Everyone is slamming poor Dubya. Everyone is saying, oh my God, he's
more inept than we ever imagined, he has no idea what's really going
on, he's oblivious and in denial and he pretty much let all those poor
black people die in filth and misery, and he basically ignored the
massive Katrina disaster for days before finally being pressured into
cutting his umpteenth vacation short and actually taking action.

This is what they're saying. Kanye West was right, Bush doesn't care
about black people, or the poor, or anything that doesn't directly
serve his handlers' agenda or flatter his monochromatic ego or anything
that isn't spelled out for him in nice simplistic pie charts and
reassuring matronly tones.

And lo, the darts are slinging in from around the world, according to
SF Gate's own World Views column: "Maddening incompetence ...
reminiscent of a drought-stricken African state," says Britain's Daily
Mail. "Can't get it together," says a major paper in Italy. "A plethora
of grim tales of disaster," says the Scotsman. "Superpower or Third
World?" asks the Spanish daily Noticias de =C1lava. Why did BushCo fail
its first great national-security test since Sept. 11, despite having
two days' advance notice of Katrina's wrath? asks Le Monde. And on it
goes, the world's powers looking on in one part shock and one part
disgust and all parts repugnance for Bush's rampant ineptitude and
America's apparent inability to take care of its own.

But it's so unfair, isn't it, to attack poor Dubya like this? Just a
little misplaced? After all, Bush has always been the rich white man's
president. He is the CEO president, the megacorporate businessman's
friend, the thug of the religious right, a big reservoir-tipped condom
for all energy magnates, protecting against the nasty STDs of
humanitarianism and progress and social responsibility.

He has always been merely an entirely selective figurehead, out of
touch and eternally dumbfounded, a hand puppet of the neoconservative
machine built and fluffed up and carefully placed for the very specific
job of protecting their interests, no matter what. Repeat: No. Matter.
What. Flood hurricane disaster war social breakdown economic collapse?
Doesn't matter. Corporate interests =FCber alles, baby. Protect the
core, reassure the base, screw everyone else unless it begins to affect
the poll numbers and then finger-point, deflect, prevaricate. All of a
piece, really. Because Bush, he was never actually meant to, you know,
lead.

So maybe it's time to stop with the savaging of poor Dubya. He is,
after all, doing a simply beautiful job of kowtowing to his wealthiest
supporters while slamming the poor and running the nation into a deep
hole and creating the largest deficit in American history, all while
his cronies in oil and industry and military supply and Big Energy gain
immense and staggering wealth and pay less and less tax on it. This is
what he was hired to do. This is why he is in office. Hell, the day
after Katrina, Bush flew right by Louisiana and headed straight to San
Diego to party with his Greatest Generation cronies. Reassure the
masters, first and foremost, eh Shrub? Understood.

Is this not what we all expected? Can you reasonably say you thought it
would be different? Just look. All major social services are being
gutted. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is a joke, second in
line only to the ungodly useless Homeland Security Department, which
has become about as reassuring and trustworthy and humane an
organization as a prison in Guant=E1namo.

The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked
for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans just
last year. The White House hacked that down to about $40 million, even
as it passed the most bloated and nauseatingly pork-filled $12.3
billion energy bill in recent history, one that guaranteed we'd be
sucking at the tit of foreign oil and kneeling before Bush's pals in
Big Energy for decades to come, even as more and more teenagers die in
Iraq for Bush's inept and failed war. Yay politics.

Why didn't National Guardsmen from Louisiana and Mississippi march into
New Orleans immediately after Katrina exited to take charge and keep
the peace? Why, because most of them are serving in that same violent
and brutally costly war in Iraq, silly. Fully 30 percent of the guard
is stuck over there, along with 50 percent of their equipment. Yay
Vietnam 2.0.

Why did FEMA chief Michael Brown wait hours after Katrina struck to
timidly plead with his parent company, Homeland Security, for some
backup, not to actually get their hands dirty but rather to help
"convey a positive image" about the government's response to the
victims? Why, because he's an incompetent lackey Bush appointee who was
fired from his former job as head of something called the International
Arabian Horse Association. Yay pathetic nepotism.

Just look. Senate majority leader Sen. Bill Frist, icon of hollow
self-righteousness and the energy magnate's friend, has already
leveraged the Katrina nightmare to argue for more drilling in Alaska,
much in the way BushCo whored Sept. 11 to cram the Patriot Act down the
nation's throat and make fear and xenophobia a national pastime. And
let's not forget trusty profit-sucking sidekick Halliburton, which has
already scored a sweet deal to help repair Katrina damage, thanks to
the fact that the former director of FEMA is now a Halliburton
lobbyist. Ah, war and death and tragedy. They are just so goddamn
profitable, right, Dubya?

And then, the kicker. Then you read that Bush has actually ordered an
official probe into the botched Katrina relief efforts, a formal
federal investigation into what went wrong, which is a bit like a shark
ordering an investigation into what happened to all the fish. Unless
this probe starts and ends in the White House, unless it hangs Bush
himself up by his monkey ears and dangles him over a river of toxic
Louisiana sewage, it's merely useless and insulting and more than a
little sad.

Let's say it outright. The truest measure of any president, of any
leader, is how well he takes care of his own people. And Bush, well,
Bush has done a simply spectacular job of taking care of exactly his
own people -- the wealthy, the corporate, the extreme religious right,
his core base of supporters -- while happily and fiercely ignoring,
restricting, condemning, destroying the rest. Are you educated or
progressive or liberal or alternative-minded or sexually open or
homosexual or anti-war? This means you. Are you dirt poor and belong to
a minority and don't drive an SUV and contribute six figures per annum
to the RNC and maybe live in a flooded swamp in the Louisiana bayou?
This means you, squared. Sucker.

Here, then, is the new American motto, as reimagined by BushCo: Give us
your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and we'll let them die in a
filthy and decrepit storm-ravaged American football stadium while our
president languishes on vacation and ponders his oil futures and fondly
remembers his good ol' days of getting drunk at Mardi Gras before going
AWOL from the military. God bless America