Wednesday, May 17

Adding My .00035 to the Sum Total of Left Blogosphere Nastiness

In my defense, I had to go to the mall today...

A) Waterworks

So, a television reporter just happened to notice Tony Snow's yellow bracelet and asked him about it. Uh-huh. Sure. Right.

I'm not even gonna bother with the "Oh, I'm not bashing Tony Snow and his brave fight against cancer" bizness. I don't really care if this gets misconstrued somewhere, and anyway, so what else is new? Lots of people fight the brave fight with cancer, and a lot of 'em don't have the health care benefits Tony Snow and the White House Press Corps types have. Snow, regardless of whether he once was brave enough, or firmly in grasp of the obvious enough, or desperate enough for attention to call his new boss "a double-digit IQ'd frat boy" is a card-carrying member of the party which has shot down public health care and cheap Canadian prescription drugs. When he weeps openly for everybody who's left out, lemme know.

But mostly it's the fact of this phony fucking set-up on Day One. Oh, looky, the new WH Press Secretary is human! Screw that noise. You people want to have a little party have it on your own time. Tony Snow is the replacement mouthpiece. Ari Fleischer was not the problem. Scott McClellan was not the problem. The people they work for are the problem, and it makes no difference who's doing their lying for them. I'm sure Tony Snow once had a beloved puppy, and may have saved a small Mexican child from drowning once. Give him a cake. Don't give him five minutes of the people's time for his Emmy highlight reel.

B) The Popular Bush

Nora Ephron at HuffPo gives Laura Bush points for saying "Yes" when asked if she's a feminist, even if that's full of shit. It's a point well taken. But someone tell me how the Washable Synthetic First Lady rates a 73% personal approval rating when all she's done is trot out onto the public stage when required and deliver a bunch of mealy-mouthed crap about The Wonderful Man She Married? Okay, and one time, one time, she told a joke about masturbating livestock. So she's got a highlight reel, too.

Oh, and she's in favor of reading. Great. She also took two days longer than her husband to wake up to the fact of Katrina, and once they finally got her up for a couple of walking-three-paces-behind-him photo ops it was so she could inform people who'd actually been paying attention to the thing for a full week that television was misleading them. You know, by showing pictures of people who'd been through the worst natural disaster in American history an' stuff, instead of focusing on the number of schools we'd be repainting.

The worst natural disaster in US history, and she stayed in Crawford to oversee the packing. She couldn't say, "Get me a fucking camera crew down here now so I can film a Red Cross appeal"?

I know, poll numbers are poll numbers, and she's the recipient of a sort of telephonic mercy hump, people saying they like her in a sort of act of contrition for hating her husband now when they know if they'd admitted he was an idiot six years ago and hated him then they wouldn't find themselves dealing with the fact that he's a criminally-inclined idiot now. Still, three-quarters of the population? For an act that bad? Maybe it's time for an Istar remake.

6 comments:

Doug said...

Ishtar! See, that shows just how bad the weenies in power are. I'm extremely tolerant of crap. I liked Ishtar. And, even with that level of tolerance for awfulness, I loathe the Bush administration.

Anonymous said...

Nice start to my day, Riley. I love banging on my desk with my shoe and ranting.

Anonymous said...

Thank you. Yeah, I love those humanizing touches that scrim the awful policies: Tony Snow has cancer and might even donate to a charity, Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter, George has a dog and is filled with com-pah-shunn, Paul Wolfowitz likes to comb his hair with saliva, and Richard Perle... okay there's nothing human about Perle. Hasn't the Whore Corps learned yet that what drives the Bush administration's public actions, more than anything, is MARKETING— blatant, gloves-off, shameless hucksterism. Remember this, which gave us rubes this onnar tee-vees?

You can bet the wad that Snowjob's yellow bracelet, just like any actor's costume accessory, was fully vetted and approved, if not planted in the first place. Gosh, they've turned me into such a cynic.

punkinsmom said...

Laura Bush gives librarians a bad name.

CatMorgan said...

Laura's like french vanilla. You can't not like it since it hasn't directly offended you, though you'd really prefer something else. Hillary? Hillary was like .. I dunno, a grape popsicle. Efficient, an acquised taste, nice if you actually try it, but repulsive to most in retrospect.

(They should be told it's hard to expose your soul when you haven't got one.)

eRobin said...

Amen. I felt the same way.