BUSH WATCH...
David Cogswell
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REPORT FROM THE FRONT
They got this idea that Bush was a great hero after 9/11, and somehow they have gotten a huge portion of the country to believe it. At least up to now, but that number is steadily diminishing as sure as Bush Senior's aura melted after the Gulf War in the middle of his term. New Yorkers didn't see the Trade Center burning on television squeezed in between commercials and narrated by CNN or Fox goons, they saw it with their own eyes, they smelled it, they felt the grime of human destruction collecting in the sweat on their arms. Their policemen and firemen died and many who survived have developed chronic health problems. 9/11 isn't a photo op to be used to re-elect the creep, as it is for Karl Rove and his followers. It is real life.
While Bush was sitting like an idiot in a grade school classroom in Florida, people in New York were burning and falling 100 stories onto the concrete below. While he was cruising around to Alabama and Nebraska, New Yorkers were dealing with the reality of massive death and destruction. While New York went through its hellish ordeal, Bush and Rumsfeld were missing in action. When Bush came and made his speech at Ground Zero a few days later when his handlers had finally gathered their wits and decided how to utilize the disaster as a political opportunity, people were desperate to believe in a leader, any leader who may help them, protect them. Bush played the role and many people bought it, many still do. But it played much better on TV than it did to New Yorkers.
They saw Bush promise a big aid package to New York to help it recover from the catastrophe, then later renege without a word of explanation, as his spin-driven administration does with almost every promise. But in New York, people remember like they still remember Gerald Ford's "Drop Dead" during the fiscal crisis in the 1970s. This is not Republicanville, USA.
They saw the Bush administration use their suffering to promote every brutal program the far right dreamed of, to slash funding for programs that help people survive and to drop the struggle to capture the perpetrators of the crime and channel everything into a crackpot idea to invade Iraq, which had nothing to do with any of the above.
Hence the CNN poll showing only a 25% approval rating for Bush in New York, 70% disapprove. And approval ratings are the most minimal measure of approval. It's been shown over and over in opinion polls that Bush gets approval ratings from people who dislike everything his administration does. He gets "approval" from many who also say they don't want to re-elect him. Negative approval ratings might better be called loathing ratings.
Bush's simplistic, fear-based, anti-science, anti-humanistic, far right fundamentalist Christian Medievalism may work for someone in Alabama, but it's not selling too well in Manhattan.
New York is the most unBush place in the US. If the anti-Bush states are blue, New York is ultraviolet. Republicans who, unlike Bush do not have armored limousines and military escorts are likely to be a little intimidated. These are the people whose world views are dictated by Fox News, who actually believe it, and studies have shown what is obvious: they are scared of almost everything. They think their enemies are all around ready to leap out from behind every corner. New York is not imagined to be a very congenial environment to the Red State types anyway, so now that they are trying to use it as a backdrop to celebrate Bushism, they must be nearly in a frenzy of Fox-inspired panic.
It's going to be interesting indeed. There will, as always, be the TV fantasy, and then the reality on the street, which people in the Red States will never see. They will see New York through the eyes of Fox.
Norman Mailer said the Republicans probably want violence to occur so they can use it in their propaganda. Just think, he said, why did the Republicans choose New York for their convention? But Naomi Klein countered that when they chose it, they probably thought they were going to be on a big roll and it would be a glorious setting for their triumph. Support for Bush has unraveled dramatically in the last year.
Sure, there are plenty of Republicans in New York. Wall Street is a Republican bastion, or rather, the Republican party is a subsidiary of Wall Street. The giant corporate office buildings that cluster in Midtown are the capitol buildings of the corporate state. There are plenty of rich people in New York, although fewer of them are swayed by Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest 5% than in the rest of the country. Here they see in highly concentrated terms what the dismantling of New Deal liberalism means to the quality of life.
No one knows how this high drama will play out. Bush, in spite of his theatrical bravado, is also a timid little soul in real life, so it's unlikely he will personally see a lot of New York, or it him. He'll stay cloistered and armored in his little Bush fantasy. But for the rest of it, it could be quite a show.
by David CogswellAugust 28, 2004
Barbarians at the Gate
The View from Across the Hudson -- Now the Republicans descend upon New York. What a riot! Let me rephrase that. The idea of the Republicans holding their convention to recrown their king is ludicrous. The Republican spinsters -- namely Rove and the minds that extend from his like tentacles -- have been spinning so furiously for so long, piling so many blatant lies on top of each other, that they seem to practically believe their own fantasies.
Hello Ralph, Hello Four More Years Of Bush
by David Cogswell
Rove, Bush and Company are happy now, and have good reason to be. According to an AP-Ipsos poll, Kerry's lead over Bush just went to Nader. (See SF Gate) So looks like we're looking at four more years of Bush, the end of abortion rights, lots more wars, continued progression of the police state at home, increasing economic impoverishment for most, a drive for military domination of the world.
Thanks Ralph, very progressive. Now Ralph is really becoming a bummer. I was never quite for calling him a spoiler in the last election. I wished that he would make a coalition with those closest to him who had a chance of winning, but I accepted his premise about how the country needs to be open to new parties. But now I think Ralph is in a cloud somewhere. Ralph, this is no longer relevant!
The content of what Ralph is saying is valid, that's what is seductive about his candidacy. Everything he said about corporations in the '70s is still true today, only worse. But the whole context of what he is saying has changed. It has changed in large part because of what he is doing. He himself changes the political dynamic. Paradoxically, he changes it in a way that materially, drastically worsens his own cause. Why can't he see this? And there he stands insisting that he has every right to be there; and sure he has the right to be there, but that's not the point. Sure the U.S. needs a real opposition party, but not a third party splitting whatever viable opposition there is to a criminal regime at a desperate moment. His logic for running sounds like some kind of ivory tower logic, some pure Platonic exercise. Your theories don't matter if the actual result of your action is the destruction of your stated agenda.
Ralph, come on! Wake up! 2004 compared to 1974 is a meta-reality. The universe has expanded in an accelerated evolution so that the world of 1974 is only a small element of the world we are now living in. Your theories about what is wrong with America are still valid, but your actions are out of touch with reality. You are dividing those who stand for those principles and aiding and abetting the crime syndicate that is now running the U.S. government. Wake up, Ralph!
In the 1970s Nader was effective. He used the power of the court to create changes in America which were largely beneficial. Safer cars, safer factories, the assertion of the responsibility and accountability that must be demanded of corporations as well as people. Those were great things. Running as a third party candidate in 2004 when Bush is running for a second term is not. It is delusional.
This is a very serious juncture in history. This is a confrontation between a corporate oligarchy that has asserted its right to rule as an autocracy and those who still believe in a democratic republican form of government. Yeah, Ralph, we know the Democrats and Republicans are the same in many ways, but not all of them in all ways. And this is no longer about Republicans and Democrats. This is about a fascist military police state, and the hope of resistance to it and the maintenance of whatever degree of freedom and justice is still possible.
Under pressure your true character asserts itself and through your actions you create your destiny. For Kerry, there is a chance to rise to the call of history, to rise beyond his privileged faction and become a leader for the real majority of Americans. He could do that, or he could cave in and cleave to his Skull & Bones Yale good ole boy network.
As for George W. Bush, I hate to even contemplate the existential choices of the man. I see virtually no chance for him to ever become more than a spoiled brat whose great joy in life is flaunting how much he can get away with. I don't see any capacity for growth, the remotest possibility of expanding, repenting from his selfish, small-minded, vicious ways and seeing a more authentic spiritual reality. I would as soon expect to see crocodiles become friendly.
But Nader has some essential value as a contributor of something positive to American life in his time on the scene. But he is essentially out of touch now. His theories are no longer engaged with the reality he exists in and acts upon. He has the potential of making an existential decision that will put him on a level that accommodates his theories with his actual effect on the world he lives in. He could negotiate an agreement with those who constitute the only viable opposition with a hope of unseating Bush. He could have an actual positive effect on the dialogue, even on the political bartering. And he could continue that without holding any office.
But as a third party candidate, he has virtually no chance of having a positive effect on the actual quality of life in the United States in the coming years. No effect on our chances of coming out of this assault on our democratic values and rights. No chance of tempering the ongoing corporate takeover of the world, in fact, actually enabling the greatest agent of that corporate movement: George Bush (either one of them, you name it).
Okay, so Nader is just one person. If he's behaving in a somewhat deluded manner after 40 years as an activist, that's forgivable. Now the issue is the American people. Just as the most important thing about the Dean campaign was the people's movement that buoyed it, the Bummer movement is not about just Nader himself. It's about how many people sign on to Nader's presidential campaign. The rest of his agenda is pretty much on the mark, at least as much as any mainstream politician. But the presidential run is not a good idea. It's lunacy. It's a mad bull attacking a red cape. It is Karl Rove's dream come true.
Come down, Ralph! And everyone else with any sense, let's get together and get George W. Bush out of office. And then we can continue to work for a less corporate-controlled government. Then we can splinter into various causes. But not now.
Right now you are making George W. Bush look very smart. --posted 03.11.04
"The Strange Personality Of George W."
Every once in a while we experience one of those little moments when a small tear breaks through the social fabric and allows us a glimpse of its underlying workings.
A Knight Rider reporter was treated to such a rare glimpse and apparently couldn't resist including it in his story, though it was tangential to the narrative. And no editor cut it out, so we are left with a gem, a glimpse into the strange personality of George W.
The article was a description of Bush's speech announcing that he had ordered strikes to begin on Iraq. Here's the quote: "Minutes before the speech, an internal television monitor showed the president pumping his fist. 'Feels good,' he said."
Dubya is now at the brink of what he has pushed for relentlessly for years, perhaps as far back as 1992 when Bill Clinton was elected and ruined Daddy Bush's chance to continue his agenda and get a few more armed engagements in, which surely would have included a return to Iraq to take revenge for his embarassment over people talking about "the wimp factor" and saying he was a little feminine.
CNN started hyping "Iraq: The Unfinished War" with its own logo back in December 2001 even before George W. took office. It has been a long time coming. It took 911 to clear the way for the war Bush desired so passionately. Now he is so close he can taste it. The blood has begun to flow, and it is exhilarating. Soon he will have Saddam Hussein's head.
We are talking now about the guy who as a kid put firecrackers in frogs and threw them into the air to watch them explode. He cracked himself up in an interview with Talk magazine by mocking a woman on death row whose cries for mercy he scorned, screwing up his face and saying, "Please don't kill me!" in an impersonation of the deceased. He presided over more executions as governor of Texas than any governor since capital punishment was legalized after being ruled unconstitutional for a number of years. And his own people said he never spent more than 15 minutes deliberating over whether to sign the order to kill. This included at least one case in which the public defender slept during the trial, and many other cases in which they obviously just took the money and ran, leaving their client to the mercy of a vicious and corrupt system.
So here is George preparing to give his speech announcing that the killing has begun in Iraq, the long-awaited moment. And there he is pumping his fist and saying, "Feels good!" It makes perfect sense, too much sense.
That's one for the history books.
--David Cogswell, 03.21.03
According to the Denver Post, "The bodies of U.S. soldiers killed by chemical or biological weapons in Iraq or future wars may be bulldozed into mass graves and burned to save the lives of surviving troops, under an option being considered by the Pentagon."
Now think this over. Let it sink in. We are talking about the lives of young Americans, our families and friends. Sure, the phony tough guys like Rumsfeld justify every act on the basis of something like, "Well, war is not a nice thing. Sometimes in war you have to do things that aren't nice."
This is fine if you are talking about a scenario like the Battle of Britain where the Nazis were bombing the country in preparation for an invasion in which they would to take over the country, turn its people into slaves or corpses and systematically rob it of all its resources.
When Churchill said we will fight them on the beaches and we will fight every step of the way and never give up, he was articulating the only acceptable response to the situation that was then facing the nation. His call resonated in people's hearts because it was what they all believed and what they all knew they had to do. It was that spirit that won the war and will always win wars.
That spirit was not present in Americans in the Vietnam War because it was not a war for freedom or for the protection of the nation, though it was falsely touted to be. It was an imperial war, a war of colonial empire. That kind of war runs counter to the American spirit, the spirit that underlies the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution. America is not an empire. America's founding documents do not lay a groundwork for empire, they lay a groundwork for a democratic republic.
When your country is being attacked you do whatever is necessary to protect it. That goes without saying, and I think most Americans, just as most people in most countries, would make whatever sacrifice is required to protect their families, their communities and their homeland. But that sacrifice -- the ultimate sacrifice -- must never be taken lightly. Even the most hardened of military leaders -- if they are real leaders -- regard that sacrifice with a kind of reverance, and don't take it lightly.
This is no doubt underlying the conflicts we are now seeing between the group of war mongers who have never participated in war themselves and the military professionals who are urging restraint and are being accused of treason by the gang in possession of the presidential palace. (See Rumsfeld criticizes top staff", Role reversal: Bush wants war, Pentagon urges caution or Dubya Clashes with Military Leaders)
When you are talking about a military action like what is now being pushed against Iraq, we are far beyond the kind of clearly justified military action that is worthy of asking someone to make the supreme sacrifice. As many have said, including many Republicans, Bush has yet to make this case to the American people.
George W. said in a recent interview in US News that he fully intends to ask Americans to continue put their lives on the line for him. He spoke of it in terms of how he was going to use his "political capital, and made clear that he was going to use it to get people to fight wars for him. "You know, when you've got kids off in Afghanistan," he said, "the remote regions of Afghanistan, hunting in caves for al Qaeda killers, you're asking a lot of people. And we'll continue asking them to make that sacrifice."
Now consider the betrayal this represents. Young Americans who are blocked out of the kinds of educational and career opportunities that were handed to George W. just for being born into the right family are choosing to go into the military based on hype about career training. And of course they are making a commitment to defend their country.
But they are not making a commitment to fight George W. Bush's oil wars, or to fulfill his crowd's dreams of world domination. That is not the way the contract reads. That is not a legitimate requirement of these young men and women. And sooner or later they are going to figure that out. Hopefully they will figure it out before they are permanently damaged or destroyed. Hopefully it will be before they sully themselves with complicity in the murder of innocent women and children.
If George W. believes the hype about himself so much that he thinks people are going to willingly throw their lives on the line for his personal ambitions, he is deceiving himself. He is an even bigger fool than he has yet revealed himself to be.
He is deceiving himself if he believes that his charisma, or his supposed popularity, or what he calls his political capital is powerful enough to dupe people into sacrificing their lives for an unjust cause, for oil wars, or wars of conquest. Americans do not need that kind of war and will not dedicate themselves to such a hollow cause.
Dubya has been so isolated from the real world and the real concerns of real people his whole life, he is believing his own PR. He thinks he's Lincoln, he has practically said as much. (Read the whole interview, or see a commentary, "The Mind of Bush".) He thinks he's going to inspire a generation of young Americans to make the supreme sacrifice for his causes. And even with the horrifying spectacle of 911 to strike fear into the hearts of Americans, Bush's wars are transparently not for the nation, they are for the oligarchy.
So I hate to tell you, George, and I know it's going to be hard for you to break it to your "supporters," who expect results from you, but the nation is not going to rally around you and your wars of empire. It ain't happenin'. 01. 25. 03
Big Brother Says, "You've Got War!"
This morning Big Brother AOL is blasting a headline about which stocks will make money off the war. Ugh. Let's see a picture of Steve Case's smiling robot face juxtaposed next to the picture of a dying Iraqi child. Is there not the slightest bit of decorum or decency left in the hearts of the moneymadmen?
"The prospect of an invasion of Iraq has investors feeling jittery," it tells us in its inhuman, flat voice. "But the reality might not be so bad for the market. Some sectors and some well-positioned companies may even thrive." Gosh, is that really so Big Brother? Do some companies actually make money off war? Imagine that. What a great deal! We ought to get in on that.
For those who are really titilated by this, AOL goes on. "Sending troops into battle has often signaled a great buying opportunity. But where should you be looking? Start with the following stocks and sectors.
Wait a minute. Stop there a minute and let this soak in: Sending troops into battle has often signaled a great buying opportunity.
Doesn't anyone in the AOL Time Warner evil empire know an actual human being who may be one of those soldiers who is being sent into battle in that land made radioactive with the depleted uranium left by the Gulf War? Can't anyone in the department that writes their "news copy" imagine that some poor mother is going to read that and have to imagine people salivating over the nickels and dimes that are going to drop into their bank accounts because Bush is sending her son into a perilous life- and health-threatening situation. For investors?
How vulgar can they get? How inhuman do they intend to make us "consumers" with their indoctrination? Are they expecting us to just nod our heads with dull stares when they talk about sending our young men to risk their lives for the benefit of investors? Or are we supposed to get really excited and eager?
To think that Americans have been so densitized that AOL can get away with such an affront is horrifying. Have the corporate media really wiped away all human feeling about killing? Is this what we have come to? If that is the case, I fear for America, because it will come back. It definitely will. No nation can wreak such violence on other people with so little consciousness of what they are doing without eventually reaping some of the spoils itself.
As usual, however, the people who take the blow will not be the ones who are dishing it out. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and all the other mongers strike war upon the world and then hide in their bunkers while the rest of us are sitting ducks for the reprisals that will inevitably come.
Welcome davidcogs ...
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Hello, david cogswell. Welcome to Live Technical Support. My name is Vinee.
You stated your issue is: how do you lodge complaints with aol?
AOLTechTRR: Hi David, pleased to meet you.
AOLTechTRR: I sincerely apologize for the difficulties you are currently experiencing.
davidcogs: I want to complain to the editor about the lead story that says, "Sending troops into battle has often signaled
a great buying opportunity."
davidcogs: I have friends who may be called to die or be contaminated with depleted uranium, and I think it's disgusting for them to talk like that about it
davidcogs: I just want to lodge my complaint with the editors
davidcogs: how do I do that?
AOLTechTRR: I understand you have comments, complaints and suggestions about the news contents featured recently on AOL.
AOLTechTRR: Your opinion makes a difference and is very much appreciated for it serve as basis on how we can further improve our service to you, our valued AOL members.
davidcogs: Yes. Are you a person or an artificial intelligence program?
AOLTechTRR: Yes, I am a person, David.
davidcogs: sorry, where do I write to the editors?
AOLTechTRR: Please allow me to escalate this issue of yours by filing a report to the appropriate staff members for review and for the necessary actions to be taken place. I assure you that they will deal this with utmost importance.
AOLTechTRR: I know how you feel about this issue.
davidcogs: thank you very much
The session has ended! --11.22.02