The GOP chose a crazy man to babysit a fool.

[chieftain]

The current series in the Post leaves me with that conclusion. The consensus of the procession of experts on the mission to Austin to tutor the reluctant prince must have been that the boy was not up to the presidency. But the party's thirst for power was so great, that rather than crossing W off the list as the anointed one, they opted to hire a nanny. Unfortunately for the US & the globe, Cheney has turned out to have a passion for not only destroying our imaginary enemies but our Constitution as well.

[Xipe Totec]

1. Pinky and the Brain

[atommom]

3. One of them's a genius, the other's insane

(OK, actually they're both insane!)

[DarkTirade]

7. One is a genius, but the other's insane...

but you'll notice the song never says which is which.
And since Brain is continually trying to take over the world, I'm tempted to label him as the insane one.
Which leaves room for only one other mouse on the show to be the genius. :)

[Brigid]

28. I love "Pinky and the Brain!"

:rofl:

[Totally Committed]

2. Actually, more accurately, the crazy man chose himself....

and the GOP let him.

TC

[peacetalksforall]

6. PEN PRESIDENT: These 'faces', crazy or idiotic, were chosen by barons. Some at

lower levels - heads of Fed Society, think tankers, reverends, ceo's, tri-Lateral, etc. were tasked with working with RNC types to calculate which faces we would see. The people running the show are not the people we talk about, speculate about, gossip about and laugh at - the ones who detract us while they plow ahead reaching goals.

The nation and the world have been focused on Bush. No one saw Cheney. They had us right where they wanted us. Bush and Cheney will survive - they will not sacrifice them to us. It's time to know who is pulling Cheney's strings. We know all about Bush, the fluid gold marionette. His strings were pulled by the black nuclear Dick. The ones who pull Dick are faceless. They approved someone's plan for PNAC - they allowed the PNAC group to go with their plan. There never was a plan to shock, then awe - what we got is what they wanted - perpetual war - and our submission - our patriotism - which is always a micro dot away from total hate of other people on the planet resulting from a false sense of superiority. Yes, like the kind that tortures people and denies rights and lets our own people in Louisiana fall into their traps and tell soldiers they are liars when they are dying of chemically induced wmds.

This is not just politics - it's the land under our feet and the feet of everyone on this planet, the resources under and on top of the soil, our submission, our labor, our taxes, our sainthood unless they can make money on us when a certain number are in prison. That's what they want. Illusions. Delusions. Trickery. Deception. No cops when they steal.

Other people are running the show - not Cheney. Definitely, not Bush when it comes to the brain and humanity. He is the PEN PRESIDENT - give him a pen and an agenda to ruin and take revenge and he will PEN his name.

We need to wake up, stay awake, wake others.

[opihimoimoi]

12. Your post is so good I wanted to R it...thanx..we need to wake others...I like that

[calimary]

20. Higher class, your post is FIRST class!

Really sums it up well.

I am SO tired of this shit. I am SO ready for it to end. Wonder what will be left when it does?

[Double T]

4. Follow the money trail and there you'll find cheney.

[zabet]

5. Crazy man appointed himself....

to look after the foolish Chimpboy.
:argh:

[chieftain]

29. Welcome to the group. I agree with you. But I want to also

make the point that the GOP power brokers were willing to put forward a completely unqualified nominee for the presidency because he could bridge key factions of the Republican Party. The abject cynicism of such an approach ought to wreck their chances for electoral success for a generation. Unfortunately, the corporate "news" vendors continue to cover up the sins of the RW cabal that has wreaked so much havoc on the world.

[autorank]

8. I think you've got the emerging theme. My first thought was "crazy Cheney."

The Post has been so craven and ill advised in it's service to this administration, it's hard to see them coming over and working to expose it. But as I read this online (never again bought the post after their sex drive coverage of impeachment in 1998) that's how I saw it. Of course, they were their normal circumspect selves. "man sized Mosler safes" in his office is really, this guy is fucking paranoid, but with out the "fucking." Lets see where they go in the series.

[chieftain]

17. It is interesting to me that the focus is on Cheney. Equally

important is what it says on W's willingness to abdicate his responsibilities to someone else:& the mendacity of Republican party leaders who would knowingly foist this unqualified frat boy on the nation.

[autorank]

19. The malefactor theory of history...distasteful history...

...bad men doing extra bad things, influencing otherwise doltish leaders who could not tell a bad thing from their rear ends otherwise...

Plus, Cheney has to go first...watch for some crime revealed...

Agnew was gone in a hurry, remember? Taking cash in the VP's office, $10,000 from someone, cash.
Presto, Vice President Ford. Oh, the drama, the hand wringing tension of it all.

If I were writing the script, I'd have * start speaking in tongues at the next press conferfence, led off by the WH guards after about 10 minutes of pure terror for the assembled and TV viewers. Cheney is about to become vice president and, as if by magic, drum roll, they find a Cheney bank account off shore with Katrina rake offs in it. (Can't be Iraq rake offs cuz that will be going on until "the end of my first term.")

[chieftain]

21. I wonder if Poppy Bush is working on a plan to oust Cheney.

He has to be pissed at how he has hurt the Bush name.

[indepat]

9. Crazy, insane, whatever, 'pukes hate us for our freedoms as evidenced by their works

[DaveT]

10. CEO of Haliburton? Ludicrous

The key to understanding the murky workings of the Bush Administration is the laughable premise of Halliburton hiring Dick Cheney as Chief Operating Officer. At the time Cheney had spent virtually his entire working life on the Government Payroll -- the Nixon and Ford Administrations; Congress during the Reagan years; the Bush I administration. He knew nothing of business or the various businesses that Halliburton was in.

But he did know about the Defense Department budget "process."

His short turn as a business man made him personally wealthy, and it cemented his "ideology" that whatever makes a buck is by definition the ultimate good.

From the outside, it is impossible to know exactly how the elites relate to each other, how they choose their leaders, how they reach consensus. But you can look at the result and reason backward that the oil companies and the defense contractors have made out fabulously under the Cheney/Bush regime in Washington. So it is obvious that they are getting exactly what they want from the government.

And in order to keep getting what they want from the Government, they have to continue to have some mechanism to prevent the demographic shifts in America from busting up their stranglehold on the Presidency, the Congress and the permanent government. Whereas Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1980 had managed to win dominating landslides by taking huge numbers of blue collar white people away from the erstwhile Roosevelt Governing coalition, by the time of the 2000 election, that old type of political domination had become impossible to achieve.

So, instead of looking for a talented politician like Reagan or Clinton to carry the banner, the elites turned inward and put the Idiot Son and the Sneering Fixer on the ballot -- and instead of running to win more votes, the game switched to keeping the Democratic tally down.

Although the profit picture for the oil companies and government contractors could not be sweeter, there are other problems attendent to the anti-democracy strategy of keeping power.

This game is far from over.



There is nothing new about moneyed elites buying the government and ruling by anti-democracy. From the end of the Civil War until Roosevelt was finally able to replace enough of the Nine Old Men on the Supreme Court to let the New Deal take effect, the corporate elite used bribery, oppression and a stacked judiciary to maintain control over our society.

The Reagan/Bush project has openly been to repeal the New Deal -- leading us back to the Gilded Age of Robber Barrons.

Our greatest weakness is that, even now, most of us think that this is all about a "weak" media and a "weak" Congress.

Nope -- it's a weak citizenry that is not mad enough to take things into our own hands.

Yet.

[ljm2002]

23. "Our greatest weakness"...

..."a week citizenry that is not mad enough to take things into our own hands"

You said a mouthful there!

Every now and then, we hear another story from a different country where the people massed and forced an outcome that their government was unwilling to do before that. Venezuela, former SSRs, and others. But here, in the "land of the free" where our government was the first to be founded on the explicitly stated principle that governments exist to serve the governed -- here in the USA, we are too afraid to try anything "radical" like assert the power of the citizenry itself.

Lazy, ignorant, victims of mass propaganda -- whatever the reasons, we are hardly leading the way in showing what it means to be a "free people".

[DaveT]

25. On the other hand,

there are several things that the power elites still dare not try for fear of pissing off the Sleeping Giant of the American People (well, the Giant who is watching a lot of TV).

There is no draft.

The idea of "privatizing" social security -- ie, taking all that money and handing it over to Wall Street -- fell flat on its face early in Shrub's second term.

For all the incremental victories of the anti-arbotion movement, middle class women still can terminate a pregancy if the need arises.

You would see a lot of people taking things into their own hands if any of those big issues broke the other way.




The hard truth for lefties to swallow is that most Americans have not felt any direct harm from the destruction of the rule of law by Bush and Cheney. People with loved ones in Iraq are an exception, and the inhabitants of the New Orleans area are another.

But most of the decline in living standards over the last generation has been the result of both Democratic and Republican policies of free trade and union busting. (Btw, I'm no far lefty or Naderite or Greenie -- I am a Howard Dean supporter of reestablishing the Democratic Party as the voice of the majority.) It is just hard for people to connect the painful fact that home ownership and college education are now much harder to attain than they were a generation ago to Bush and Cheney or to their disdain for the rule of law.

Making that connection between democracy giving way to corporate oligarchy and the fact of a general decline in the middle class is the task at hand.

[ljm2002]

26. Re: "things that the power elites still dare not try":

1 -- no draft: okay I'll give you that one, they know that would mean disaster for their war policies.

2 -- privatizing social security: they *did* dare to try it, they just failed, that's all. And they will keep trying. They will try it under a different name, they will find some other mechanism with which to drain the public social security monies and put them into the pockets of their Wall Street cronies. Bank on it.

3 -- incremental anti-abortion victories: while a middle class woman can still get an abortion, there are many more limitations on that right. The latest ruling means that, if a woman is faced with a late-term abortion for medical reasons, her doctor may not be free to choose the *safest procedure for her*. I would call that more than an incremental "victory" for the forced-birth crowd.

The hard truth is that most Americans have no idea, none, about how much their thinking has been corrupted by the propaganda machine that is our national news media. And yes most have "felt no direct harm" -- but a large reason for that is that the news continuously promotes lies: direct lies, lies of omission, and lies of interpretation.

Anyway. I don't disagree with your analysis of the Democratic Party and how it has run from its base in the pursuit of corporate $$. The union busting, the welfare reform, the bankruptcy reform, prescription drug prices -- the list goes on and on. And we do need to reconnect with the base.

Oh, and thank God! (or who/whatever) for Howard Dean!

[DaveT]

30. regarding Social Security we have a semantic disagreement

Yes, they tried to gut SS, but it was the Republicans Congressmen who backed off for fear of pissing into a hurricane. I was surprised when that happened, and the only explanation for it was that people would really have gotten into an uproar if it had passed.

Which is my point about the power of the a pissed off citezenry being really powerful -- even in 2005, which was the lowest point for American democracy ever.

You are definitely right that they will try again.

[yy4me]

11. Best one line description yet of what has happened.

[chieftain]

18. Thanks

[The Backlash Cometh]

13. When you elect the most incompetent man in the country, don't act

surprised when he delegates the power of the executive branch to the most corrupt man in America.

[elehhhhna]

14. Well said. Hell's Subcontractor advises Caligula Jr.'s fantasy dictatorship

[Uncle Joe]

15. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread chieftain, I believe your title is spot on.

[democrat2thecore]

16. Very good description!

I agree completely. "The GOP chose a crazy man to babysit a fool." I like that!

[RobertDevereaux]

22. A bumpersticker, please! n/t

[Justpat]

24. That is an utterly correct assessment of this administration. n/t

[Brigid]

27. But this shouldn't be a surprise.

Isn't this the way the GOP has been doing things for years?

[chieftain]

31. Too true. But before this regime, never so crazy & never

so foolish.