis go to waste." And Afghanistan.... still there, always will be. There's gold in them thar hills, drones in them thar skies. Enriching the plutocrats is what is meant by "our way of life" -- just in case I was not being perfectly clear.
And finally, a President bears no greater decision and no more solemn burden
than serving as Commander-in-Chief of the greatest military that the world has
ever known. As President Bush himself has said, “America must and will keep its
word to the men and women who have given us so much.” So even as we Americans
may at times disagree on matters of foreign policy, we share a profound respect
and reverence for the men and women of our military and their families. And we
are united in our determination to comfort the families of the fallen and to
care for those who wear the uniform of the United States.
(Applause.)
Forgive my boilerplate jingoism. Weasel words: "solemn burden" = lying our complacent asses off with a straight face and pretending it's a huge drag. "Profound respect and reverence for the men and women of our military and their families" = we'll say a prayer, but forget about those benefits even after ten years of soul-crushing deployments. With the exception of Bush Sr. and Jimmy Carter, the good old boys in the Exclusive Club have never put their own hides at risk. Their families will never have to put themselves at risk. That's for other people's sons and daughters. And if they do come back, they will wait months and years for their disability claims to be chained-CPI'd or even denied, they'll commit suicide at the rate of 22 every day, and their PTSD and traumatic brain injuries combined with their weapons expertise will make them more dangerous than the foreign terrorists we speciously claim are trying to destroy our way of life. But when the Homeland Security secretary warned about such an eventuality, her report was maligned by the offended wingnuts across the beloved aisle and across the reactionary spectrum.
No one can be completely ready for this office. But America needs leaders who
are willing to face the storm head on, even as they pray for God’s strength and
wisdom so that they can do what they believe is right.
George always listened to his gut. Like all of us, he left whatever vestigial conscience he may once have possessed at the Oval Office door. Because when it comes to killing and maiming and spying and torturing and giving ourselves and the criminal financiers who destroyed the entire world economy free rein, we the members of The World's Most Exclusive Club will simply blame it all on our invisible friend in the sky.
