Brain Dead and Proud of It
September 20th, 2005 | by Dr. Forbush |I was thinking about the recent slump in the approval rating of George W Bush. Newsweek has a great article on “How Bush Blew It” in regards to the Hurricane Katrina debacle. But Bush has been blowing the Iraq situation and the terrorist situation for several years now and his approval ratings didn’t take such a hard knock. One could argue that the Cindy Sheehan camp outside of Bush’s vacation holiday on the ranch had already set his approval ratings going down, but that doesn’t seem to be the case according to the polls.
Bush has told the American public that he would make everyone safer. That was his recurring campaign propaganda. He needed the Patriot Act and the creation of the department of Homeland Security to accomplish this feat, but the public was willing to give up some of their liberty to allow for this radical plan. But, the American people haven’t seen any results from this plan. Hurricane Katrina was actually the first opportunity to witness the response of the new Department of Homeland Security, which now encompasses FEMA, the organization that normally responded to natural disasters. In fact, FEMA would be called in to respond to the aftermath of a terrorist attack of large devastating proportion. And, every American can see the failure of the Department of Homeland Security and they can also imagine what would happen in the next large terrorist attack. Everyone now knows that George W Bush has not made us safer than we were on September 10, 2001. In fact, with his funding cuts to FEMA he may actually have made us less safe. With his spending on the unnecessary War in Iraq he has increased the debt of every taxpayer, and we have paid this price with no change in the level of our safety. Some actually argue that the War in Iraq has made us less safe by giving terrorists more reasons for potential followers to be recruited.
Anti-War activists have been telling the nation that George W Bush has lead us away from world public opinion, but Americans generally have no sense of the importance of what other countries think about us. The fiscal conservatives have been telling us that it is wrong for us the borrow money to fight a war and have our children pay the loans back. But, most Americans have huge credit card debt and don’t see the importance of trying to maintain fiscal responsibility. Some religious leaders have argued that the War in Iraq was unjust and immoral. But, Americans generally don’t have the same empathy for the citizens of another country and they don’t feel the pain of the families of the 25,000 Iraqi civilians largely killed by US forces. So, it comes down to a large natural disaster in the USA to actually effect the approval rating of George W Bush. What could possibly be different here?
I think that George W Bush has been knocked off his high horse. The problem is that the other side doesn’t have anyone to jump into the saddle. The people who are still supporting George W Bush wouldn’t vote for George W Bush if he switched Parties, even if he said exactly the same thing that he is saying right now. His borrow and spend way of governing would be considered a sin if a Democrat had done it. We are forcing our children to pay back this enormous debt that will grow even larger if Bush continues to borrow even more money to rebuild New Orleans. This is liberal economics gone wild. The supporters of George W Bush wouldn’t vote for him if he told us the importance of American Security and the War on Terror if he had a (D) next to his name. I submit that the project of tearing down George W Bush has been completed successfully. We just need a leader that 61% of Americans can put their support behind, because that 39% that supports George W Bush are brain dead and they don’t want to think about the stupidity of George W Bush.
13 Responses to “Brain Dead and Proud of It”
By The Cranky Liberal on Sep 20, 2005 | Reply
Hey Doc, we don’t even need that many. Just 49% and a good vote rigging….
By Orikinla Osinachi on Sep 20, 2005 | Reply
washingtonpost.com
Incompetence, Not Racism
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, September 20, 2005; A23
If you told me that George W. Bush is a dummy, I would argue with you but understand why you thought so: all those idiotic statements. But if you told me, as some have been implying, that Bush is a racist or that he doesn’t care about black people, I would not only say that you’re wrong but add, “Not the George Bush I know.”
Of course, I don’t know George Bush personally. But in his first presidential campaign, I traveled with him and tried, as he might say, to look into his heart. Conveniently enough, he sometimes wears it on his sleeve — never more so, as I discovered, than when he talks about poor kids and racial and ethnic minorities. His feelings for them — especially for poor kids — are genuine. This is what I believed then and this — his incompetent performance regarding Hurricane Katrina notwithstanding — is what I believe now.
Others believe differently. The most non-nuanced statements came from the rapper Kanye West. Appearing on an NBC special to raise money for flood victims, West attributed the slow recovery effort not to ineptitude but to the fact that “most of the people are black.” He followed that up a moment later with: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” NBC snipped that comment from its West Coast feed, but no matter: West was clearly not speaking only for himself. National polls showed a racial divide in appraising how the government did after Katrina. Blacks by and large thought race played a role in the laggard relief effort.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, functionally unemployed all these years, put it a bit differently. Appearing Sunday on local New York television, he didn’t exactly say that Bush was indifferent to the plight of New Orleans’s poor blacks, but he did say this about Bush: “One has to suspect why he had such delayed compassion.” Sharpton did point out, as Bill Clinton did in his Sunday TV appearances, that in New Orleans, poor and black are largely synonymous, but still the damage was done: George Bush is no friend of black people.
I have two problems with all this. The first is not just that it’s unfair — Bush, in this case, was an equal opportunity bungler — but that it rests on a stereotype: Republicans tend to wear lime green pants in the summer and dislike black people all year round. There was more than a little truth to this at one time. The GOP, after all, became a safe haven for Southern bigots who fled the Democratic Party (as Lyndon Johnson knew they would) in the civil rights era. The fight for the rights of blacks turned Dixie as Republican as it once was Democratic. To its everlasting shame, the GOP continues to benefit from raw bigotry.
But Bush is not cut from that cloth. He is a contemporary Republican, a person of another generation who, you may have noticed, has a black woman as secretary of state and had a black man before her. Under him, the GOP began an outreach to black Americans, and unless the Democrats wake up it will ultimately succeed. As Karl Rove well knows, all he has to do is pick up a small percentage of the black vote and he ends the current 50-50 electoral split. Bush, who won an impressive 27 percent of the black vote in his reelection bid for Texas governor, could have been the man to do this. His task is a lot harder now.
My second problem is that yelling racism stops creative thinking. Questions about how reconstruction should be managed, about how relief money should be used, about who will be resettled and where — all of them fraught with racial issues — will not be addressed. Instead, as we have already seen, the feds will simply throw gobs and gobs of money at New Orleans and its poor — never mind how it is spent. Bush has reacted like a conservative’s stereotype of a liberal — just spend the damn money and hope it does some good. This, more than anything, shows true contempt for the poor, regardless of race.
We owe the poor our special consideration. We especially owe the black poor an appreciation of their plight and their dolorous history. But in general it was incompetence, not racism, that slowed the relief effort — incompetence on the local and state levels, too, and incompetence on the part of black as well as white public officials. The search for racist scapegoats does the poor no good. This relief effort ought to start, above all, with some clear thinking.
cohenr@washpost.com
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
By Jet on Sep 20, 2005 | Reply
Sheesh. Get a blog, why doncha!
By The Bastard on Sep 20, 2005 | Reply
Orikinia Osinachi,
You have fucking gotta be kidding me,
That’s like saying, “I’m not a racist I have a black friend that trims my hedges!”
And don’t forget Mrs. Bush Sr. “scared” about all these negros coming to live in Houston.
It is class warfare and just like regular warfare the black community usually pays the price because of the oppression in this country.
I am 100% white and I see sheets whiter than me brother!!!! These people, these contempary Republicans you speak about in your well posted article from the WP are nothing but racists!!! That would include Bush, Frist, DeLay, Santorum. There are moderate Republicans out there that hate this hijacking of the party and trust me they are starting to jump ship.
By ascap_scab on Sep 20, 2005 | Reply
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the sudden fall in poll numbers. It’s not Sheehan, it’s not Iraq, it’s not even the slow response to Katrina.
It’s Bush’s use of the word “reconstruction” in his Thursday speech from Jackson Square. Reconstruction was the code word used by the carpetbaggers after the Civil War to further denigrate and impoverish the southerners. It’s the sudden willingness to blow yet another $200 billion without any accountability, without identifying offsets in the budget by sticking yet another boondoggle on the nation’s credit card. In short, it’s suddenly sounding like a “new deal” democrat, something the Republican party has been trying to reverse for decades.
Republicans know Bush doesn’t have to run again, so why cave into democratic ideals when this is the perfect chance to create a Republican utopia?? The poll numbers are reflecting the cracking of the Republican base, the one where fiscal conservatives were willing to put up with religious radicals to keep winning.
By Vince on Sep 20, 2005 | Reply
I don’t fear any one Political Party more than I do the Power Brokers and Bad Money. The Patriot Act and Home Land Security may have a more long-term and sinister purpose–That is to provide government with the power to control and contain a public that demands change. I think members of all Parties ought to be wary of ‘brain blockage’.
By DennyK on Sep 20, 2005 | Reply
Hey guys, maybe Bush won’t be re-elected if his pol;l numbers are so low. Oh yeah, that’s right, he isn’t running again. Awww, too freakin bad.
By Treason on Sep 20, 2005 | Reply
Well, let’s see now. I’ve been a registered voter now for well over 18-19 years and have NEVER been called a single time regarding elections or approval ratings. So, I don’t live my life on “polls”. Especially when they are taken in sample numbers of 500-1000-or even 2,000. But, go ahead and live your lives on these polls. “Your” party of the left will be very disappointed YET again at the mid-terms my friend.
By steve on Sep 21, 2005 | Reply
There is only one poll that counts and it happens every 4 years on the first Tuesday in November. Not some gallop/AP/Newsweek poll.
I have once or twice had a poll call me about some local politcian or school board issue. You know what I do? I lie… I waste their time. I ask them personal questions to keep them busy. I also like “politcal mail” with the free business reply envelopes. What I like to do is attach them to bricks or big pieces of wood with some duct tape. The post office has to send them too!! I asked once and they approved of it. I didn’t want to be littering. And the people I mail them back to, they get this dead weight that costs an arm and a leg in postage due. I wish the ACLU would send some. It’s also a great way to help the environment and save some trees!!! Mail their free mail back with a bunch of crap. If you include your address they never send you another thing, thus saving the environment. It’s free why not… like the majority of America, I like to do something about the environment when I can.
Since I am bashing telemarketers and deviating from this post’s intent… I also like this other game I play with telemarketers. I like to play “hold, please” They call and ask for me and I say hold on I will get him. I will place them on hold for like 4 or 5 minutes and then I pick up in the laundry room with the washer and dryer running and yell “Maintenance” and they ask for me again and I just yell “Hold Please,” If they are still there 3 or so minutes later my wife picks up and says that “Steve” is not here. And then we laugh our asses off. The best telemarketer to keep hanging is BMW America. When you take your BMW in for warranty service they freaking call you relentlessly so they can “Check the quality of their dealer that served you” God these people are worse than Jehovah’s Witnesses on Saturday morning. They want nothing more than for you to answer them and tell them how you “feel”. They called like 20 times in three months because I didn’t answer them the first time. I want to get my money’s worth. It’s a freaking BMW man, the cars are unstoppable, they should chill. The dealer had great coffee. It still smells new after a year and a half. We’re thinking about getting an H3 Hummer so we can run over little Priuses with Sierra Club stickers in the back windows … Burn Baby Burn…
I am sorry where was I? Oh yeah, I don’t trust polls because assholes like me could be answering them. I wish we could have purple fingers like the Iraqis after we voted. That would be cool…
By alas on Sep 21, 2005 | Reply
Your whole country is going down the toilet. My only regret is you’re taking the world with you. It saddens me to see that honest people like yourself see these poll numbers and have hope. How can you even rely on those numbers when your electoral system is clearly rigged? It doesn’t even matter if it’s not rigged, the point is the system is open to -far- more abuse than any other electoral system in major democracies, and USA is supposed to be the shining beacon of democracy. Look at the Australian Electoral Commission in Australia. We vote with PENCILS and PAPER, and we have an independent, centralised, bipartisan agency in charge of vote counting and running the elections. And we have fairer elections than your basketcase country. I’m sorry to be so brutal. Keep fighting the good fight man, the world is behind you. (as in the “world” in “World wide”, not the world in “World Series”).
By Martin S Friedlander on Sep 21, 2005 | Reply
I just attended a dinner sponsored by the World Affairs Counsel for Los Angeles. The guest speaker was Andrea Mitchell, the better half of the “Maestro”. She danced the “minuet” with me when I compared the Right Wing Religious Ideologues of the Bush Administration with the Muslim fanatics of the Middle East. She refused to accept my characterization of the Bush Administration and proceeded with a non answer to my question a la John Roberts. I mentioned tonight’s incident to make the following point. We will never get a straight answer from the established media. The answers will have to come from “We the People”.
We have to do more than just criticise this administration. We have to put forth a Plan for America that sets forth a positive vision. We just cannot be “nay” sayers. We ran a “neuter” to oppose Bush. He never had a message. I wrote a letter to “People For the American Way” making the same comment. Their response was “they are not the Democratic Party”. I accept that. But what is our message” What is our Plan for America? It has to be a positive one, since in the long run we have to have a “Plan” not just to replace or impeach Bush, but a Plan to govern America for the benefit of all of the people, not just for the “Rich and Powerful”. What is our vision if we have one?
Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.
http://www.freedompost.typepad.com
By Dr. Forbush on Sep 21, 2005 | Reply
Martin, you make a very good point. It isn’t always enough to dislike your opponent and make him look unattractive you need to make your candidate attractive as well. But in America with the two-party system more often than not making the other guy look bad is enough. And the Bush campaign did a better job with the mudslinging in 2004.
By Martin S Friedlander on Sep 21, 2005 | Reply
My good Dr. Forbush:
I belong to the PLATO organization, which is, in reality, Continuing Education for the Retired. I fall within that category. One of my colleagues, Stanley E. Tobin, just pulished a book entitled; “A legacy Lost” published by “The Graduate Group” of West Hartford, Ct. I spoke to him today at my PLATO class and he sold me the book. He is brilliant, a la Roberts. I read the prologue of his book, which I will comment on at my website, which I will publish here as well. I highly recommend this book, which is now being sold at Barnes and Noble. Mr. Tobin is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School and practiced law from 1959 to 2003. He also served on the faculty of Stanford Law School. I read his first book, and I can’t wait to fininsh this one. Based on what I read, it explains my philosophy.
Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.
http://www.freedompost.typepad.com