A Reply to Floris on the Dim Dynasty
Dear Floris,
Thanks for checking in on me!
> From: Florisv
> Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 12:47:49 -0700 (PDT)
> To: foxwell@sonic.net
> Subject: [A Freeway in Hell] 10/01/2005 12:47:48 PM
>
> intresting. One could almsot sya there would eb akind of bush dinassty.
Kevin Phillips, who once upon a time was involved in Nixon's 1972 re-election and is partially responsible for the racist "Southern Strategy" that has become the core of Republicanism today, has become, simply by standing fast to the same ideological place he was in in 1972 instead of moving right with the rest of his herd, what passes for a leftist populist progressive in this country. He has written several books, beginning with the 1986 The Politics of Rich and Poor, that give incisive insights into the strategy of the Right here. And one of these books is the recent American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (January 2004) which goes in depressing detail into this foul phenomenon. Not only are the Bushes a dynasty with pretensions of actual kinship with the British royal family; many Americans are in general succumbing to the urge to fawn on nobility and dynastic families. It goes hand in hand with the rise of a corporate aristocracy in practice.
> I wouldn't have voted for Bush.
Glad to hear it. I never did. And I don't believe a majority of Americans who voted in the 2004 election did either. It is an indisputable fact that they certainly didn't in 2000.
>The one thing that I did remark is that his
> younger Brotehr, the governor of Florida, looks far smarter then he.
He certainly seems to be. But W won the 1994 election to be governor of Texas and Jeb lost his bid the same year for Florida, so the dumb one got the nod. Besides, the dumb one was the one the American political system craved, as the perfect instrument of an intellectually vacuous and stupendously immoral set of policies; only an idiot could look at those plans and proclaim them as the "restoration of integrity into government."
And Jeb's brains don't make him any less of a disaster as a leader; they just prove that where stupidity in the Bush dynasty leaves off, evil takes over. Or perhaps W is not as fundamentally dumb as he has always looked; perhaps he is just poisoned by the evil.
I wonder if in the Netherlands you've heard Mater Babs's latest revelation of her character, where she remarked that all the victims from New Orleans were better off in refugee camps since as poor people they never had anything worth keeping anyway. If this family was not evil before George HW married her, it had a sufficient injection then. Nasty woman, and that is these guys' mother. (And the sort of creature mister "Kinder and Gentler America" George Herbert Walker Bush would marry. I sometimes wonder if he deserves her, or if she made him the man he is today and was in 1988).
>Lets hope
> tha tthe next president can undo some of the damage done by current
> govenrment. Many peopel in my country were suprised at how the governemtn
> handled katrian, and at reports of levess not being repaired an the like.
This should have come as no surprise to us, since we've seen how the Republicans handled Iraq. But yes, people were astounded that they'd do the same to Americans. So shocking was this, that veteran Fox news reporters who have been shilling for the Right for years and freely lying to carry out the will of Rupert Murdoch were challenging the media stars who tried to minimize the significance of the suffering these reporters were in the middle of. It just caught them under their ideological radars. Four years of what looks like miserable failure to anybody with a decent concept of humanity, and they were seeing it at last.
We honestly don't know whether the planned levee upgrades would have saved the city or not, but we do know this--for the past 2 years 80 percent of the projected budget for that project was diverted to pay for the war in Iraq, and for tax cuts, and pork for other politicians. Just 1/5 of the money that was supposed to be spent on the project remained. It seems likely to me that at least, the damage would have been less if the project had gone forward as planned.
>But
> something like katrina would hit us, a 300 km area would be destroyed. Still,
> there are so many things that could have been done after the previous
> hurricane in the 1960's, and weren't, I hope that hsi time around they do do
> them. Peoples live could have been saved.
We are all vulnerable, especially in a world which is definitely undergoing warming. There is talk right now of another hurricane in the Gulf that would be named with the letter S. The Gulf is definitely warmer and prone to create both more and stronger tropical storms. I have never spent any time in the Netherlands except for changing planes at Schipohl, and I remember looking with Natasha at the mark that showed sea level--about at my eye level, and Natasha in her wheelchair would have been about half a meter below it.
I really hope to visit the Netherlands someday. But I've been to Florida--if the seas rise, that state will be gone.
> why I found personnally so very
> strange and not just, was how people stayed on holdiay while, this was surely
> a disaster.I think I'm going to reread your post again. It igve a differnt
> view, opinion, then those often seen on the news.
I don't watch TV (unless you count DVDs of science fiction series--all the Star Trek stuff, Lexx, Red Dwarf...) anymore, but I do often listen to Air America radio; most of what I have learned about Katrina comes from web pages or Randi Rhodes on Air America. I wonder if you have any way to hear her in the Netherlands? She is the kind of American one can be proud of.
I have to wonder what they have been saying on Dutch TV.
The whole "let them eat cake" attitude of the Administration, as I have said, did come as a shock to a lot of Americans who are not normally considered at all progressive. Meanwhile, on the left, it has been pointed out that the calloused inaction of the Administration was supplemented by negative action--they actually acted to block private and foreign initiatives to help people out. And we have reason to suspect that the death or destitution and displacement of the mostly African-American New Orleans poor and the devastation of coastal people in general is seen as a windfall by rich people who hope to rebuild the region their way, for their profit. Already the Governor of Mississippi is trying to open the way for converting his state's coastline to a free zone for casinos.
Meanwhile, a lot of people were reminded of Bush's "My Pet Goat" moment on 9/11/01, when after getting the news of the second airplane to crash into the Trade Center, he sat for over 10 minutes, either oblivious or in shock, and continued reading a classroom of Florida school children pages from My Pet Goat. It is hard to figure out whether he is dim, sociopathic, just evil, or some combination of all of them--but this time, only a minority here think he was any kind of leader.
Thanks for checking in on me!
> From: Florisv
> Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 12:47:49 -0700 (PDT)
> To: foxwell@sonic.net
> Subject: [A Freeway in Hell] 10/01/2005 12:47:48 PM
>
> intresting. One could almsot sya there would eb akind of bush dinassty.
Kevin Phillips, who once upon a time was involved in Nixon's 1972 re-election and is partially responsible for the racist "Southern Strategy" that has become the core of Republicanism today, has become, simply by standing fast to the same ideological place he was in in 1972 instead of moving right with the rest of his herd, what passes for a leftist populist progressive in this country. He has written several books, beginning with the 1986 The Politics of Rich and Poor, that give incisive insights into the strategy of the Right here. And one of these books is the recent American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (January 2004) which goes in depressing detail into this foul phenomenon. Not only are the Bushes a dynasty with pretensions of actual kinship with the British royal family; many Americans are in general succumbing to the urge to fawn on nobility and dynastic families. It goes hand in hand with the rise of a corporate aristocracy in practice.
> I wouldn't have voted for Bush.
Glad to hear it. I never did. And I don't believe a majority of Americans who voted in the 2004 election did either. It is an indisputable fact that they certainly didn't in 2000.
>The one thing that I did remark is that his
> younger Brotehr, the governor of Florida, looks far smarter then he.
He certainly seems to be. But W won the 1994 election to be governor of Texas and Jeb lost his bid the same year for Florida, so the dumb one got the nod. Besides, the dumb one was the one the American political system craved, as the perfect instrument of an intellectually vacuous and stupendously immoral set of policies; only an idiot could look at those plans and proclaim them as the "restoration of integrity into government."
And Jeb's brains don't make him any less of a disaster as a leader; they just prove that where stupidity in the Bush dynasty leaves off, evil takes over. Or perhaps W is not as fundamentally dumb as he has always looked; perhaps he is just poisoned by the evil.
I wonder if in the Netherlands you've heard Mater Babs's latest revelation of her character, where she remarked that all the victims from New Orleans were better off in refugee camps since as poor people they never had anything worth keeping anyway. If this family was not evil before George HW married her, it had a sufficient injection then. Nasty woman, and that is these guys' mother. (And the sort of creature mister "Kinder and Gentler America" George Herbert Walker Bush would marry. I sometimes wonder if he deserves her, or if she made him the man he is today and was in 1988).
>Lets hope
> tha tthe next president can undo some of the damage done by current
> govenrment. Many peopel in my country were suprised at how the governemtn
> handled katrian, and at reports of levess not being repaired an the like.
This should have come as no surprise to us, since we've seen how the Republicans handled Iraq. But yes, people were astounded that they'd do the same to Americans. So shocking was this, that veteran Fox news reporters who have been shilling for the Right for years and freely lying to carry out the will of Rupert Murdoch were challenging the media stars who tried to minimize the significance of the suffering these reporters were in the middle of. It just caught them under their ideological radars. Four years of what looks like miserable failure to anybody with a decent concept of humanity, and they were seeing it at last.
We honestly don't know whether the planned levee upgrades would have saved the city or not, but we do know this--for the past 2 years 80 percent of the projected budget for that project was diverted to pay for the war in Iraq, and for tax cuts, and pork for other politicians. Just 1/5 of the money that was supposed to be spent on the project remained. It seems likely to me that at least, the damage would have been less if the project had gone forward as planned.
>But
> something like katrina would hit us, a 300 km area would be destroyed. Still,
> there are so many things that could have been done after the previous
> hurricane in the 1960's, and weren't, I hope that hsi time around they do do
> them. Peoples live could have been saved.
We are all vulnerable, especially in a world which is definitely undergoing warming. There is talk right now of another hurricane in the Gulf that would be named with the letter S. The Gulf is definitely warmer and prone to create both more and stronger tropical storms. I have never spent any time in the Netherlands except for changing planes at Schipohl, and I remember looking with Natasha at the mark that showed sea level--about at my eye level, and Natasha in her wheelchair would have been about half a meter below it.
I really hope to visit the Netherlands someday. But I've been to Florida--if the seas rise, that state will be gone.
> why I found personnally so very
> strange and not just, was how people stayed on holdiay while, this was surely
> a disaster.I think I'm going to reread your post again. It igve a differnt
> view, opinion, then those often seen on the news.
I don't watch TV (unless you count DVDs of science fiction series--all the Star Trek stuff, Lexx, Red Dwarf...) anymore, but I do often listen to Air America radio; most of what I have learned about Katrina comes from web pages or Randi Rhodes on Air America. I wonder if you have any way to hear her in the Netherlands? She is the kind of American one can be proud of.
I have to wonder what they have been saying on Dutch TV.
The whole "let them eat cake" attitude of the Administration, as I have said, did come as a shock to a lot of Americans who are not normally considered at all progressive. Meanwhile, on the left, it has been pointed out that the calloused inaction of the Administration was supplemented by negative action--they actually acted to block private and foreign initiatives to help people out. And we have reason to suspect that the death or destitution and displacement of the mostly African-American New Orleans poor and the devastation of coastal people in general is seen as a windfall by rich people who hope to rebuild the region their way, for their profit. Already the Governor of Mississippi is trying to open the way for converting his state's coastline to a free zone for casinos.
Meanwhile, a lot of people were reminded of Bush's "My Pet Goat" moment on 9/11/01, when after getting the news of the second airplane to crash into the Trade Center, he sat for over 10 minutes, either oblivious or in shock, and continued reading a classroom of Florida school children pages from My Pet Goat. It is hard to figure out whether he is dim, sociopathic, just evil, or some combination of all of them--but this time, only a minority here think he was any kind of leader.
posted by Mark H. Foxwell | 10:11 AM
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