This is completely true

Regardless of Klein's thinking about BrandO, she nails the previous admin with this:

There are many acts of destruction for which the Bush years are rightly reviled – the illegal invasions, the defiant defences of torture, the tanking of the global economy. But the administration's most lasting legacy may well be the way it systematically did to the US government what branding-mad CEOs did to their companies a decade earlier: it hollowed it out, handing over to the private sector many of the most essential functions of government, from protecting borders to responding to disasters to collecting intelligence. This hollowing out was not a side project of the Bush years, it was a central mission, reaching into every field of governance. And though the Bush clan was often ridiculed for its incompetence, the process of auctioning off the state, leaving behind only a shell – or a brand – was approached with tremendous focus and precision. Naomi Klein h/t humorzo.

History Management and Franchise Protection

President Bush’s depiction of the past is sanitized, selective, and self-serving where not simply false. 

Andrew Bacevich intelligently applies Niebuhr* to the Bush benightenment:

 Since the end of the Cold War, the management of history has emerged as the all but explicitly stated purpose of American statecraft. 

Much has been made of the allegedly Bible-driven subtext peering through Bush's melodramatic horseshit, e.g:

When our founders declared a new order of the ages, when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner of 'Freedom Now'--they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of liberty.

It's important to be clear that in critique, Bush's reading of the Bible -- if indeed that's what he (viz his handlers) were doing -- gets filtered through someone else's reading of that reading, simultaneously triangulating with their own reading of the good book.

What sort of tugs at that reduction of Bush and his "base" to mere Christian barbarism is that there may be another sort of contest built in that should not be ignored.

For example, in The Discoverers, Daniel J. Boorstin talks about how the Chinese, who early on were so advanced in optics, glassmaking, camera obscura boxes etc. were dismal in astronomy.

It seems astronomy was sort of the stem cell technology of the age. A 17th century visitor, Father Matteo Ricci, noted that the Chinese had "seen" more stars than their semblables in the West, but had failed to make any scientific sense out of them. Ricci wrote in 1605: 

...the Chinese astronomers take no pains whatever so reduce the phenomena of celestial bodies to the discipline of mathematics. . . .  they center their whole attention on that phase of astronomy which our scientists term astrology, which may be accounted for by the fact that they believe that everything happening on this terrestrial globe of ours depends upon the stars. . . . The founder of the family which at present regulates the study of astrology prohibited anyone from indulging in the study of this science unless he were chosen for it by hereditary right. The prohibition was founded upon fear, lest he who should acquire a knowledge of the stars might become capable of disrupting the order of the empire and seek and opportunity to do so.

Surely the family patriarch was also concerned to protect his franchise. Local intellectual property and monopoly rights management are always present in these thickets. My point simply is that the underlying issue really was more complex than the bare opposition of supernatural authority to natural intellect -- these hotbutton matters were in a knot whose threads included tradition, mafia power, trust, underlying cultural disposition, protection racketeering and realpolitick concerns that the sacred tools of history management (e.g., the calendar) be protected from interlopers. This much seems relevant to what's at stake in the cultural divide from which Bush and now Palin have derived both energetic support and potent opposition. 

*h/t to Informant

Buy my steaming pile?

Recession

Among the items  receding even further than they were not too long ago:

• Credit Card Company customer service. Call, and get the usual menu of options, only, very hard to locate that human. Living humans are a dying breed.

• Denver, CO and St. Paul MN. If anyone detected actual political activity, i.e., life, during either convention, I'll eat McCain's withered testicle.

• Corporate Infrastructure::Politics = Country Music::Music.

• Abandonment of the needy: The code of the survivalist mooseeating Northern exposure.
  

McCain-*-Pain courtesy of Mr. Locke.

NewsPorn

The US media has apparently learned nothing from the hot anal action it provided leading up to the invasion of Iraq, in view of its Pre-K-level coverage of the conflict in Georgia/Ossetia.






A couple of salubrious correctives:

CounterSpin - Interview with Helen Cobban. (See also this earlier bit).

Informant here, here, here, here, and passim.

What is it

panopticon of the asinine

Thivai recalls Brian Springer's Spin - an open site of media archaeology of the 90s.

War is the father of all conversational impasse

This week, NPR's morning edition is doing a 5-year-review of the war in Iraq - sober, thoughtful, involving interviews with guys who sound truly humane and heroic.

Then there is the enterprise as told by veterans of Iraq, which makes NPR seem parochial, and offers a war run like My Lai turned into systematic policy:

Something else we were actually encouraged to do, almost with a wink and a nudge, was to carry drop weapons or, by my third tour, drop shovels. What that basically is, is we would carry these weapons or shovels with us, because in case we accidentally did shoot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body and make them look like they were an insurgent.

he watched the commander, who had given us the order to shoot anyone on the street, shoot two old ladies that were walking and carrying vegetables.

Winter Solder

Winter Solder 2

Winter Soldier reprise

The movie

[update:] Jeff Cohen finds a validation of new media in Winter Soldier. via

epiphanic nonentification

“the people have no voice because they have no information”

But even if they think they have information, which they do not, (not knowing their right hand from their left, THE people cannot distinguish between information and opinion) they would have no place from to and in which to speak.

Blog and twit till you're blue in the face -- people -- not THE people, nothing of platform about it (the platform, cause of our ingesting your stately prairie dog antics, is what makes you invisible and inaudible), just those biomorphs with runny noses silting the lower atmospheric ambient bollocksphere around and about -- still have no voice, and no place to and from and in which to speak.

A friend was telling me tonite of how in her small town in Pa., where there were once two hospitals there now is one. One ER instead of two, one surgery instead of two. It's called efficiency, tho it may not seem so to octogenerians with cancer and great pain who wait until 5 a.m. to be seen in the ER.

Is it not clear yet that before things like healthcare can be addressed, those involved -- not us blogging, but those involved in their locality, the sick, the well, the medical people, the suppliers, instrument makers and installers, money people, maintenance people, illegal aliens, politicians, real estate whizzers, marketeers, cemetery personnel, systems analysts -- all these and more of a place have to look at the problem together, with someone who does not insist with the sycophancy of the tool that USia is the greatest nation on earth and that there are no problems with healthcare, but who listens and helps each place work out a system that makes sense for itself, multiple specific solutions that can then learn from and network with each other, maybe, yepper, if they ever get that that right/left business sorted out and skip the great nation status since nations are dangling teratomatic appendices of a doomed evolutionary trajectory, or worse?

It is also remarkable how Gore Vidal nailed the presidential debates of last evening, but did so a full week before:




via Informant38

What Zizek could have said

. . . today’s liberal-democratic state and the dream of an ‘infinitely demanding’ anarchic politics exist in a relationship of mutual parasitism: anarchic agents do the ethical thinking, and the state does the work of running and regulating society. Critchley’s anarchic ethico-political agent acts like a superego, comfortably bombarding the state with demands; and the more the state tries to satisfy these demands, the more guilty it is seen to be. In compliance with this logic, the anarchic agents focus their protest not on open dictatorships, but on the hypocrisy of liberal democracies, who are accused of betraying their own professed principles. Zizek

One hoped the Zeester would try to go beyond hand-me-down binaries, but no. What would be appealing -- more so than media-sanctioned alternatives involving either shrill fecklessness or suicidal explosiveness -- would be something more along the lines of:

If you allow the massive, complex, superpowerful organism of large states to be directed by individuals, you risk the chance that those seeking power will either enter office insane, or rapidly become such.

Serious, sober, unshrill, non-violent "opposition" could take the form of people simply saying "look, this isn't working in its current form. Doing away with this pair of ungulate testicles in power will merely present a vacancy to be filled by another, conceivably more nauseous set."


Instead of shouting quondam solutions or demands on the D.C. mall or on blogs or on TV, consider that perhaps the problems lie deeper, that things have shifted from where they were in 1776.

Instead of assuming every political/social/economic ill of 2007 can be addressed through stalemated political process and hilariously irrelevant election rhetoric, we need to understand why it's come to this. A Reconstitutional Convention (ReConCon) --could explore how the political matrix can work better.

I.e., eliminate the possibility of morons (vide supra) from even running for office by requiring something in the way of minimal voter literacy. Give those citizens who think it's about Second Life, Liberty to commit corporate rapine, and Ignorance of all but the most commodified, impulsive Happiness the right to worship a virtual president in the privacy of their home entertainment centers.

Make it impossible for psychotic or power-maddened citizens to swagger and spend until the last Middle-Eastern family is raped or killed. Subject corporate activity to communal vision and public policy. Play with various representational and performative schemes to more adequately convey and exercise the will of the people. Criminalize the legal fiction that endows corporations with personhood. Demythologize the nation-state.

Let these schemes be openly discussed, perhaps even tried out in small polities with Reality TV show crews on hand to help us follow their fortunes. And when we've seen that there are better ways to choose, elect, represent and govern than the one we've got now, use our "business intelligence" to make those ways the new law of the land. No need for bloodshed, no infinite demands on an unchanging golem, merely commonsense improvements based on the vertiginous insights we have not yet forgotten as to how, with everyone alternately shrieking and going about their business, things have managed to go so strangely wrong.

The 4th Estate, moribund since 1956

WASHINGTON, Oct 26 (Reuters) - The U.S. government's main disaster-response agency apologized on Friday for having its employees pose as reporters in a hastily called news conference on California's wildfires that no news organizations attended.

When we're all done harrumphing, please advise as to what would have been learned had "real" reporters been there.

Correction

WSJ interview with GWB:

We have lost sight of what it means to be a nation willing to be aggressive in the world and spread freedom or deal with disease.

Given the Presidential penchant for malapropism, we helpfully unscramble:

We have lost sight of how to be a mean nation willing to be aggressive in the world and spread disease or deal with freedom.

Closing the sale

This is just a new plan that has one great advantage: it’s something that could be sold. . . Sy Hersh on DN. New Yorker article.

"That crocodile will never be a pet."

"When we came in here, we arrested everybody. . . Everybody is in jail, everybody has a relative in jail. . .we can make, we can make huge friends if we can help to release them." Two-part video here.

Take away the precious thing, barter it back. End of the day, we're friends.



Update: The alleged Lawrence of Arabia of al-Anbar reportedly is no more.

armed and squamous

There are 90 guns for every 100 Americans, making the U.S. the most heavily armed country in the world, a new report released Monday says.

The "report" does not say what percentage of USians are possibly undereducated, sociopathic, or submoronic.

("Armed and dangerous" was unavailable.)

On a per-capita basis, Yemen had the second most heavily armed citizenry behind the U.S., with 61 guns per 100 people, followed by Finland with 56, Switzerland with 46, Iraq with 39 and Serbia with 38.

France, Canada, Sweden, Austria and Germany were next, each with about 30 guns per 100 people, while many poorer countries often associated with violence ranked much lower. Nigeria, for instance, had just one gun per 100 people.

The study also found that civilians are acquiring greater numbers of increasingly powerful guns, and that this trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

Isn't Iraq more like 1,783 guns per Iraqi?

"...released the virus cannot be recalled"

Huh?

Taking judicial review of highly compromising federal surveillance activities away from the judicial branch and handing it over to...Alberto Gonzales would seem cause for some consternation.

Remarkably, there's a strange disconnect between the fury of many bloggers and the condemnation of groups like the ACLU on the one hand, and the relative reticence of large media, including not just the Times but even tonight's breezy NPR discussion via Andrea Seabrook on NPR. (Schorr had his own take.) Strange, that something reaching so far into basic principles of rights(including physical searches), powers, and priorities would garner this mass of dead air between squealing mice and bovine placidity.

Greenwald, of Congress:

...what they’ve done is they convened Congress and stayed in session under the President's order to revise a law at his direction, that they actually have no idea how it’s been administered and what this government has been doing.

Marjorie Cohn, about the law:

It basically hands over the power. It takes the power out of a judge’s hands and puts it in the power of Alberto Gonzales and the director of intelligence.

Is it that there are no publicly available media mechanisms for examining and judging this sort of thing? Too many campaign dollahs at stake? The only thing clear is that MSM has punted the punting of Congress.

Has the entire country turned into a quivering mass of bushdumb chickenshit?

Strange.

Tax dollars at work

Minor update on our Cluster Bomb ClusterFuck Thread:

At the Convention on Conventional Weapons in Geneva last month, Bush administration officials said that the threat to civilians from cluster munitions is “episodic” and “manageable within current response mechanisms” - presumably unless you’re a [not a joyous link] child attracted by the bomblets. They said it “only” took two years to clear the high-risk affected areas in Kosovo after 1999, but also admitted that eight years later, unexploded bomblets remain. They cited 10 countries threatened by cluster bombs - Afghanistan, Albania, Cambodia, Iraq, Laos, Lebanon, Montenegro, Serbia, and Vietnam - as well as Kosovo, leaving out another 20 countries so affected.

Separately, the US State Department has said that Israel may have illegally used US-made cluster bombs in Lebanon, but welcomes that it will take “only” a year and a half to largely clean up the remnant. CSMonitor

No One Ever Wins.

Bend it like Bunkum

Government has left the building -

FEMA Suppressed Warnings on Toxic Gas in Evacuee Trailers
Newly-released documents show top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials have suppressed internal warnings about dangerous levels of toxic chemicals in trailers inhabited by Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Several emails show FEMA field workers warned the evacuees were living amidst levels of potentially cancerous formaldehyde gas that was seventy-five times the recommended maximum for U.S. workers. As many as one hundred twenty thousand families lived in the suspected trailers. Hundreds have complained of health effects. But the emails show FEMA officials were only concerned with avoiding any legal liability for the evacuees’ potential health problems. Three months after the complaints surfaced publicly, a FEMA official wrote agency lawyers had advised against carrying out tests because doing so : “would imply FEMA’s ownership of this issue.” On June 15, 2006, FEMA lawyer Patrick Preston wrote: “Do not initiate any testing until we give the OK. . . . Once you get results and should they indicate some problem, the clock is running on our duty to respond to them.” Eleven days later, an evacuee who had complained about the chemicals was found dead in his trailer. In a subsequent conference call, FEMA attorneys rejected calls for an independent investigation into his death and wider trailer tests.

More here. It is a measure of the success of the efforts of Bushians that we no longer even notice stories of this sort. Not too long ago this might have been news even on corporate-owned networks. Now it barely makes Democracy Now. Soon there will be no memory of "the news" at all. Like gas lamps -- a former utility, supplanted by moodia.

factice

Erin's Weird and Wonderful Word of the Day:

factice [fak-tees]

a perfume bottle, usually hugely oversized, made for display instead of sale.