The "real" America

This about says it all, from the BeatBushGear Cafe Press store.

As the crypto-fascist NeoCon zombie brigade tries to circle their wagons, even Bush's trips to the Gulf to look concerned unravel to reveal the truth: nothing but callous blatant PR photo ops. The Salt Lake Tribune reported yesterday that the 1,400 firefighters gathered from around the country by FEMA, instead of using their firefighting, search-and-rescue, paramedic, or haz-mat skills, they were herded into a conference room in Atlanta, forced to sit through an eight-hour sensitivity training class, and told their were to be "community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA." This was on Monday, when their expertise might have been put to better use rescuing people and putting out fires.

To add insult to injury, a team of 50 of these firefighters were flown to Louisiana--so they could accompany Bush on his tour.
In addition, he apparently set up another photo op of the 17th Street levee being fixed, and yet another of an open air food distribution point. On top of that, rescue efforts had to be halted for hours while Bush was in the area, since the airways had to be kept clear.

Laura "It was an accident!" Bush did her part, as well. She commandeered the computer in Lafayette's Cajundome--the only room with phone and internet access for the evacuees--for eight hours, along with the food service rooms and the ladies showers, so she could manipulate a feel-good photo op "helping" seven evacuees.

The excellent Daily Kos blog expresses just the right eloquent outrage:

This is a clear signal of the depravity of this administration, were everything is political and nothing can be real. Nothing can be done simply because it's the right thing to do, or it's the best thing for America. There is a "real" America, and then there's Rove's America, where firemen serve the Republican Party and their leader, not people in distress. The Republican banner flies over the Stars and Stripes.

That the NeoCons are living in a different reality isn't such a surprise; it was admitted in an October 2004 New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind, where Suskind quotes a Bush aide:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-- "Ozymandias," Percy Bysshe Shelley