All disaster, all the time
KATRINA CLAIMS
A NEW VICTIM
Michael Brown has already begun his vital new assignment: assessing disaster preparedness at key U.S. installations along Alaska's strategic Bering Strait
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Tonight George Bush desperately clings to political life in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. However, not all of his flunkies were so fortunate.
Washington City was plunged into glee [Surely, gloom? – Ed.] by the news late today of the career death of Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. While Bush Administration officials, who wished to remain anonymous so they could lie like shkutzim, claimed that Brown was being sent on an important new assignment to shore up emergency planning in Nome, Alaska, the stink of death hung over FEMA offices.
News that Brown's body had been discovered on the floor of Karl Rove's office had been widely expected in the wake of Brown's utter failure to provide adult leadership to FEMA before, during and after the Hurricane Katrina disaster. On the Thursday after the hurricane struck, with thousands of desperate American citizens trapped in hot, dangerous buildings without adequate food or water or plan of rescue, Brown told the Wall Street Journal that we should "all take a deep breath." It was the same day that his boss, unaware that the waters of political doom were lapping around his neck, told "Brownie" that he was doing "a heck of a job."
this just in: Toxic waste nightmare
The catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina has created a huge flood of toxic sludge that threatens the mental and physical health of anyone who comes into contact with it.
The toxic sludge was a by-product, according to some, the inevitable by-product, of attempting to hold George Bush accountable for the debacle of the federal government's response to the disaster.
A mere 24 hours after reporters started to question the Administration's ineffectual and confused response to the sufferings of tens of thousands stranded in the disaster zone, Bush Administration apologists and right-wing blowhards unleashed wave after wave of poisonous, highly caustic garbage, overwhelming the sea of political discourse with its stench.
Following Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco's claim that FEMA had not moved quickly enough to rescue thousands trapped at the Superdome, Administration officials, assisted by promises of anonymity freely granted by craven reporters, stated falsely that Gov. Blanco had failed to declare a state of emergency. When Gov. Blanco posted her August 26 declaration on the state's website, raw political sewage started to pour out in other directions.
Some of the dangerous flow of misinformation was traced back to the President himself, who told the media: "Who could anticipate a levee breach?" The answer: FEMA, the state of Louisiana, the Army Corps of Engineers and, in a September 28 briefing with Bush himself, the National Weather Service Hurricane Center.
Many in Washington fear the neurotoxic effect of the witch's brew of smears and disinformation. According to these experts, labelling all efforts to assign responsibility for the debacle as nothing more than a "blame game" could induce political paralysis and leave the country wide open to the next disaster caused by the failure of the Bush Administration to pay any attention to the work of government.
For latest updates on the flow of toxic political waste, click here.
Brown's condition worsened considerably when reporters for Time magazine, utilizing an all-but-forgotten journalistic technique known as "investigating," discovered that this particular hack had embellished his resume by transforming an internship in the municipal government of the metropolis of Edmund, Oklahoma into line authority over public safety personnel and awarding himself a professorship at prestigious East Overshoe State University [Factcheckers, please confirm details – Ed.].
With President Bush in danger of sinking beneath the floodwaters unleashed by the collapse of the inadequate levees he had refused to improve, the decision to lighten the White House lifeboat was, in the words of another official who requested to slip the knife in anonymously, a "no-brainer." Critics scoffed that it would be nice if some Bush Administration official could make any other kind of decision.
A senior White House official, who requested anonymity because he didn't want to be teased this weekend on the golf course at Congressional, explained that Brown was not being fired, but rather assigned to important new responsibilities, including a review of disaster preparedness at U.S. installations on the Bering Sea and McMurdo Sound and assisting Afghani officials in improving disaster response in the country's strategic Ass End of Beyond region.
On Capitol Hill, the House and Senate announced a new effort to rescue George Bush: a Republican-dominated joint committee that would exercise the same searching scrutiny to the Katrina debacle that it had previously afforded to the disregard of 9/11 warnings, the nobbling of Iraq-related intelligence by Bush Administration officials, the Abu Ghraib scandal, and the multiple criminal acts committed by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R – Abramoff) and White House political aide Karl Rove. To assist the investigation in its life-saving work, FEMA arranged for emergency shipments of whitewash to be trucked into a besieged Capitol Hill late Friday.
FEMA officials also mounted a desperate nationwide search for Negroes who would appear next to George Bush without spitting in his eye. Thus far their search has turned up one minister from Texas and Condoleezza Rice.
The question Washington insiders pondered at week's end [Who wrote this, Whittaker Chambers? – Ed.] was simple: would George Bush survive the wreckage of his presidency? White House insiders were surprisingly sanguine.
Said one top adviser, who requested anonymity because his comments were so callous and arrogant that he would be lynched on sight at the Georgetown Bread & Circus were he to be identified: "George Bush survived his failure to protect the United States on 9/11, his destruction of the fiscal health of the U.S. Government, his willful disregard of the environment, six years of slow or no growth in the economy, increasing income inequality and taking the U.S. into an unnecessary and losing war on false pretences. Take it from me: the man is a survivor."
In a related development, thousands are feared dead along the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. When informed of this dreadful fact, Queen Mother Barbara Bush commented: "Well, a lot of those dead people were underprivileged anyway, so this is really a step up for them."
This story was written by David Bloviator with reporting from Douglass MacArthur, Geoffrey Dawson, Bobby Baker, Nollie Tangere (on loan from the Old Sludgebury bureau), and Samuel Tilden.
Volume CCXXXV, Number 93 September 11, 2005
