Ah, memories. A song parody I wrote after the 2000 theft

[deutsey]

You may recall that Gore told Bush not to get "snippy" when Gore refused to concede the election at first. I wrote this right after the Supreme Court decision and even sung it with Laura Flanders on her radio show on the old KWAB station in Denver.

I found this still up on an anti-Bush site from that wonderful time.

THE "SNIPPY SHRUB KLUB"

Sung to the tune of "The Mickey Mouse Club"


Who's the leader of the thugs
who stole the election from you and me?

S-N-I-P-P-Y S-H-R-U-B

Hey there! If you lie and don't care,
help perpetuate the travesty.

S-N-I-P-P-Y S-H-R-U-B

(GOP Leaders): Snippy Shrub!

Majority of Americans: Al Gore won!

Corporate Media: Snippy Shrub!

Majority of Americans: Al Gore won!

Miami-Dade "Protesters": We'll forever shout you down with a 'Seig
heil! Heil! Heil!'

March along, don't think too long...
Join the rightwing conspiracy!



S-N-I-P-P-Y S-H-R-U-B

(Closing: sung slowly with false solemnity):

Now it's time to say goodbye to our democracy...

S-N-I…
(I'm the new boss… "el new wavey jeffey," as they say under the border).

P-P-Y
(Why? Cuz the Supreme Court sez so, dummy.)

S-H-R-U-B

See you next Election Day, Shrubkommandos!

[Octafish]

1. Snippy Shrub grew up to be Poppy's Little Turd from Crawford.

You were one of the original DUers to note "You don't steal elections to do good things."

Lie Father, Lie Son

Dwayne Eutsey | 06.07.2002 23:21

Poppy Bush and Dubya made the same tacit agreement with America: They agreed to lie to us, and we agreed to be lied to.

The spate of recent revelations that our selected resident of the White House has been (gasp!) less than truthful should come as no surprise to anyone.

After all, presidents, even the elected ones, lie. It’s part of the job description: “The incumbent will swear to uphold the US Constitution while simultaneously selling it out to wealthy elites and corporate interests. Ability to lie through teeth a must so that no one can tell the difference. Some travel, occasional weekend and evening work required.”

That’s probably why the reports about Bush’s contradictory explanations for possible insider trading back in the ‘80s have caused much of a stir among the punditry (that, and the fact that despite their best efforts, investigators have found no evidence linking this story in any way to Bill Clinton’s penis).

It also explains why news that Bush’s often repeated lie about his alleged campaign promise to keep the budget balanced except during a war, recession, or national emergency has generally been met with a yawn. Al Gore, of course, was the one who actually made the promise, but since he shaved his beard we don’t hear much about him anymore among those in the chattering class (he’s back on that “Let’s-talk-about-the-issues-that-really-affect-the-American-people” kick again. How gauche.).

In all fairness to Bush, though, he did turn Gore’s campaign promise it into a joke. Somehow Bush has made it the set-up for his hilarious “Lucky me, I hit the trifecta” punchline that has them rolling in the aisles at GOP fundraisers. Bush must have been quite the card during those late-night bull sessions at Skull and Bones. I can just see him now cracking up his fellow Bonesmen as they sat around Geronimo’s skull musing about what they were going to do after they finally inherited the world from their dads..

There have been plenty of other lies from Bush (e.g., “Kenny-Boy Lay? Um. Never heard of him”), but what makes his lying different from previous presidents is that with Bush, lying isn’t just one of his strongest political skills; it’s a family tradition. For the Bushes, the art of lying is a code of dishonor handed down from father to son the way other families pass down cherished family heirlooms.

I’m not the first to point out the long, rich history of mendacity in the Bush family. Most recently, Mark Crispin Miller touches on this trait in The Bush Dyslexicon, part of which examines the impact Nixon’s ruthless truthlessness had on his young protégé, George H.W. Bush. Likewise, there is Neal Bush’s deceit in the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s and Jeb Bush’s lame excuses for “accidentally” disenfranchising thousands of African Americans in Florida during the 2000 election. And then there’s that murky granddaddy of all Bush lies: Prescott Bush did not (NOT, I tell you) make his fortune with a little help from his Nazi friends during World War II.

The best overview that I’ve read of Poppy Bush’s vampire-like aversion to the light of truth was in an article by Weston Kosova in the August 16, 1991 Washington City Paper. Entitled “Whoppers! Reeling in George Bush’s Pathetic Lies,” the article gave an insightful analysis of the way, as Kosova put it, “Bush has advanced himself by lying when telling the truth might have proved politically risky. The expedient lie has paved Bush’s upwardly mobile path, from the 1980 campaign trail, to the vice-presidential mansion, to the White House.”

As Kosova points out in the article, it isn’t so much that Bush Senior was the first politician ever to flip-flop on issues when it was politically beneficial to do so. What was so creepy about Bush was his Orwellian ability to flip-flop drastically and then deny with a straight face that he had ever believed otherwise.

For example, prior to running with Reagan in 1980, Bush ridiculed Reaganomics as “voodoo economics.” After joining the Reagan ticket, however, Bush was not only a sudden convert to Reaganism, he denied ever doubting the eternal verities of supply-side economics at all. He even went so far as to make certain no footage existed of himself uttering the phrase “voodoo economics” (he checked with his contacts in network newsrooms, including his nephew at NBC).

Confident that no evidence of his remarks existed, Bush told a crowd in Houston (speaking in fluent Doublespeak): “Number one, I never said it. Every network has searched for it and none can find it. So I never said it.” If it’s gone down the memory hole, it never existed, right? Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. Only in this case, a clip of Bush calling trickle-down theory “voodoo economics” did in fact exist and Bush was caught in one of many of his doubleplusgood untruths.

Kosova goes on to present a number of other Bush-lies, including:

• Poppy claiming that he, like Reagan, had always opposed Roe v. Wade (despite his long history of supporting abortion rights);

• Poppy saying he was completely out of the loop on the Reagan Administration’s arms-for-hostages deals with Iran. Caspar Weinberger contradicted Bush’s Sgt. Schultz-like insistence that he knew nothing, nothing about selling weapons to America’s enemies. As president, Bush pardoned Weinberger of any wrongdoing before he could give all the details…what a generous guy;

• The time when Bush’s DEA lured a drug-dealer to sell drugs to them in front of the White House just so Bush could hold up a bag of crack on national TV and bemoan how the drug epidemic was raging right outside the gates of the First Family’s home. (I wonder if Dubya personally “disposed” of that bag of crack afterward).

• When the US indicted Manuel Noriega in 1988 on drug trafficking and money laundering charges, people started wondering what Poppy, a former CIA director who had met with Noriega, knew about Noriega’s drug activities. Bush denied knowing anything at all, of course, Hardly even knew the guy. Reminiscent of his “voodoo economics” lie, Bush even challenged anyone to produce evidence that he knew anything whatsoever about Noriega’s drug trafficking. Shortly after issuing the challenge, the New York Times printed an article in which the US Ambassador to Panama said he had met with Bush in 1985 and discussed Noreiga’s drug activity.

With the increasing number reports exposing Bush the Lesser’s difficulty with telling the truth, it seems that with the Bushes the lies of the father have become the lies of the sons. But, a liar is merely a delusional crank if no one buys into his lies. I agree to an extent with Kosova and Mark Crispin Miller’s accusation that Bush-family deceit has often been swallowed whole by the American people. As Kosova pointedly remarked about Americans in 1991, “No one cared (about Bush’s lies). Bush had learned from long experience that the national memory was short, and poor.”

According to Kosova, Poppy Bush made the same tacit agreement with the country that I believe Dubya made with it in 2000: He agreed to lie to us, and we agreed to be lied to. Like Diane Keaton and Al Pacino at the end of The Godfather, the American “sheeple” don’t really want to know the truth if it’s going to upset their pleasant domestic fantasies, and the Bushes all too willingly manipulate that self-deception.

Still, I don’t know. While there’s some merit to that argument, I have a little more confidence in the American people than that. After all, Keaton’s character ends up leaving Pacino in the Godfather sequel. Kosova’s cynicism may have reflected the times when he wrote the article: Summer, 1991 when Bush’s post-Gulf War approval ratings were still as large as Reagan’s deficits were deep.

But, lest we forget, it was only a year later when Americans went to the polls and dropped Poppy down the memory hole.

###

Thanks for writing this tune and writing all the stuff you've done down, Dwayne.

[deutsey]

2. Thanks, Octafish

Coming from you, that is indeed high praise. :-)

Here's a link to something I wrote in April 2001. I had a gut feeling then they were going to do something heinous based on what they did in Florida and what crimes the powers behind them have committed on a larger scale over the past few decades.

http://www.bartcop.com/coupsp.htm

I couldn't have imagined the horror of 9/11, though. Whether they were behind it or whether they just exploited it, they used that tragedy to strengthen their dictatorial grip on power. Either scenario is disgusting.

Anyone who thinks they're just going to go quietly into that good night just because a majority of the people despise them now are fools. Double drag fools, as Prince used to sing.

[Octafish]

3. For the record...

...and for my Journal.

Here we are, seven years later.

The difference is, more people now understand what Henry "Won't reveal client list to 9-11 Widows" Kissinger said about Chile, back in 1973:

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

Substitute "America" for "Chile" and you see how we got to where we are today.

Hey, DU! Here's some prescient work:

Smells Like Coup Spirit

By Dwayne Eutsey

Thanks to the investigative reporting of journalists such as Greg Palast, more evidence of a coordinated effort to disenfranchise tens of thousands of registered voters (mostly African American) is surfacing in Florida. When these reports are considered within the context of police roadblocks, cases of intimidation, and possible large-scale voter fraud and ballot tampering, fears of an orchestrated dirty election become more substantiated.

There is another aspect of the 2000 election in Florida that remains largely untouched, however: the possibility of a domestic covert intelligence operation designed to make certain that America didn't go Democratic "due to the irresponsibility of its own people," to paraphrase Henry Kissinger's remark concerning overthrowing the democratically elected government in Chile.

Perhaps the possibility of such an operation in the US is too far-fetched to take seriously, or perhaps there isn't enough evidence to proceed with documenting such suspicions. Unfortunately, history proves that the former assumption is naive (Watergate, Iran-Contra, and documented CIA activities against US citizens come immediately to mind). Regarding evidence, it's the nature of the covert beast to leave no fingerprints and smoking guns behind (unless you're setting up a patsy). However, if you can't find a corpse laying around, the stench in the air can often reveal, nonetheless, that a murder victim's body is covered up somewhere nearby.

What follows here is not an expose of how a CIA-backed coup in Florida helped kill the democratic process in November. It is an effort, however, to draw attention to the disturbing stink surrounding events in the 2000 election that are similar to known CIA actions that thwarted democracy in other countries, namely Guatemala in the 1950s and Chile in 1973. To avoid the appearance of "conspiracy theorizing" on my part, I've limited the information presented here to what can be verified. I have also limited the focus of this survey to very broad similarities. Many others connections exist and warrant further investigation (such as claims that former CIA/FBI agent Charles Kane, who was involved in possible absentee ballot tampering in Florida, played a role in the Bay of Pigs invasion and CIA coups and dirty tricks around the world. He allegedly retired in the mid-'70s and would have been employed during the Agency's heyday of covert operations).

Hopefully, this general overview will help prompt others to conduct a more thorough look into murky activities that, taken as a whole, suggest the spirit of CIA-Coups-Past may have paid an unwelcome visit last November to Florida.


HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

By placing these facts within the larger historical context of CIA coup activity, many of the baffling events transpiring in Florida last year begin to make some sense. The same players (CIA, powerful corporations, rightwing militarists), the same motives (preserving economic/political power), and even the same tactics (armed violence, fortunately, being one exception) begin to emerge that suggest some unpleasant connections among them.

For easier comparison, I break down these similarities according to coup patterns in Guatemala, Chile, and Florida. Unless otherwise noted, the information here is from David Halberstam's excellent book, The Fifties, and from the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Report).

Guatemala: Prior to the legitimate election of Jacobo Arbenz to the presidency in the early '50s, United Fruit Company controls most of the country's land, economy, and politics. The land reform policies that Arbenz wants to implement, which would redistribute United Fruit-controlled land to Guatemalans, threaten United Fruit's economic interests and political power in the region. United Fruit has close ties to powerful figures in America, including Allen Dulles (Director of the CIA) and his brother Foster (Secretary of State). The Dulles brothers and others portray Arbenz as a communist threat and convince President Eisenhower that a coup is in America's best interest.

Chile: Despite CIA covert efforts to defeat him, socialist Salvador Allende is elected as president in 1970. His plan to nationalize Chilean industries poses a direct threat to the reactionary Nixon Administration and the multinational corporate interests it represents. Prior to Allende's election, the CIA spent years and millions of dollars waging a propaganda war to maintain a US/corporate-friendly government in Chile. After the election, the Agency is instrumental in implementing Henry Kissinger's desire to thwart Allende's policies and in supporting a military coup being planned by General Augusto Pinochet.

Florida: Strategically important in the CIA's covert war against Cuba (and other troublespots throughout Central and South America), Florida has been home to CIA mercenary training camps since at least the '50s (such as one in Opa-Locka).

There is also an interesting Bush connection to Florida (apart from Jeb Bush holding the state's governorship). According to a report in The Nation, days after the Kennedy assassination in 1963 a memo from J. Edgar Hoover stated that a "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency" had been briefed regarding the reaction of anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami to the murder. Although George H.W. Bush claims the name he shares with the "Mr. George Bush of the CIA" is coincidental, a source for the story observed: "I know was involved in the Caribbean. I know he was involved in the suppression of things after the Kennedy assassination. There was a very definite worry that some Cuban groups were going to move against Castro and attempt to blame it on the CIA." (see Joseph McBride, "'George Bush,' CIA Operative," The Nation, July 16/23, 1988, p. 42).


THE PLAYERS

What follows is a very general review of similar interests and organizations involved in some manner in Guatemala,
Chile, and Florida.

Guatemala:
CIA: Director Allen Dulles is a key player in organizing the coup.

Multinational: United Fruit Company is known as "el pulpo" ("the octopus") because of its pervasive influence over so many facets of the country.

Rightwing Militarists Takeover: A reactionary military junta is installed after the coup, fronted by the CIA-selected Carlos Enrique Castillo Armas. The junta is responsible for the mass murder of dissidents and years of brutal repression.

Chile:
CIA: For a detailed analysis of widespread US covert activities in Chile, see the Church Report.

Multinationals: "In addition to providing information and cover to the CIA, multinational corporations also participated in covert attempts to influence Chilean politics." Church Report. Among the corporations actively opposed to Allende's election and his socialist experiment were ITT, Pepsi-Cola, and the Chase Manhattan Bank.

Rightwing Militarists Takeover: With CIA support and the blessings of the Nixon Administration, General Augusto Pinochet establishes a brutal and reactionary military junta after the coup. As in Guatemala, the junta is repressive and responsible for the mass murder of dissidents (including Americans Charles Horman and Frank Terrugi, both of whom were tortured and executed. According to a US State Department memo dated August 25, 1976, the CIA "may have played an unfortunate part" in both deaths. See http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/19991008/01-04.htm).

Florida:
CIA: At least one "former" CIA operative (Charles Kane) is implicated in shady activities during the Florida election. The attorney for those investigating Kane's involvement in tampering with absentee ballots said Kane's efforts were part of a "sinister underground conspiracy." ("Florida Official Admits Helping GOP," Associated Press, December 7, 2000).

Multinationals: Oil, insurance, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, etc., all have concerns about a Gore presidency and its potential for regulatory activism. These corporations are eager to bring "business special interests into politics so they can take over the regulatory bodies of government and regulate themselves. ("America in the Grip of Bush's 'Iron Triangle,'" The Observer, December 3, 2000).

Rightwing Militarists Takeover: The Bush Administration has established "itself as the most brazenly rightwing of modern times. As the ecstatic head of the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation enthuses, the new crowd are 'more Reaganite than the Reagan administration.'" (The Guardian, April 25, 2001). Among the appointments Bush has made are Cold Warriors (e.g., Donald Rumsfield), old Iran/Contra characters and intelligence operatives (e.g., John Negroponte and Otto Reich; see The Nation, May 7, 2001: "Lie to the Media, Get a Job," by Eric Alterman).


TACTICS

Media Manipulation/Reality Distortion

Guatemala: CIA "deftly created a fictional war over the airwaves, one in which the government troops faltered and refused to fight and in which the liberation troops were relentlessly moving toward Guatemala City." Halberstam

Chile: "Press placements were attractive because each placement might produce a multiplier effect, being picked up and replayed by media outlets other than the one in which it originally came out." Church Report

Florida: John Ellis, Bush's first cousin, at the rightwing Fox News decides to declare the state for Bush after 2 a.m., causing the other networks to do likewise, creating the lasting (and false) impression that Bush won the election.


Press Collusion

Guatemala: "...one crucial ingredient left for the success of the coup...was the cooperation, voluntary and involuntary, of the American press. This meant it was necessary for the press corps to tell the public that the coup was the work of an indigenous Guatemalan force." Halberstam

Practically all American reporters cooperate, with the exception of NYT reporter Sydney Gruson. After CIA director Allen Dulles puts pressure on the Times, Gruson is removed from covering Guatemala. "It was an important moment," writes Halberstam, "a warning to the paper's top executives about the potential difference between the agenda of the secret government and that of serious journalism."

Chile: Excerpts from the Church Report"The most common form of a propaganda project is simply the development of 'assets' in media organizations who can place articles or be asked to write them." "According to CIA documents, the Time correspondent in Chile apparently had accepted Allende's protestations of moderation and constitutionality at face value. Briefings requested by Time and provided by the CIA in Washington resulted in a change in the basic thrust of the Time story on Allende's September 4 victory and in the timing of that story." "According to the CIA, partial returns showed that 726 articles, broadcasts, editorials, and similar items directly resulted from Agency activity. The Agency had no way to measure the scope of the multiplier effect...but concluded that its contribution was both substantial and significant."

Florida: After Election Day, airwaves are saturated with rightwing commentators, such as Ann Coulter, accusing Gore of being a "nutcase" who is trying to steal an election that was, at the very least, in dispute; at the most, it was a victory for Gore. (See "GOP Won by Planting Seeds of Deception, by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, December 14, 2000).

Lewis Lapham of Harper's noted that the "poisonous language" and "paranoid" arguments being aired at the time were mostly coming from rightwingers (although the Democrats were not free from "unctuous statement, rank hypocrisy, and bitter diatribe.") Still, when it came to rancor and speciousness, he "didn't find the same sort of stupidity on the Democratic side of the dispute."

A sidenote on the Press and the CIA: There are a number of articles exposing the connections between the US media and the CIA. The most famous expose was Carl Bernstein's "The CIA and the Media" in the October 20, 1977 issue of Rolling Stone. In it, Bernstein reveals the cooperation during the '50s and '60s between major US media outlets and the intelligence community, including, CBS, New York Times, Time, the Miami Herald, and hundreds of others. The NY Times recently reported, ironically enough, that the CIA has included news wire services (the now Moonie-owned UPI, for example) as part of its "regular propaganda apparatus;" this apparatus also included "Miami exile contacts with Florida papers."

Although this report is based on a CIA document from the early '60s, it was also reported this year (or underreported) that US Army psychological operations personnel (responsible for spreading propaganda) were placed at CNN's TV, radio, and satellite bureaus during the Kosovo war. (From a report by Andrew Cockburn in Counterpunch, cited among AlterNet's Top Ten Censored Stories of 2000).


Staging "Spontaneous" Revolts/Protests

Guatemala: CIA creates the "rebel army" that is supposed to be an indigenous uprising. "One of the CIA's main responsibilities was to keep American journalists out of the area lest they find out how pathetic Castillo Armas's army really was." Halberstam

Chile: "The CIA was directed to undertake an effort to promote a military coup in Chile to prevent the accession to power of Salvador Allende." (This particular coup fell apart). Church Report.

Florida: Republican operatives are bussed into Miami in a GOP-orchestrated campaign to shut down
the recount effort and intimidate (and even physically assault) Democratic election officials.




Targeting Special Groups for Propaganda

Chile: "The covert propaganda efforts in Chile also included 'black' propaganda--material falsely purporting to be the product of a particular individual or group...the CIA used 'black' propaganda to sow discord between the Communists and the Socialists and between the national labor confederation and the Chilean Communist Party." Church Report

Florida: African Americans received calls the weekend before the election from a speaker who falsely claimed
to be with the NAACP, asking them to vote for Bush. (Midwest Today, December 2000: "Scary Facts
About the Florida Vote," by Larry Jordan).


CONCLUSION

Where does mere coincidence end and meaningful patterns begin? Even if the events in Florida listed here
(along with the more detailed reports being filed by investigative journalists) are removed from the context
of covert actions, it is easy to conclude that something profoundly disturbing happened in the previous election.

Reviewing the increasing amount of evidence demonstrating just how dirty the 2000 election was, however, is it so unreasonable to think that those interests whose hands remain sullied from Florida would have sunk one notch lower into the murky depths of covert operations? What are the limits when the objective is to grab power at any cost?

And what will those who seized that power do next time in order to hold on to it?

You were on to their gangster asses from Day 1, Dwayne.

Thanks to you, it was only a short while being in the 8-Percent.