Five bloggers shit huge piles of rancid bile on Bush leadership - plunge Prez headfirst in projectile vom

Compassionate Prez sings 'In The Ghetto' to comfort Katrina victim

As a follower of blogs, I'm convinced that when it comes to the issues of the day, the best bloggers are better than the best national columnists. That includes the heavies from the NY Times and Washington Post. Here's a selection to prove my point. These five bloggers take Bush down like no one in the MSM can:

1. From blogger Ezra Klein:

A Small Man:
I have to say, none of this really makes sense to me. America is not a country that lacks for cars; why isn't the Superdome totally evacuated? America is not a country that lacks for copters -- why does CNN keep spotting stranded families waving sheets for help? For that matter, why don't we just conscript CNN's copters to help them? We are not a country that lacks for food, so why aren't trucks barreling in with rations? We are not a country that lacks for homes, why isn't Bush going on TV and, with the Astrodome full, asking private citizens to open their doors? For that matter, why doesn't Bush just fire back up the network of evangelical churches he used to win the election? They could sleep thousands in their pews and call on their congregations to provide hundreds of thousands of beds -- and they would. Why isn't Bush coming on TV and asking Americans to send blankets, to send canned foods, to donate to a relief effort, anything? Why isn't he leading, why isn't America responding, why do we all seem so paralyzed?

George W. Bush is not up to the task of leadership. That's not said as a criticism, actually -- I am not up to the task of dancing, or running marathons. We all have failings, and Bush's essential flaw is an inability to project himself, an inability to grow in dimension during a crisis, an inability to sense that catastrophes serve as opportunities for strengthening the American community. I dislike Bush for mean-spiritedness, for his incompetence, for his smugness. But I deplore him for his smallness. That the 2004 election was a 51-49 affair is shocking. Had John McCain won in 2000, his response to 9/11 would have toasted the Democratic party for the next 20 years. Had Al Gore been in office, his leadership in the moments after would've changed the world, or at least the international community. Both of them would have brought Americans together. But Bush simply invited us to malls, wedged us apart, snookered us into a disastrous war that didn't need to be fought. For a President to hold office during a crisis of that magnitude and do as little, both socially and politically, as Bush did is almost unprecedented.

I don't blame Bush for Katrina -- he does not control the weather. And I don't blame him for the levees -- even with full-funding, they weren't scheduled to be completed for years, the levee that broke was actually one of the renovated ones, and so on; his funding decisions were criminal, but they would only have been causal five years from now. I blame him for the national guard being absent, but that's a secondary problem. What I blame him for, what I hate him for, is for not stepping up to the job of President right now. For being a small man when a big one is required. For offering a laundry list of supplies-on-the-way when his job is uniting the American people and helping them give aid and comfort to their countrymen. A President can't stop a disaster, but he can coalesce the citizenry to ease its aftermath, he can take catastrophe and use it to reknit the nation's community.

Bush didn't. He didn't do it here and he didn't do it on 9/11. In America, great things can come out of great calamity. Bush has had two opportunities to create something lasting, he has failed both times. For most else, I forgive him. For that, I never will.

2. One of Ezra Klein's blogreaders didn't agree with him. Here's his comment to Ezra:

You're wrong. It's not incompetence. What we've seen, both before and after the hurricane, is ideology at work. The Army Corps of Engineers wasn't defunded due to budgetary pressure; since when has this administration given a damn about containing the deficit? USACOE was defunded to fight the greater evil of "moral hazard." FEMA wasn't broken last week because Michael Brown turns out to be a half-wit; FEMA was deliberately "drowned in the bathtub," because Bush and his camp genuinely, consistently believe that it's morally wrong, the worst, evilest act they can imagine, that rich people should ever be forced to give up tax dollars to buy things like levee repair, or when the levee fails, to waste money on helicopters or medicine or bottled water for flooded-out poor people.

Incompetent? No, I give Bushco high, high marks for competence; they're doing, literally, one Hell of a job. Imagine what a tricky, subtle task it's been all last week to deliberately hold back the Army, the National Guard, the Red Cross, two dozen foreign nations and a million volunteers, while thousands of Americans in the city of New Orleans die in agony right before their eyes. (Posted by: W. Kiernan)

3. One of my favorite bloggers, the sharp-tongued spinster aunt blogger of I Blame the Patriarchy, expanded on this comment:

Blogular vituperations on the subject of Bush's astounding and ceaseless displays of incompetence--the least of which is his unsettling yearning for a seat on professional racist Trent Lott's front porch--have been many and spectacular. But are they justified?

Now, now, keep your shirt on. I'm not saying Bush isn't a moroon stumblebum. But what if, as a commenter at Ezra Klein chillingly suggests, Bush's seeming stumblebummery isn't the result of anything so mild and comical as mere incompetence? What if it is, in fact, the quintessence of ideology? I allude to an ideology summarized poetically in a bygone century by prescient punk militant Jello Biafra: "Kill kill kill kill kill the poor."

Should you ruminate on the hypothesis for five minutes, which is what I did because I had an extra five minutes, it will dawn on your astute young mind that there can be no other explanation for the enormity of the post-hurricane denouement than the manifestation of a deeply entrenched kill-the-poor ideology. What appears to be the federal government's epic indifference to the continued suffering of disaster victims suggests in actuality some fairly acrobatic and precise machinations of ruthlessness. I submit that such flawlessly executed ruthlessness could never have been realized by the mere ineptitude of a figurehead president and a couple of moron cabinet secretaries. If this administration were as clumsy as the liberal bloggers are saying it is, Al Gore, or at least John Kerry, would be president right now, and Americans would know the difference between Saddam and Osama, and between science and baloney.

I'm no forensic political scientist, but it shouldn't be too difficult to poke through the record and come up with evidence to suggest that the Bush corporatocratic philosophy traditionally has looked less than favorably on the poor, to the extent that it really doesn't mind killing them. In fact, I should think that the more herculean task would be to unearth any evidence at all to the contrary. It's not like they even try to hide it. El Bushito unapologetically sends kids from his own nation's poor families to kill and be killed by poor people overseas, while his wife--yes, I am currently obsessed with her--coolly elucidates similar views when she acknowledges that the poor necessarily snuff it at disproportionate rates because they're, you know, poor.

If it is not, in fact, the policy of the current administration to exact revenge on the poor for the hideous crime of poverty, it would be an exception to a rule as old as patriarchy itself. This kill-the-poor M.O. has been favored by aristocracies since the first Sumerian stashed away his first bushel of spelt, declared it a surplus, realized with a start that he was the first rich dude in history, and lost no time initiating a rampage around Ur forcibly informing everybody else he was their king by order of the invisible, anthropomorphic, rich-dude-lovin' gods. And that they were now, you know, poor. And that's just the way it was gonna be.

4. Blogger Oliver Willis compares the leadership of Bush to other presidents:

A Leadership Deficit:
My opinion of various past presidents is varied. I was never a fan of Ronald Reagan or the legacy he has left us with. George H.W. Bush was as tone deaf as they come, though not a rabid right-winger. And of course I think Bill Clinton was the best president of the last 30 years with some clear personal failings.

But they all had something in common: they knew how to lead. Presidents Reagan, Clinton, and Bush Sr. understood in one way or another that the mantle of the Presidency confers on the officeholder a solemn duty to present oneself as the leader of a nation during times of triumph and crisis.

Whether you agreed with him or not, Ronald Reagan was able to communicate the aura of presidential leadership - either in his stance against communism or while pushing his domestic policies. Whether you agreed with him or not, George H.W. Bush was able to be accepted as President - telling Saddam Hussein his invasion of Kuwait was unacceptable and building an honest to goodness international coalition to accomplish the task of liberating Kuwait. Whether you agreed with him or not, President Clinton was able to get the people on board with him to push economic and social reforms that helped transform America.

This most basic function of the United States presidency has proven to be lacking time, and time, and time, and time, and time, and time, and time again from George W. Bush. A skill that not only reflects poorly on our national image, but one that has affected whether people will live or die. It is as clear as the Summer night that George W. Bush is simply the worst president of the modern era … and quite possibly the worst we’ve ever had.

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end. (From a NY Times editorial.)

There are high school kids who would be more up to the task.

5. Finally, the Rude Pundit sounds off, and if you haven't heard the Rude Pundit be rude yet, listen up, reader, you never knew from rude before:

The Empty Vessel as President:
Here's the Rude Pundit's fuckin' amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Fuck all yer anti-choice, save the flag bullshit amendments. Here it goes: No motherfucker who became wealthy due to inheritance is allowed to be President. No pampered pukes who get their hands dirty only as a lark. No asshole socially-connected cocksuckers who own three, four homes, fuck, no one who owns a huge fuckin' house they call a "vacation home." Sure, sure, we may have to sacrifice a Kennedy or two along the way, but, shit, and c'mon, between George Bush I's golfing during Hurricane Andrew in 1992 (which was a double fuck-up because not only was he allegedly the President, but he was in the middle of a campaign to do it again) and now George Bush II's, well, fuck, golfing and goofin' on the guitar when a million of his citizens are displaced and over half of them are fucked for good, we can sacrifice a potential liberal or two to ensure that there's never a President Jenna.

For there he was, our goddamned President, standing there in the picturesque Rose Garden, surrounded, like Al Capone with his capos, by his cabinet, as if to say, "Don't worry - you won't have to rely on me." Having been pried away from his "working vacation" like a meth addict from an iodine factory, Bush appeared irritated that he had to talk to us last night. He smirked, he gave a campaign-like laundry list of shit heading to New Orleans and elsewhere, he told us what we already fuckin' knew from CNNMSNBCFox: that Hurricane Katrina was major, that his "folks" around him were ready to do their jobs, but, hell, at least he didn't mention how jim-fuckin-dandy Iraq is.

As always, though, Bush made it all about him and his own defense of his own stupidity: "Right now the days seem awfully dark for those affected -- I understand that," he said. On ABC's Good Morning, Diane Sawyer, Bush said, "I fully understand people wanting things to have happened yesterday ... I understand the anxiety of people on the ground."

"No," someone needs to tell him, "you don't understand. If you had been in New Orleans, you'd've been able to hire a passel of negroes to carry you out of there in your Mercedes. You'd've been able to pay people to let you shit in their hands. You could've paid men and women to lick you to keep you clean, making sure they bathe the waxy folds of your balls with their tongues. You'd've been able to pay for small black children you could cook over a spit and stay nourished and healthy. And when you got out, you'd just jet to one of your other homes. And when the real chaos hits the United States, after gas prices hit five bucks a gallon, you'd've jetted over to one of your European homes. You would not have been stranded in the attic of a house in the Ninth Ward, baking slowly to death, hoping that someone hears your increasingly strangled cries and hacks you out, drinking your own depleting piss, not knowing if the mosquitoes are gonna drain your blood before you finally just pass out and hope that you don't wake up again if it means continuing this suffering, listening to the gunfire outside, and wondering if it's the good guys, the bad guys, and, really, does it matter anymore."

Bush's approach to the incredible madness and degradation and loss of life is the fucked up response of the righteous, the Mother Theresa approach, if you will: suffering is good because it makes you stronger. How can one believe that if it comes from someone who has never paused in the all-encompassing luxury of his life except to heave his drunken guts into toilets that'll be cleaned by servants.

Yesterday he deigned to ascend above the earth to view the devastation below. And looking down, he saw it was bad. He called it by its name, "devastation," and, in fact, could come up with no other words for, lo, his vocabulary was limited. When George Bush looked out of Air Force One at New Orleans and Mississippi for his strangely reminiscent of 9/11 photo-op, did he ask himself how, once again, he could use this tragedy to turn his shambles of a presidency into triumph? Or did he just sigh, remembering that one hole he bogeyed and how the destroyed north shore of Lake Ponchartrain reminded him of all the water traps at the 16th hole in Kennebunkport? Do ya think anyone oughta tell him that all of his bullshit rhetoric about the Iraq War being about preventing harm to Americans in America could perhaps be applied to the numerous environmental, social, and other disasters that are awaiting us? That perhaps that ounce of prevention will cost far, far less than the cure? That a quarter of a day of the budget for the Iraq insanity might have helped solve the levee problems in New Orleans?

Nah. Fuck him. When he told Diane Sawyer that "I don't think anyone could have anticipated the breach of the levees," someone should have taken him, flown him to New Orleans, put him in a tiny pirogue somewhere off Claiborne Avenue, and sent him merrily on his way.

Fuck him. Again. There's insanity in the streets. There's kids dying on the sidewalks of an American city for no other reason than they were too poor to be able to leave the city on their own. And fuck all the commentators that wanna make this about the looters. There's death and disease everywhere, and there's no leader to be found. That's as criminal as anyone who takes a TV.

So let us at long, long last face a stomach-churning, bile-swallowing reality: we have no President. For Presidents at least attempt to lead. Now we are a ship without a rudder, a car without a steering wheel, a pair of balls without a cock. A President would have suspended his schedule of meetings, but the fact that he didn't means that he's insignificant to the whole process. And while that may be seen as a small reason for relief, it is instead a giant void in the center of the American vessel.

NOW TELL ME you don't agree these bloggers lay it on the line better than anyone you've read recently in the MSM (even if one of them ended up quoting the NY Times).