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Sunday, April 30, 2006 |
Editor&Publisher: "A blistering comedy 'tribute' to President Bush by Comedy Central's faux talk show host Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondent Dinner Saturday night left George and Laura Bush unsmiling at its close.
Earlier, the president had delivered his talk to the 2700 attendees, including many celebrities and top officials, with the help of a Bush impersonator.
Colbert, who spoke in the guise of his talk show character, who ostensibly supports the president strongly, urged the Bush to ignore his low approval ratings, saying they were based on reality, 'and reality has a well-known liberal bias'.
He attacked those in the press who claim that the shake-up at the White House was merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. 'This administration is soaring, not sinking,' he said. 'If anything, they are re-arranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.'
As Colbert walked from the podium, when it was over, the president and First Lady gave him quick nods, unsmiling, and handshakes, and left immediately."
The 'tribute' can be downloaded here (BitTorrent).
The complete performance, including Dubya's clenched teeth, in larger format: part 1, part 2 and part 3.
And here's Dubya's own pathetic attempt at being funny (sorry folks, this is Microsoft).
Updated link here.
4:55:19 PM 
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From The Spirit of Disobedience - an invitation to resistance by Curtis White in Harper's Magazine April 2006.
"As Henry Osborne Havemeyer, president of the sugar trust, acknowledged in 1899, 'Business is not a philanthropy... I do not care two cents for your ethics. I don't know enough of them to apply them... As a business proposition it is right to get all out of a business that you possibly can.'
And so as the judges and juries in Colorado* struggle with their confusion over what system of ethical values to apply to a case, the very nature of the system in which they function goes unexamined. It is, I hardly need to rehearse, a system in which poor people are at a grotesque disadvantage. Justice, under capitalism, works not from a notion of obedience to moral law, or to conscience, or to compassion, but from the assumption of a duty to preserve a social order and the legal 'rights' that constitute that order, especially the right to property and the freedom to do with it what one wants. That's the real and important 'moral assessment' sought by our courts. It comes to this: that decision will seem most just which preserves the system of justice even if the system is itself routinely unjust.
*in the case of the People of Colorado v. Harlan, in which a court threw out the sentence of a man who has been given the death penalty because jurors had consulted the Bible in reaching a verdict - the court argued that the jury should have avoided 'extraneous prejudicial materials' such as newspapers and the Bible; last year the Colorado Supreme Court upheld the decision reasoning that the Holy Scripture has factual and legal import for many citizens.
In the end, [capitalism] only believes in the sanctity of profitable returns to stockholders, to whom there is no greater pledge of moral fealty, if one is to believe our nation's chief executive officers. That is the only certain morality of the so-called Free Market. 'Our stockholders deserve a return on the investment they have entrusted with us, and we are honor-bound to maximize that return,' say our captains of industry on CNBC or FOX or Wall Street Week or even The Nightly Business Report on PBS, a little tear of commitment welling in the corner of their eyes. They do not trouble themselves to try to operate under what John Ruskin called 'conditions of moral culture', whether Christian or Enlightenment. Compassion is at most something for private consideration as charity, though even that must be made economically rational as a tax deduction.
In the end, evangelical Christianity conspires with technical and economic rationalism. In the end, they both require a commitment to 'duty' that masks unspeakable violence and injustice. In the end, the Muslim whose legs are being reduced to pulp by his American tormentor doesn't care if he's being murdered because he is despised by Christians or because he is an impediment to economic rationality. He understands far better than we do how the two become one at the end of the torturer's rod. The Predator missile, product of American scientific ingenuity, that homes in on his head is both self-righteously and arrogantly evangelical and meanly pragmatic. It is the empire that the rest of the world reads in George Bush's smirk. As John Ruskin understood 150 years ago, 'The only question (determined mostly by fraud in peace, and force in war) is, Who is to die, and how?'
If we live in a 'culture of death', as Pope John Paul II put it, it is a culture that is made possible by the advocates of both Reason and Revelation. In the opposition of Reason to Revelation, death cannot lose. Ours is a culture in which death has taken refuge in a legality that is supported by both reasonable liberals and Christian conservatives. Our exploitation of humans as 'workers' is legal and somehow, weird and perverse though it may seem, generally acknowledged as part of our heritage of freedom, and virtually the entire political spectrum falls over itself to praise it. When Wal-Mart pays its employees impoverishing wages without adequate health or retirement benefits, we justify it out of respect for Wal-Mart's 'freedom', its 'reasonable' need to make itself 'competitive', and because what it does is legal.
As George Whalin, president of Retail Management Consultants, put it, 'They don't have a responsibility to society to pay a higher wage than the law says you have to pay'. Similarly, our use of the most fantastically destructive military power is also legal and also somehow a part of our heritage of 'protecting freedom', no matter how obscene and destructive its excesses."
Though I categorically refuse to understand Reason as an integral part of capitalism, the basic analysis of our society is right. Only, the capitalist system is not based on Reason but on the petty self interest of a privileged class that has hijacked reason for its own cause. A system in which competition leads to economic aggression and destruction is not led by reason but by irrationality and greed. It is bound to falter. Reason itself would include the future of mankind.
And certainly, the use of military power by the US is not only illegal, nationally and internationally, but also morally. George W. Bush fakes legality and fakes religion for the sake of power.
Moreover, neocon capitalism is anything but legal. After DeLay and Enron, and scandal after scandal, nobody can deny that right-wing America is more related to fraud than legality.
Capitalism combines the worst of reason and the worst of religion. Religion in right-wing America is a Disneyland religion, a simulacrum. Religion is used by the neocon to justify his blatant irrationality and greed, his right to wealth and power. Bush is not a Shaker or a Quaker, but a Faker. He uses religion to associate himself with the power of the Almighty. And his pretentions are limitless. Bush, like any serial killer, will go on because nobody is preventing him from doing what he does.
Capitalism has no morality, no ethics. Money is the neocon God. Corporate capitalism is dogmatic, it imposes its unjust laws on the whole world, it is totalitarian. It only allows freedom for the Corporations (but not the individual freedom of their CEO's). In essence corporate capitalism is opposed to individual freedom. And it is bound to self-destruct by the very nature of its principal tenet of competition. It thrives on destruction and war and destroys its own world.
The total lack of consideration for humanity, our future, our environment, responsibility or compassion is radical evil.
The word 'evil' that comes to Bush so easily only does so because it is his world, his experience, his evil.
How far the system is dogmatic can be seen in the officials (CEOs, generals, secretaries, presidents) who give up their individual freedom to speak when in office, but once retired they admit they were wrong and point to the flaws in the system. Corporate capitalism hates individual freedom.
"So let the Age turn, as St. Paul promised. We're well done with this world."
Wal-Mart
ICH: "There is no legal or Constitutional authority, to date, under which this administration can proceed to an attack on Iran, much less one involving an unprovoked and unnecessary resort to nuclear weaponry.
Should our military fail us now, we must act ourselves. If the good men and women who wear our uniform will not refuse unlawful duty, and those more compliant with authority will not stand down in the face of the threatened attack, then we the people must immediately take the present government down."
12:04:21 PM
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