A Small Man in a Tiny Room Before the Big Storm:
There he sits, in a tiny room, like a safe room in a drug lord's family home, like a bomb shelter in a Cold War suburban backyard, a tiny room in the middle of his massive faux ranch, a vacation home, a mockery of everything that the West stands for, because a real rancher, real ranch hands, on real ranches, would shake their heads in pity at the idea of a ranch being a retreat from work. In that appropriately grainy video of the conferences before Hurricane Katrina took out a large chunk of the Gulf Coast, there he sits, our goddamned President, being told everything he would lie about later: that lives would be lost, that the levees wouldn't hold, that so much was going to be needed.

And all he says is: "I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm to help you deal with the loss of property. And we pray for no loss of life, of course." Property before life, always, always, always with this President. And prayer, of course.

Maybe later, when Bush said that no one could have anticipated any of the awful things that all the other people in that video are clearly, cogently anticipating, maybe Bush was telling the truth from his perspective. He obviously wasn't paying attention. For if one panned around the space, one could see that the tiny room wasn't actually a situation room, but the President's private porn viewing theatre. Yes, while the Michaels Brown and Chertoff appeared on a couple of monitors, with the National Hurricane Center guy and others speaking, the large plasma screen TV was playing a loop of graphic animal fucking videos, intermixed with interspecies fucking. The President had been engaged in his morning ritual of using a cow doll to fuck himself, its cottony pussy washed every night by a special military detail.

Since he was a young man in Midland, the President has had a favorite cow. Indeed, he used to fuck a particularly sassy hereford heifer in the barn on his family property. Young George thought it was love; indeed, love would never be as pure for George, even if sometimes Laura puts on the rubber udders for him to fondle. Jeb found out about it, spying on his brother through a knothole in the old red-painted wood, and, being a particularly enterprising Bush, he started charging the neighbor kids a buck a peek. It's the reason why so many particularly incompetent and/or evil people from Texas seem to have positions of great power in the Bush administration: if a man has watched you fuck a cow, you better treat that man well.

You see, then, of course, that Bush couldn't have been fully engaged in the conversation on the morning of August 28, before Katrina struck land. For when Michael Brown, who comes across looking much less little bitch-like than ever, said that if the hurricane deviated slightly from its path, "I do expect there will be some of the levees overtopped," the President of the United States was fucking a stuffed cow in rapturous memory of his past. And who are the heads of FEMA and the DHS to interrupt such a reverie, such bliss, with news of the nasty big storm?

White House spokestooge Trent Duffy assured reporters that Bush was "engaged" with what was going on during Katrina. What is it with Republican presidents that their press people need to constantly assure the public that the Leader o' the Free World is "engaged" or "understands" or "reads"? And for all the good that Bush's engagement did as Michael Brown and others pleaded for help with the metastasizing disaster, well, there's few among us who could tell George Bush to stop fuckin' that stuffed cow and pay attention to the nation. The saddest part is that the administration's reaction is right: the video's nothing new. It's just more of the same.

George W. Bush is the anti-Midas. Everything he touches turns to shit. And then he tries to convince us that shit is actually gold. Isn't it time for the few non shit-statue Republicans to say enough is enough? Is there any reason that hundreds of thousands of us shouldn't be marching on Washington on a daily basis?

Tomorrow - as promised from yesterday - why Karl Rove fears the Rude Pundit: How To Start a Civil War in the Republican Party.