[In a fit of nostalgia (and laziness), I’m marking my remaining days here on HA by posting links to some of my favorite and most influential posts. If you have favorites you’d like to see, please let me know.]
09/02/2005: FEMA director Mike Brown, a “total fucking disaster”
Yes, that’s right… the man responsible for directing federal relief operations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, sharpened his emergency management skills as the “Judges and Stewards Commissioner” for the International Arabian Horses Association… a position from which he was forced to resign in the face of mounting litigation and financial disarray.
Perhaps no post anywhere better demonstrates the potentially powerful nexus between local and national blogs than my little expose on “Brownie.” An HA reader and horse enthusiast, distraught over the disastrous relief efforts in New Orleans, mention’s Browns disastrous tenure at the International Arabian Horse Association, and the story quickly moves from HA to Daily Kos to Talking Points Memo, and then throughout the media at large. Within 24 hours Brown became a symbol of Bush administration cronyism, and a few days later he’s forced to step down.
No doubt my most influential post. But don’t just take my word for it…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9JXd8bGGh8[/youtube]
It’s interesting to revisit Sept. of 2005, and remember “Brownie’s attempt to blame “Horses Ass” for for “distracting” him from doing what he should have already done long BEFORE the disaster hit.
Similarly, Palin’s got a video out today blaming the left and the media for “blood libel” when they (finally) called her to task for poor choice of words, images, and Tea Party candidates, especially in light of the recent shootings of the blood media.
Because, for Brownie, it’s all about him – he’s the victim, not the dead and the homeless refugees in New Orleans.
Likewise, for Palin, it’s all about her, she’s the victim – not the dead and wounded when a mentally unstable guy in a super-charged rhetorical atmosphere takes the words of her and her followers literally.
Dang, I wish there were an edit function. Let’s try that again…
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It’s interesting to revisit Sept. of 2005, and Brownie’s attempt to blame Horses Ass for for “distracting” him from doing what he should have already done long BEFORE the disaster hit.
Similarly, Palin’s got a video out today blaming the left and the media for “blood libel” when she is (finally) called to task for her poor choice of violent words, images, and Tea Party candidates, especially in light of the recent shootings in Arizona.
Because, for Brownie, it’s all about him – he’s the victim, not the dead and the homeless refugees in New Orleans.
Likewise, for Palin, it’s all about her, she’s the victim – not the dead and wounded when a mentally unstable guy in a super-charged rhetorical atmosphere takes the words of her and her followers literally.
But I’m a bit worried at all this attention being paid to Palin and her Tea Party flakes like Sharon Angle and O’Donnel. What worries me is that they are a distraction, a diversion, designed to keep our attention while the real attack is coming from another quarter.
Palin, Angle, and O’Donnel are certainly not qualified candidates for any government office.
But in the upcoming 2012 elections, they make the other candidates seem almost reasonable by comparison. Even the MSM will crow about how the fanatics were defeated by the “moderates”, when the these right-wing “moderates” are actually poor candidates for any number of reasons, and are far to the right of what we would have called a moderate just a few years ago.
I watched that hearing. It was what initially made me look you guys up. When I saw that you were a local outfit, I jumped on the bandwagon.
Heckava job there Brownie, ya stupid ignorant fuck.
@3, rhp:
It’s a conscious strategy, IMO. Overton Window and all that.
Many thanks to whoever passed along the tip.
Nice to see a Republican acknowledging the cost of running stories that distract from the work at hand . . .never mind the fact that in this case, the facts were true, and when the right does it, the facts are rarely actual facts.
There was a definate turning point in the Bush Presidency, which occured during the week after Katrina hit New Orleans.
Before Katrina, Karl Rove’s spin machine and Fox News worked together to cow the MSM into acquiesence (or at least silence) when they dared to question the “unqualified success” of the Bush presidency. According to the story line manufactured by them, 9/11 was Bush’s finest hour. The war in Afganistan was a nearly bloodless American victory. The 2003 war with Iraq was an unqualified success, and although the occupation was taking a bit longer than expected, it should result in a democratic and U.S.-allied Iraq any day now. Those who questioned any of this were shouted down, confinded to “free speech zones”, and in Dan Rather’s case, were set up to take a fall and see their career ended. A CIA officer who dared to question Bush’s assertions ended up having her cover story blown in leaks to the media. Under the Patriot Act, and even operating beyond it’s purview, law enforcement under a Republican administration was spying on any American which they cared to label as a “terrorist”.
Voting reforms, enacted after the 2000 Florida voting fiasco, only served as cover for an attempt to make new electronic voting easily manipulated and incapable of being cross-checked against paper ballots. Caging campaigns in 2004 in Ohio showed how to make sure Democratic ballots weren’t counted. Mid-census gerrymanding in Texas was a fore-runner of how the Republicans planned to use majorities in state legislatures to create a “permanant Republican majority” both in state politics and in the nation’s Congress. The bank accounts of K-street lobbying firms were turned into laundry machines to turn illegal corporate contributions into legal campaign donations to approved Republican candidates.
Now, with the 2004 campaign safely behind him, Bush was prepared to roll out an ambitious neo-con agenda. It was, in short, an attempt to roll back just about every government program established after the Hoover administration. Leading the agenda was the privatization of Social Security, giving Wall Street bankers access to billions of dollars of retiree’s ultimate safety net. Environmental laws, unemployment compensation, minimum wage legislation, etc. was all open for change or elimination.
But suddenly in Sept. 2005 the nation learned that the emperor had no clothes. It wasn’t the images of Bush on Air Force One flying over the scene which caused the backlash against Bush. It was his statement, some four days after Katrina hit, that he was only just then aware of the fate of refugees at the New Orleans Superdome and another location which caused news anchors to drop their jaws in disbelief.
The entire nation had been watching the drama unfold 24 hours a day, and the Bush administration claimed to just then having heard about how bad things were????
From that point on, pronouncements from the White House were subjected to considerable scrutiny. People no longer simply accepted what they said as being the truth, they observed their actions and the results instead.
And when Bush proclaimed that Brownie was doing a “heckuva job”, and pattend him on the back, it was clear that something was rotten. The HA expose, coming shortly therafter, revealed the extent of cronyism and the ultimate disregard for the proper role of FEMA from within the Bush administration. That was hammer blow which drove in the nail to the Bush administration’s credibility, on a national scale.
Goldy, nice of you to admit that you’re the one who’s behind the Bush Admin’s post-Katrina failures.
@1 Blood Libel
“Blood libel” refers to a historical myth that Jews kidnapped and murdered Christian children. This myth has been used through the centuries to justify violence and pogroms against Jews. Conservative loudmouth Andrew Breitbart threw out the term into the blogosphere and Sarah Palin, never one to shy away from feeding red meat to bigots, picked it up and ran with it. Of course she knew exactly what she was doing when she incorporated this hate speech into her rhetoric; how could she otherwise have been familiar with the term? The MSM have noticed, and even a former George W. Bush speechwriter is criticizing Palin.
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/01.....-controve/
Roger Rabbit Commentary: The idea that this obnoxious rabble rouser could be taken seriously as a contender for the GOP presidential nomination is ludicrous. She belongs in a mental ward.
@9 Huh???
This could be Palin’s worst — and most damaging — gaffe yet. The Atlantic has picked up the story.
http://www.theatlantic.com/
@10 “blood libel”
In response to this horrible tragedy the woman has decided to double down on the hate rhetoric.
She is the victim. It’s all about her.
@12 It looks like the Atlantic author is like-minded in viewing Palin, after time for reflection, as choosing to “double down”.
I also agree with the author that, instead of rising to the occasion, Palin has chosen to sink to it.
Well, my take on it is that SP really just does not have the intellectual wherewithal to hold public office, in any capacity.
But we knew that.
The problem is, that she openly states her support for, and even exhibits pride in her associations with holocaust deniers, radical religionists and right wing terrorist organizations like the Alaska Separatists.
During the last election, and I have mentioned this before, my Jewish friends were watching SP, and M Bachmann and others of that ilk very closely, and they were worried that they might actually have a chance in the elections. They know the dog whistles, the code words. The general attitude that comes from the extreme right wing.
They know where such rhetoric invariably leads. It is always the same, and always for the same purpose.
Many of them lost relatives in the Camps in Germany and Poland. They know what the underlying theme of the rhetoric really means. They’ve spent their lifetimes hearing the stories from the Grandparents, and in one case a Father who carries the marks given to him when he was nine years old. Palin is a prime example. Bachmann, Angle, Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh and even Medved all use the language.
Pay attention, people.
Some of you know that I became very angry with one of our trolls on the open thread last night. I do not apologize for that anger. But I will say that there are times that an expression of anger serves to mask and conceal deeply felt pain and hurt. To a certain degree, that was the case last night. No, the troll did not hurt me. He did not cause me pain. The pain I feel is for the victims of the Tuscon tragedy and for our nation.
@11
Yeah, I thought about not posting that one.
Wow, just wow. A Jewish congresswoman gets shot and Palin trots out blood libel.
@13 Palin’s “blood libel” rhetoric is true to form and reflects the wingnuts’ paranoid victimology that sees themselves as an oppressed and persecuted minority.
So here’s what the President said tonight:
And here’s what Fox (non) News said.
This just in: Fox (non) News still lying.
Checkout the comment thread on the Fox story.
@ 20
Jesus, the comment section looks just like the Free Republic.
What a bunch of total idiots.
@21
Yeah, it’s pretty disgusting, but all they’re doing is making themselves more and more irrelevant.
I started to read those comments but I’m just not in the mood for that kind of stuff tonight. There was also a live blog I ran across by Michelle Malkin mocking tonight’s event in Arizona but I didn’t have the stomach for that one either.
Ol Jan Brewer was looking like she was gonna burst a hemorrhoid.
Christ what a bunch of psychos. It’s like a whole thread of Spuddy and Cynical.
Holy shit. I had no idea that story started here.
Nice work.
Don’t be a stranger, Goldy. Good luck in your new job. Maybe Brownie will be your copy editor…and he can tell you that you are doing a “heckuva job”.
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