I wish I had a bullhorn to shout just how tired I am of hearing about how wonderful George W. Bush’s “bullhorn moment” was.

It will go down as one of the worst moments in American history because when he stood on the smoldering ruins amid the dust of the dead it was through that bullhorn that Bush’s Big Lie was first shouted to the world that the people who knocked down those buildings would soon be hearing from us.

It might have been a fairly good, better-late-than-never moment if all Bush had done was use that bullhorn to launch a war on Al Qaeda. It might have escalated into a great piece of historical stagecraft if we’d just gone into Afghanistan and stayed the course on a noble quest to kill Osama Bin Laden and all his Al Qaeda cowards who murdered our people.

But the words that echoed through Bush’s bullhorn into the smoldering 16 acres of lower Manhattan, the words that resounded across the grieving outer boroughs and the sorrowful suburbs and the stunned globe, were but an orchestrated setup for a grander diabolical scheme.

Because we fast gave up the hunt for Bin Laden for a bait-and-switch war in Iraq that had nothing to do with the rubble upon which Bush stood at Ground Zero shouting bull through his bullhorn.

Bush has now declared that half-a-buck stops on his desk for Katrina.

But he doesn’t ever mention that Osama Bin Laden is still out there roaming free and plotting more American murders. That stops on his desk, too.

Historians will refocus that bullhorn moment as the point of origin to exploit a terrible attack on America for a preconceived war in Iraq that had nothing to do with our dead.

Historians also will remember that directly after the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 2001, killing 2,749, our fearless leader, with all that Texas Air Guard combat training, hopped aboard Air Force One and lammed to, um, Omaha.

Talk about heroic.

And as real heroes dug in the rubble for signs of life, shortening their own lives in the toxic air, Bush hid out. Then three days later, when the coast was clear, he arrived to shoot a Karl Rove-inspired reelection commercial and to launch a war in Iraq.

— Denis Hamill, New York Daily News

Tough talk: Sen. John Kerry delivered the following address at Brown University yesterday. It’s long, but it’s well worth reading. One wonders if Kerry could have communicated this level of passion and tough-talking rhetoric during the campaign, if he would have been the one to deal with Katrina — and wonder how well he would have done.

I want to thank you for what the Brown community has done to help and comfort the many victims of Hurricane Katrina. This horrifying disaster has shown Americans at their best — and their government at its worst.

And that’s what I’ve come to talk with you about today. The incompetence of Katrina’s response is not reserved to a hurricane. There’s an enormous gap between Americans’ daily expectations and government’s daily performance. And the gap is growing between the enduring strength of the American people — their values, their spirit, their imagination, their ingenuity, and their willingness to serve and sacrifice — and the shocking weakness of the American government in contending with our country’s urgent challenges. On the Gulf Coast during the last two weeks, the depth and breadth of that gap has been exposed for all to see and we have to address it now before it’s obscured again by hurricane force spin and deception.

Katrina stripped away any image of competence and exposed to all the true heart and nature of this administration. The truth is that for four and a half years, real life choices have been replaced by ideological agenda, substance replaced by spin, governance second place always to politics. Yes, they can run a good campaign — I can attest to that — but America needs more than a campaign. If 12 year-old Boy Scouts can be prepared, Americans have a right to expect the same from their 59 year-old President of the United States.

Katrina reminds us that too often the political contests of our time have been described like football games with color commentary: one team of consultants against another, red states against blue states, Democratic money against Republican money; a contest of height versus hair – sometimes. But the truth is democracy is not a game; we are living precious time each day in a different America than the one we can inhabit if we make different choices.
[…]

Conducted over the weekend, the latest CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll shows George Bush’s poll numbers continuing their precipitous slide toward infamy.

Asked how the prez is handling his job as leader of the free world, 40% approved of his performance while 58% said he sucks. OK, not in so many words, but that’s what they meant. Here are all the other ways respondents said Bush is doing a suck-ass job (all disapproval ratings): economy 63%, foreign affais 58%, Iraq 67%, Katrina 57%.

Then the poll gets personal. About whether Bush is honest and trustworthy, 47% said yes, 50% said no. Asked if he is a strong and decisive leader, 49% said yes and 51% said no (note: no No Opinions — decisive Americans!). Asked whether Bush “cares about people like you,” 56% said nope to 46% who said yup.

In other views, 81% said they want to see an independent panel investigate the Katrina mess and 56% said Bush was only out to help the hurricane victims for political reasons. Regarding Iraq, 56% said we shouldn’t have gone in, but 60% say the Senate should confirm John Roberts as Chief Wingnut of the Supreme Court.

Admin Brain Drain: The American Spectator examines the degree of lameness of Bush’s lame-duck administration and the unlikelihood of the prez achieving either of his pet proposals: reforming Social Security and making the tax cuts for the rich permament.

“You run down the list of things we thought we could accomplish and you have to wonder what we thought we were thinking,” says a Bush Administration member who joined on in 2001. “You get the impression that we’re more than listless. We’re sunk.”

Perhaps more significant are rumors of longtime Bushies who are looking to jump ship, but are finding few opportunities in the private sector. Probably because their predecessors got the good jobs:

“What happened was that some of the best people who were working in the Administration during the first term, but who weren’t necessarily Bush campaign members or weren’t particularly close to the White House, jumped when they saw opportunities being filled by under-qualified but more politically connected people,” says a current Administration senior staffer in a Cabinet department. “In this department we lost three quarters of the people who should have been encouraged to stay, and most of them left simply because they had received no indication they would be considered for better or different opportunities. And many of these folks would have stayed.”

Looks like Bush’s team is suffering the same problem as his political vision — no depth.

The great downfall of America is not some sort of precipitous moral decline … but rather that the “theatrical presidency” has been uncoupled from any accountability.

How Bush “performs” on television is the criterion by which the media judges him, not how he performs for the people of America. Word and deed have taken two separate paths — and the media may cover deed for a day or two, but is always diverted back to writing reviews about Bush’s dramatic reading of scripts written by Rove and Hughes — or airing visuals of carefully orchestrated photo-ops…

The manner in which the media gobbled up the stage-managed speech from Jackson Square — in which tremendous resources, including emergency generators to light the cathedral, were brought into a city that had no electricity — was as reprehensible as it was revealing about how political “reporters” have now pretty much become theatrical reviewers.

You could have two theories about the disintegration of the ability of the government to protect us and provide us with basic survival services under Bush.

One is that the Bush administration is full of total incompetents — and is such a “spin” operation depending upon the press buying the latest photo-op of Bush and speech written for him — that they simply have no idea nor do they care how they are weakening America.

The other theory is that Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld are geniuses. This theory holds that they know exactly what they are doing by making government the scapegoat for being ineffective, because that helps them to further privatize services — such as protecting people, rescuing people, policing, health care, social security, etc — that should be efficiently offered by the national government.

— Buzzflash editorial, Sept. 19, 2005