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Rising Up Through the Air

Yet another new and, for the Bush administration, naturally bad economic report was issued The Institute for Supply Management which indicated that expansion in the U.S. factory sector slowed in August. Reuters phrases this finding in a rather odd way--which we will note elsewhere--as though to assuage the actual bad news by saying that factory growth eased. Ahh, yes, much better.

This report comes on the heels of Bush strutting around the country telling the millions of unemployed that we are "turning the corner." As hard to imagine as this may be, Bush's actual record as president is now appearing to be nearly irrelevant to the much of the voting public. Why, gentle readers may ask, would the BHC make such a claim? Thusly:

Slowing factory growth, slowing productivity growth, slow job growth, over a million jobs in the hole since he began to sit in the Oval office, a soaring budget deficit the IMF has warned the world about, an increase by 1.3 million, the number of people living in poverty, an increase by 4 million, the number of Americans lacking heath insurance, world opinion of the US at an all time low, increasing terrorism worldwide, record prices for crude oil spurred by general mayhem in the middle east and targeted sabotage of Iraqi pipelines, which has in turn been spurred by deceitful, reckless nation-building adventurism, a fog of newly-permitted toxins foul the air, fetid, mullagatawny soups of newly-permitted toxins seap into water supplies and what do we see being reported about President Bush? In defiance or ignorance of such facts, the incredible, the inexplicable appears to be happening:

President George W. Bush's job approval rating rose in August from July according to a National Annenberg Election Survey completed before the Republican National Convention began this week.

Bush's job approval rating among 5,146 registered voters surveyed from Aug. 9-29 was 53 percent, compared with 50 percent in a July 5-25 survey, the poll showed

It is becoming obvious that the reason we have seen that accountability doesn't actually mean anything to this administration is that it appears to mean nothing to much of the American public. This administration is allowed such an horrendous record of misfeasance and malachievement precisely because the voting public will allow them it. We here at the BHC could not have imagined a few months ago that any opposition candidate could be in the unenviable position Kerry now finds himself: after weeks of an abusive, distracting smear campaign against his Vietnam service orchestrated by a cabal of Vietnam shirkers, he now is tied with or trails an incumbant who boasts, by many measures, what is generally considered one of the worst economic records in modern times. Bush's consistent, driven assault on environmental regulation, nothing many Americans claim to be pleased about, has been very nearly ignored. The reckless foreign policy which has resulted in thousands of civilian deaths, a thousand dead American soldiers, billions added to the bloated deficit and global ill-will is fawned over as strong and visionary.

The ever-widening gap between Bush's stump speech claims and reality is as intractable as it is astonishing. Just how do Bush supporters cling to their disbelief in the face of clamorous fact? Fox News? What is clear is that many who support Bush seem unaware of basic and unflattering facts. At a Republican event in Erie, Pa, recently, Scott Stearns asked Republican voters what they think about Mr. Bush and Iraq. There appear to be two camps of cluelessness.

The "Saddam had WMD" faction:

- First of all, there were weapons. They are in parts unknown.

- I believe that there are things that will be found buried in the sand

- I believe like him that there were weapons but they were hidden. And I believe they were hidden maybe in Syria.

- There's a lot of evidence that proves that they did have them. We even have the sheets from Saddam Hussein saying that he did have them. So it's not an issue.

and the crowd of xenophobes who believe the Bush line, "The World is full of Evil and We have to Fix it and when We do, those who haven't been collaterally killed by our love of freedom and democracy will be happy and free":

- We got rid of Saddam Hussein anyway. And he was nothing but a bad dictator, and I think we are doing the right thing.

- We need to put to rest all the bad people in the world trying to attack us.

- We need to stabilize it over there. It was just a time bomb waiting to happen.

- The people there are obviously living much better lives....

So here we are, sixty days from the election, and Bush's numbers are beginning to improve. Though we are loathe to do it and however one may view the base and vile tactics, there is one thing we must admit: as creepy as he certainly is, Karl Rove is brilliant and the one thing Rove relies on time and time again is that a vast swath of the American voting public, most assuredly, is not.


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Up is Down

Continuing the theme of implausible deniability, The Congressional Budget Office is projecting that this year's federal deficit will reach $422 billion. This will be the single largest budget deficit in the history of the world. The current record was last year's $375 billion whopper. Democrats went on the attack with this unpleasant news. Thomas Kahn, Democratic staff director of the House Budget Committee, said, "there is no credible way Republicans can portray the record deficits they have created as good news." Boy, is he wrong. Of course, they'll have to toss out that annoying adjective, "credible," but they often do that anyway. Immediately, Sean Spicer, a Republican spokesman for the House Budget panel, countered that, indeed, it is happy news: "deficits are going down, jobs are going up, the economy continues to improve. I don't see how you can't be happy with that news." Now, how does Sean manage to believe, or even say, that deficits are going down, when, last year's deficit was $375 billion and this year's deficit will be $422 billion? ?? We...don't know.


Billions and billions....

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The Commitments

Rudolph Giuliani praised George Bush with these dissembling words about Bush's record of promise to New York after 9/11:

He kept every commitment, did everything he could, to rebuild my city and to make my city...better than [it was] before that terrible event.

Pleasing and hearfelt. Unfortunately for New York, none of it is remotely true. Which prompts us to present a summary of what Bush has actually done to the city of New York.

There are now 5,879 fewer city cops than in 2000, partly due to the nearly 90 percent Bush cuts in Bill Clinton's COPS programs. Even with the post-9-11 invention of homeland security funding, NYC is getting $61 million less in federal public-safety subsidies than it did before our cops became America's front line.

With the Bush administration also opposing legislation backed by Mayor Bloomberg that would've compensated the city for revenue lost due to 9-11, six firehouses were closed as well.

Bush has also de-funded the SAFER program even after Congress passed it--blocking NYC from hiring more firefighters--and limited equipment purchases under the FIRE program to a puny cap of $750,000, putting NY's allocation on a par with Poland, Ohio's, with Montana getting $9 per capita for federal firefighter aid and NYC nine cents.

We here at the BHC don't really remember promises like that.


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Oodles of Doodles

It appears that John Ashcroft's Justice Department has some rogue prosecutors who have managed to assail the Department's own behaviour in the Detroit terror case which resulted in the convictions of three men, Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi, Karim Koubriti and Ahmed Hannan, in June of 2003. Elmardoudi and Koubriti were convicted on charges of terror and document fraud and Hannan, on document fraud.

Federal prosecutors have been conducting an investigation of the investigation and have found mounds of evidence that the lead prosecutor, Richard G. Convertino, knowingly withheld discoverable evidence and misled the court during the trial which, to date, had resulted in the only terror convictions the Justice Department has managed. Or rather, mismanaged. Now those convictions have been undone.

Of the supposed "crucial" evidence used in the trial was a day planner which contained sketches, it was claimed, which depicted an aircraft hangar at an American air base in Turkey. At the trial, defense counsel dismissed the drawings as doodles of the Middle East. The current investigation revealed that military officials had doubts about the prosecution's claim and some contended that the doodle was nothing but a doodle. Convertino's team also contended that another doodle was really a doodle of a military hospital in Jordan. In an effort to demonstrate that this other doodle was just doodle, defense counsel requested photographs of the hospital. Trial witnesses said no such photographs existed and Convertino's strategy appeared to be that the doodle is a doodle of the hospital so just trust us. Well, it turns out that, indeed, Convertino's team did have photographs of this hospital and they obviously show that no one could mistake the doodle for the hospital. Got that?

The moral of the story: be careful what you doodle. With men like Convertino and Ashcroft in the Justice Department, it could take years out of your life.


Read it....

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Dumb and Dumber

After both the Bush campaign and the Swiftboat Vets claimed they and their actions were completely unconnected, the Bush campaign was outed and had to dismiss a volunteer, retired Col. Kenneth Cordier, who worked on the Bush campaign's veterans steering committee and who also appeared in a Swiftboat veterans advertisement. This came as no great surprise to our phalanx of researchers here at the BHC, but what was a bit of a surprise was the quick hussle out the door of Ben Ginsburg, the Bush campaign's chief lawyer who, it turned out, was also counseling the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth. Oh dear, what an unhappy surprise. Amusingly, the republican campaigners seem to not understand that when you say you are not connected, you should not be connected. In any way. Is this really that hard? Naturally, Ginsburg came over all sullen and expressed his "sadness that my legal representations have become a distraction from the critical issues at hand in this election." Critical issues at hand such as the shameless smearing of John Kerry? Yes, Ben, damn inconvenient that you have mucked that up. We know you'll be more careful next time. And don't doubt it, there will be a next time.

At this juncture, it might be instructive to review what the Swiftboaters had said when accused of being in cahoots with the Bush campaign. Bob Elder denied any connection to the Republican Party. He said that anyone may donate to the organization and some of them may happen to be Republicans, as though that might just be some happy, partisan-free coincidence. When speaking about the alleged association of the group with President Bush, Bob said, "we would not be that dumb." Bob appears confused about the meanings of the words "dumb", "be", and especially, "would not."


Read it....

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And Dumber Still...

Futher enhancing their rapidly evolving record of mendacity and ineptitude, it now turns out that the Swiftboat Vets have engaged in forgery, the theory here appears to be that once embarked on a voyage of lies and deceit, one might as well go all the way.

It seems that several swiftboat vets have noticed that their names have appeared on a letter on the Swift Boat Veterans for Forgery website (we will not sully our page with a link to that scurrilous place and we at the BHC are confident our readers are more than capable of finding it themselves) which contains the group's indictment of John Kerry's Vietnam service. These vets are not happy that their names have appeared on this letter as they were included without permission. Says Bob Wedge of Mesquite, Nev., "this is the fourth or fifth time someone has called me or e-mailed me in regard to signing this damn letter. I don't agree with it and want no part of it and especially don't want my name on it."


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Father's Son

The behaviour of the Bush campaign so incensed conservative maven George Will, he wrote this about their tactics:

Today honorable conservatives feel the sort of fury felt by honorable conservatives 40 years ago when Joe McCarthy was giving anticommunism a bad name.... But serious people flinch from being associated with the intellectual slum that is the Bush campaign, with its riffraff of liars and aspiring ayatollahs.

Bush calls his campaign "a crusade to bring back values." His campaign is powerful evidence of the need for such a crusade.

Now, one might read such a passage almost anywhere these days, though perhaps with some lesser degree of skilled articulation. So what is curious about this passage? The date. Will wrote this excoriation of George H.W. Bush on August 26, 1992. Will was speaking of then President Bush's campaign tactics toward then nacscent Democratic star Bill Clinton.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Finally, that bloody saying makes sense now.

And what, prithee, is Will occupying himself with these days? Why, the Mars Rover project. Something infinitely more noble, meaningful and interesting than the sordid politicking on display this election cycle. Will now appears unable to pay attention to that which he admonished those many years ago.


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Zellraiser

It is indicative of the zeitgeist of the Republican party these days that its leadership should chose Democratic senator Zell Miller as the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention this year. His xenophobic ranting reached a fever pitch as he roundly excoriated John Kerry:

For more than 20 years, on every one of the great issues of freedom and security, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak and more wobbly than any other national figure.

Whether intentional or not, this statement, just one of many rhetorical, Kerry-bashing hammer throws delivered during the keynote rage, demonstrates the wobbliness of Miller's mind much more than it says anything about Kerry. In March 2001, zig zag Zell said this about John Kerry:

My job tonight is an easy one: to present to you one of this nation's authentic heroes, one of this party's best-known and greatest leaders – and a good friend.

In his 16 years in the Senate, John Kerry has fought against government waste and worked hard to bring some accountability to Washington.

Early in his Senate career in 1986, John signed on to the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Bill, and he fought for balanced budgets before it was considered politically correct for Democrats to do so.

John has worked to strengthen our military, reform public education, boost the economy and protect the environment.

The BHC speculates that there are three possible world lines which the previous, contradictory statements might represent:

1) John Kerry truly is the most accomplished and craven flip-flopper of this or any political era. Having snowed stalwart hard-ass Zell Miller into believing Kerry, in 16 years in the Senate, worked for the good of all things Americans care about, Miller amazingly discovers, sometime after March of 2001, that, in fact, Kerry has been wrong, weak and wobbly for 20 years. This outrages Miller and he turns on Kerry with a vengence, compelled by righteous indignation to expose the charlatan.

2) Kerry is weak, wobbly and wrong and Miller just never noticed until after March of 2001.

3) At some unknown time and by persons unknown, Zell Miller's brain was replaced by an enormous volume of puss.

None of this should have surprised anyone who has been paying attention to Miller's previous jaundiced raving. But it did. In fact, Republicans appeared to be rather embarrassed that this nut was speaking at their convention. He is a Democrat after all. Surely this must be some Democratic ploy designed to make the Republicans look bad, as though saying, "hey, we don't need nutty Democratic senators making us look bad at our own convention. We can do that all on our own." Which is precisely what they did, of course, and in various ways. Like taping band-aids with glittery purple hearts to themselves and infuriating veterans across the country or shouting at Fernando Suarez del Solara, who snuck into the convention and then exposed a t-shirt with his son's photo and which read, "Bush lied, my son died." Suarez's twenty year-old son, Lance Corporal Jesus Suarez, was killed in Iraq in March of 2003. GOP delegates became unhinged by such a flagrant and partisan display of fact. They booed and shouted, calling him "unpatriotic." While this is going on, what are those two favourite words in the Republican lexicon? Compassionate conservative. Just what does that mean to people who shout down as unpatriotic, a man whose soldier son was killed in Iraq?


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Repulsed But Not Overlooked

Occassionally the BHC will notice a phrase here or there which, despite our jaded view of the mainstream media, gives us some small glimmer of hope that all is not lost in the maw of media corporatism:

Police repulsed anarchists....

Such a breeze of truth on so many levels.

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More Damnable Lies

Demonstrating that nearly every damn thing emmanating from his mouth these days is a lie, Bush was on the campaign trail when his bus tour cruised into Erie, Pennsylvania. There he said,

I appreciate you all coming out. There's nothing better than taking a bus trip on a Saturday with your family. Nothing better than ending the bus trip in Erie, Pennsylvania.

We've been to Erie. Liar!!


Suck up...

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Mayhem: Upbeat

The BHC noticed that Reuters choose an oddly upbeat turn of phrase in describing that the high world oil prices are the result of the uncertainty in supplies resulting from targeted bombings and a general mayhem in Iraq:

World oil prices held steady on Friday, and dealers said prices remained well supported by renewed pipeline sabotage in Iraq, which has brought market focus sharply back on to thinly stretched supply capacity.

Prices well supported, renewed pipeline sabotage...we strongly suspect this was written by an economist.


Feel the joy....

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Doctors in Love

We all heard Bush's reference to OB/GYN's in his acceptance speech at the RNC. Well, he appears not to have been satisfied with that singular odd note and brought the subject up again, in Poplar Bluffs, Missouri, and mouthed perhaps his greatest Bushism to date:

Too many OB/GYN's aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country.

Now, the BHC is going to hazard a guess as to what Bush might be trying to say: he seems to be bemoaning the fact that many doctors, especially OB/GYNs, are being driven away from their practice of medicine by litigation.


What a freaking idiot.

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Wind Bag

Our final item of this edition comes to us from a BHC reader and a fine entry it assuredly is. It would appear that some enterprising chap in Florida has consumed some valuable internet bandwidth with his eBay auction sale of, and we quote, "Tupperwared Wind from Hurricane Frances." That's right, this industrious fellow stood on his lawn during the storm with open plastic cannisters and "captured" the wind of the hurricane. Four of these containers now grace the pages of eBay and have apparently been sold. The advertisement is as follows:

I will close the container during the heart of the storm, then I will make every attempt to seal the container airtight. I am no expert. I will mail it to you...Rusty [his dog] and I braved the elements to bring you the finest hurricane wind.


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Wonders never cease.