Charlatan

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

Bill O'Rights

I fail to see why anyone is shocked, surprised, apalled, or otherwise. Polititians lie. It's as simple as that. They lie. Get over it. And ya know what else? It doesn't matter whether it's the Democratic, Republican, Liberatrian, Bull Moose or the Know Nothing Party. If a lie will possibly cover their ass...they're gonna.

Ain't nobody here got a moral leg to stand on, either. Clinton lies, under oath, about something as pathetically ridiculous as a jizz stained dress...and the Republicans are outraged. (Yeah...right.) Now...Bush lies (although there is that whole thing about semantics), lots and lots of people die...and the Democrats are outraged. It's like a poorly written sitcom, that deserves its bad ratings.

Oh...and remember when the paper boy swore that he threw your paper on the front porch...and you found it later in the hydrangeas? Ya know what? He lied. Yup...lied straight to your face. Don't give him too much crap about it, though. That kid's gonna grow up to be the President of the United States. Then you can say; "Y'know...I remember the first time I caught that son-of-a-bitch in a bald faced lie."

__________________
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony

"Hedonism with rules isn't hedonism at all, it's the Republican party." - JumpinJesus

It is indisputable that true beauty lies within...but a nice rack sure doesn't hurt.

Ustwo

Fine and good but Bush didn't lie in this case, so its all moot, typical political crap.

__________________
Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

Bill O'Rights

Perhaps not...but he sure as hell didn't tell the truth, either.

__________________
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony

"Hedonism with rules isn't hedonism at all, it's the Republican party." - JumpinJesus

It is indisputable that true beauty lies within...but a nice rack sure doesn't hurt.

roachboy

ok, so i dont get this thread at all:

first, i think that cowboy george needs to be held accountable for the massive fuck-up that was the federal response to katrina. period.
i do not see how, in any rational world, holding bush accountable for a fuckup of that magnitude can be reduced to the question of whether, in a particular press conference, or in any series of press conferences, he lied or not--fact is that this debacle followed from structural incoherence.
i think that questions about potential misuse of funds that were previously allocated for levee work should be investigated.
i think that state and local officials should also feel their feet being held to the fire over this.

this should not be a partisan affair
if you think about it, katrina posted problems for the entire governmental apparatus and the tacit arguments for legitimacy that rest on functioning infrastructure and/or service delivery, particularly service delivery in a natural disaster context.

so i see little more than damage control in all of this debate, including the reduction of what is at issue to the question of whether bush personally lied--which diverts things into the truly insignificant space of what goes on in the mind of the Leader, whether he knows he is lying or not, blah blah blah.

functionally, this is no different from how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

smooth's post earlier is interesting, and so as one would expect, it goes unremarked.
let us assume, then, that this entire nondebate operates within a framework of damage control.
that is, the whole of it is diversion.
to talk about what this fiasco points toward, you would have to talk about the nature, extent and brutality of class relations in the united states.
but no-one wants to do that--not the extreme right, not their partners in reaction in the democratic party--no-one wants to talk about that because it points to structural problems with the form of capitalism that the americans have inflicted upon themselves.
and for the far right, that discussion is impossible because capitalism is for them an unqualified good.
for the democrats, who differ from republicans only on questions of tactics, the same basic assumption obtains.

so what is the function of this debate, if coherent addressing of problems is excluded from the outset?

maybe smooth is right--that, in a perverse way, this is functional from the viewpoint of far-right politics in that it undermines the service-delivery functions of the state while leaving its police functions undebated--this from an ideological perspective.
of course, the right generally gets to make its arguments about the irrationality of the state in a vacuum (a polite way to refer to limbaugh and the horrifying rabnge of sub-limbaughs)--which is functional in that it enables the petit bourgeois listening public to pretend that nothing really is at stake in this matter, that one need only adopt an abstract position on the service-delivery functions of the state based on (truly idiotic) assumptions about bureaucracy and the public.
the fact of the matter is that the redistrubution of wealth--direct and indrect--is central to the political legitimacy of all capitalist states. neoliberal economic ideology is predicated upon this at the level of assumptions, even as it argues against such service delivery functions in the interest of increasing the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

so katrina revealed real problems---deep problems---structural problems--- system problems.
better to worry about whether george w bush lied or not.
the alternative is beginning to face the reality of the american economic order.
and if you think within the tiny orbits layed uot for you by the existing political formations in the states, you do not want that.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Ustwo

If all you have is a hammer, the whole world seems like a nail.

My guess is this thought applies to Marxists as well. If all is due to class conflicts, that is what must be at the heart of all situations.

__________________
Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

smooth

hmm, an Ustwo double-whammy special: ad hominem layer cake topped with a truism.

__________________
"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman

roachboy

for a long time, there was no real barrier that prevented folk who identified as conservative from seeing that there were systemic problems with capitalism as a mode of production (look it up)...differences between conservatives and other folk tended to play out across types of responses--conservatives preferring to advocate positions that maintained the status quo becuase in doing that they defended their own position--other advocated responses that may have requried more effort/disruption. with this older-school form of conservative, there was the possiblity of discussion about issues.

an example of old-school style conservatism: for many conservatives from brazil--say--there is no problem with admitting class stratification--at times there is no problem with admitting the injustices that follow from this--but they, in the main, support the police in this context because the poice defend the order that is because it is and for no other reason---and these folk benefit materially from that order---so they have every interest in seeing that order continue.

contemporary american conservatives--those shaped by the populist idiocy of the limbaugh school, directly or indirectly--cannot even bring themselves to admit that there are problems with capitalism. if you mention the problems you are a marxist or a pinko.
so it is no wonder the administration now in power, which wraps itself tight in the blinkered little world of contemporary conservative ideology, is so thoroughly incompetent. they prefer to not see problems...like the need for a plan in iraq--or the need for a coherent response to katrina.

i did not previously accord enough respect to old-school conservatism because i understood their tactics as reactionary. but now, i kind of miss them. in comparison with the kind of tripe you see from this administration, what you hear on right media and what you see in here from folk like yourself, ustwo, they seem paragons of lucidity.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite