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Secret Photos Show Bush Terrified and/or Relaxing on 9/11

By The Fucking News Staff

NEW YORK -- A producer working with the PBS documentary program Frontline has won the release of White House photographs taken on September 11, 2001. The photos include never-before-enraging images of behind-the-fuckups moments that tragic day. They were taken by official White House photographer Eric Draper, and in his iconic images of Pres. Bush, take powerful advantage of Draper's unique ability to capture the intimate moods of subjects who have elevated their feet onto a desk or table.

 

Frontline posted the photos online here this weekend--okay, Friday, fuck you-- and captioned them with supplemental information to reflect the retroactive rewriting of history and collective infantilization of the subsequent 15 years. The photos are reproduced by The Fucking News below to add context reflecting factual shit that should piss you the fuck off all over again, as well as supplemental made-up shit that you fucking know is true.

 

At first--as seen on the president's face in this famous photo from the time--when Chief of Staff Andy Card whispered to him that two planes had hit the World Trade Center and that, "America is under attack," the president immediately launched "Air Force Two" into his presidential briefs.

Photo credit: A photographer really hoping for something like, "Nothing to fear but fear itself."

 

 

The New 9/11 Photos: A Pantshitting For the Ages

After waiting at least five minutes after being told of the attacks before leaving the classroom, the president conferred with Press Secretary Ari Fleischer to discuss how to tell the nation that he had waited at least five minutes after being told of the attacks before leaving the classroom.

 

Through spectral analysis of the sonic vibratory patterns captured in the photograph, The Fucking News has been able to establish what the two men said to each other:

 

Bush: How's this: "My fellow Americans, I sat in that chair for at least five minutes because pet goats are not scary. And I did not want to be scared."

 

Fleischer: Say you didn't want the children to be scared.

 

Bush: Why would the children be scared? "Kids, I gotta go. Be good and learn your calculus shit." What's scary about a guy getting out of his chair and leaving? Oh, you mean like when kids don't cry when they're hurt unless they can see you're freaked out? They woulda seen how scared I was?

 

Fleischer: How scared the children were.

 

Bush: Roger that.

Minutes before Pres. Bush realized that the rest of his presidency would be spent in the deep end of the pool, he met with the children of a Sarasota, FL, elementary school. As one of the new photos shows, one little girl instinctively recoiled from the president's touch.

As new facts and intelligence came in, the president quickly boarded Air Force One and ran away. En route to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisifuckingana for some fucking reason, the president was briefed by his top advisor.

Hiding safely at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisifuckingana for some fucking reason, the president worked furiously to avoid making direct eye contact with The Scared Boy Who Lives In The Table.

Senior Advisor Karl Rove crosses his arms and stands with his legs apart looking off in the distance the way people do when no one's taking their picture, as Pres. Bush raises his feet in solemn tribute to the dead still being raised at that moment from the smoldering rubble in New York, the Pentagon and Shanksville, PA.

In this fourth consecutive photo of him leaning back in a chair in classic When-in-crisis-lean-back-in-a-chair mode, Pres. Bush uses his own face to clench itself in terror. As in all the photos, the president is listening intently to someone else speaking because who the fuck's gonna listen to that guy.

 

At a news conference before changing hiding places, the president addressed the nation and vowed that the United States would "hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts" after he was gone.

Back on board Air Force One to go to fucking Nebraska if you can fucking believe it, the president is consoled by Lt. Col. Cindy Wright of the White House Military Office. Col. Wright advised the president that the Geneva Conventions on international warfare explicitly prohibit peeking during hide and seek but that if he was still scared of being found he could have a cookie and wear his cowboy hat.

More than ten hours after the attacks, Pres. Bush arrived safely back at base, where--for reasons most Americans would only grasp years later--First Lady Laura Bush cannot fucking believe it.

Pres. Bush relied upon the TelePrompTer technology of the time in order to ensure that precise, thought-out wording was adhered to, as was the unremarkable practice until the president became black.

Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card confer with one another as Pres. Bush tries to catch the score on TV.

 

Pres. Bush prepares to deliver his speech to the nation from the Oval Office, on the 12-hour anniversary of the attacks. The president explained to the nation that "the attacks were intended to frighten our nation into chaos" and that they had succeeded.

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Editorial

Triump of the Will

"For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout,

with the voice of the archangel, and with the Trump of God."

- Four Thessalonians

 

So here we are.

 

We’re almost done with the national project of normalizing utterance of the sentence, “Donald Trump is the 2016 Republican presidential nominee.” We have physically mutilated our very synapses into a shape capable of acccepting a reality in which the party whose first presidential nominee went to war to liberate slaves will now nominate a man who went on TV to fire apprentices.

 

We’re already moving beyond that. Polls show that approximately half of the country wants to hand the levers of economic power, the nuclear codes, and the keys to our future over to Trump rather than to a former secretary of state or a sitting U.S. senator whose political weakness is his embrace of the same political ideology that has made Scandinavia the envy of the world.

 

How did we get here? This is not solely the death throes of a confused, angry, anxious, white, male, Christian hegemony. In choosing Trump we have simply made explicit what has been implicit in a million fucking choices made by right and left alike for decades.

 

Yes, there is racists in Trump’s ranks. But there have always been racists. And he could not win on racism alone. And his racist/sexist statements have always been caveated enough to enable the coming pivot.

 

Trump said what he had to in order to win the nomination…is what he will say in order to win the election.

 

And the left will focus on which of those two he really means. Because that’s what the left does. That’s what we all do. That’s how we got here.

 

We are obsessed, like children, with essentialism. What do they really think? Are they racist? Who are they…really? Because we think that tells us something about how people will act in the future.

 

We find ourselves asking these questions about Republican nominee Donald Trump because we ever started asking those stupid questions in the first place.

 

Essentialism is the stuff of children. Which we now are.

 

The counter-culture of the sixties did a vast amount of good…but also hurt us with the exaltation of feelings and emotions. Conservatives once took pride in the idea that they were the intellectual ones, scoffing at the emotionalism of the left, at the primacy the left gave to people’s feelings, for fuck’s sake.

 

The conservatives lost. Feelings won. Impulse won. Essentialism won. If it felt good, we did it.

 

So we traded a thoughtful president for a thoughtless one. We traded reluctant warriors for war-loving warriors. Rocky for Rambo.

 

The left dealt with the right, and vice versa, in absolutist, essentialist terms because it was easy, and that’s how we felt. The way children do things.

 

People love Trump because he appeals to this childlike laziness. We don’t want to do the work of evaluating policy, of thinking before we speak about people of color, of figuring out who to vote for in the mid-terms, let alone in state elections, let alone in local elections.

 

We grew up with the left preaching “Think Globally, Act Locally.” As if there was some reason we couldn’t think and act globally and locally. And so we acted locally, and while we were thinking globally, we lost the globe to climate change and Wall Street Unbound. And acting globally, it turned out, didn’t mean showing up at local elections, let alone volunteering or donating. It meant ordering locally grown, non-GMO produce for our kale salads at the artisanal bistro while our statehouses became the trendy spot for organic, free-range lobbyists raised on an exclusive diet consisting of our future.

 

Because elections were tawdry, dirty things, and we were above them. We removed ourselves from the fucking work, the way we’d been taught by Henry David Thoreau, and Timothy Leary, and Jon Stewart. Our primary accomplishment was keeping our own fucking hands clean. We talked about “Congress” because we couldn’t bother to find out which members were good on which issues. Easier and more rewarding to condemn the institution, the city, as if were built on mystical ley lines of corruption rather than the fault lines of human dynamics and the constitutional bedrock of adversarial systems. Priding ourselves on saving our own selves from “the system,” while still thinking of ourselves as patriots who revere the American way, which--guess the fuck what—is participating in the system. Which is the system.

 

We held ourselves above the system, but that didn’t elevate us, it lowered the system.

 

And we let the boring, actually essential stuff, slip away. The unions. Regulatory regimes. Truly progressive tax rates. Because the arguments against those things are easy to win if we evaluate them based on feelings rather than on work. Which we did.

 

So everything turned to shit. Because we shat on the hard work needed to preserve and sustain it. And once the right figured out that the left’s embrace of emotionalism and essentialism was actually better suited for them, they ran with it.

 

In 2000, when Al Gore made his case about the shitty state of Texan health care, George W. Bush was asked whether Gore’s numbers were correct.

 

“If he’s trying to allege that I’m a hard-hearted person and I don’t care about children, he’s absolutely wrong.”

– George W. Bush, Oct. 11, 2000, presidential debate

 

It was the answer of a child. A child running for president. Atop the ticket of the party that once prided itself on its coldly reality-based intellectualism.

 

The triumph of lefty emotionalism was complete. Now everyone could believe whatever they wanted because of how it made them feel. Belief in global warming went down. The country embraced Draconian anti-crime measures—despite stunning declines in crime—because we didn’t feel safe.

 

So it wasn’t just the things that were worse that felt worse…everything felt worse. Because it’s hard to convince people of the truth when they don’t do critical assessment. Things feel true or they don’t.

 

So we did away with the quaint requirement that television news provide equal access to participants in the political system. Stories had to feel important.

 

And one by one, our essentialism and our emotionalism made it easy for the robber barons and the terrorized children to steal away all the bulwarks and norms that used to propel us forward, economically, socially, scientifically, culturally.

 

Until we were left with norms that were arbitrary and untethered from the engines of our past successes. Our media and politicians observed these norms above all else. And yet. And yet.

 

The American Dream slipped away. We answered chaotic crimes with chaotic wars. Anyone who thought about this shit saw prima facie that these were mistakes. But we made them because they didn’t violate the last, stupid, vestigial norms.

 

Bipartisanship. “The tone” of our discourse. Expertise and experience.

 

None of those things saved us. They’re the very things that fucked us.

 

Trump has extended himself as the most potent middle finger we can imagine aimed right at all the norms and niceties that got us here. It’s not just Angry White Dudes tired of defending their essences from charges of racism, tired of doing the work not to say things that are racist. Democrats and independents sympathize with the Great Norm Rebellion, too. Norms and niceties cost us precious blood and treasure in Iraq and on Wall Street. TV journalists only got mad when a guest violated the norms against crosstalk. How did those norms help us against global warming, al Qaeda, Wall Street…things that never seemed to anger the TV news people, if they covered them at all.

 

We see it even among those who hate Trump. It’s hate, a feeling. We see it in the Clinton supporters who can’t admit that she’s advocated some shitty policies and defended her husband’s shitty record. We see it in the Sanders supporters who think all of that makes Clinton essentially “corrupt” or “untrustworthy”…as if all of us aren’t corrupt and untrustworthy.

 

Absolutism, essentialism, simplification. Watching for “flip-flopping” as if that’s not asinine, the mark of someone who believes there’s a “real” person in every politician, steering them, and that if we could only find out what that real person really believes…we’d have the kind of solace and certainty a child craves.

 

Yes, Clinton is corrupt. No, Clinton’s not corrupt. Yes, Sanders is egomaniacal. No, Sanders isn’t egomaniacal. They’re just fucking people, people, responding as best they can to the incentives and circumstances in which they find themselves.

 

But we can’t see that, because that’s not satisfying. It doesn’t feel good. It’s fucking work. And so we get Trump, who is easy. Not because he’ll say anything, but because of what it says that he will say anything: That it’s okay not to do the work, that the norms don’t matter. He has officially liberated Americans from the yoke they’d already come to resent and reject. The yoke of empiricism and engagement. Of acting and thinking globally and locally. Of embracing nuance and accepting uncertainty. Of subordinating feeling to thinking.

 

Until we change all that, we will get Trump, or someone like him. And we will deserve it.

 

Actual, non-comatose, job-holding, child-rearing adults, educated in our schools, have chosen him. So until we change ourselves, restore our norms and institutions and do the fucking work required of citizens in a participatory democracy, some of us will be tempted to withdraw from “the system” even more, to close their eyes and think of America.

 

We don’t actually deserve President Trump. NO ONE deserves President Trump. But we have earned him.

 

We have nominated the enemy and he is us.

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Terribly Serious GOP Trump Lament, Now Annotated for Your Sanity!

So here's some shit that the Washington Post published Monday that had Serious Repulbicans nodding their heads and muttering in agreement. It all sounds eminently reasonable if you don't have A Google Thing or a Wikpedia Machine.

So, to help us all stay sane, we've followed up the bullshit--well, SOME of the bullshit; we're only human--with what was secretly thought, or shoulda been said, in response. Enjoy, and share!

Opinion

The Most Depressing Moment of the 2016 Race

By Michael Gerson Opinion writer May 30 at 8:52 PM

For those of us with a certain political bent and background, this is the most depressing moment of all [Not that Trump actually won, of course]. The best [True!] of the GOP — Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan, the [most] intellectually serious reformicons who have called attention to [but not done something about] issues of poverty and the need for Republican outreach [winning] — are bending their knee to the worst nominee in their party’s [very recent] history. Ryan drags himself slowly. Rubio eventually went with a quick Band-Aid pull. But the largest political choice each man has made this year will be one of the worst mistakes of their careers.

How do I know this? [I don't, I am paid to opine through my ass] It doesn’t require fortune-telling [just some other kind of magic]. Just days before Rubio offered to speak on Trump’s behalf at the Republican convention, the presumptive nominee declared the 1993 suicide of Vince Foster to be “very fishy,” especially given Foster’s “intimate knowledge of what was going on” with the Clintons. And Trump attacked the Republican governor of New Mexico, Susana Martinez, for allowing Syrian refugees to be “relocated in large numbers” to her state. “If I was governor,” he said, “that wouldn’t be happening.” [None of which entitles me to "know" the thing I just asked you how do I know.]

 

This is Trump on his best behavior, trying (once again) to act “presidential” [like George Bush, e.g., mocking a blind reporter for his glasses] A previous column I wrote — examining Trump’s penchant for conspiracy thinking on issues from vaccination to the death of Antonin Scalia [to the president's birthplace, SO WEIRD I LEFT THAT ONE OUT!] — appeared on the same day as Trump’s implication of Hillary Clinton in Foster’s death [which came straight from my party's mainstream]. One challenge of detailing Trump’s lunacy is the need for hourly updates [I do zingers!]. His allegation in the Foster case involved the exploitation of a personal tragedy, amounting to the mockery of a family’s loss. It revealed a wide streak of cruelty. [like George Bush, e.g., mocking a death-row convict pleading for her life.]

The attack [by which I mean WORDS] on Martinez demonstrated another less-than-desirable leadership quality. Trump’s charge against her had nothing to do with refugee policy. During her time as governor, just 10 Syrian refugees have been relocated to New Mexico. Trump was attempting to punish Martinez because she has been noncommittal about endorsing him. In making judgments about people, Trump’s primary measure is not ideological or even political. [Like George Bush, e.g, when he got rid of U.S. attorneys who wouldn't help him electorally by ginning up bullshit voter fraud cases]

 

He likes people who support him and disdains people who don’t. So Martinez and liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) are lumped in the same category of lèse-majesté. It doesn’t matter that Martinez is known as an effective Republican governor. Trump demands the unity of adulation. He is incapable of magnanimity [unlike George Bush, e.g., who non-rhetorically magnanimitied two entire countries into the stone age].

 

And this meanness of spirit is also applied to some of the most vulnerable people in the world [as opposed to meanness of action, e.g., George Bush applying meanness of decade-long detention without trial to some of the most vulnerable and innocent people in the world]. Trump’s mention of refugees was a subterfuge, but still a damaging one. To score his political point, Trump chose to heap disdain on a few people — vetted for years before arrival — who seek the protection of the United States after a terrible ordeal. Can you imagine, say, Ronald Reagan attacking women and children fleeing violence and oppression [unless it was an ACTUAL, NON-verbal attack committed by the Contras, in which case freedom]? They would more likely be used as an inspiring speech illustration [or for jokes about AIDS]. For Trump, the bully, a trickle of refugees is another chance to kick the weak [rhetorically, as opposed to literally kickiing them, e.g., the enhanced kicking authorized by George Bush].

Republicans are testing out a theory. “What Trump is doing,” argues Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, “is exactly what Rush Limbaugh and others have been begging Republican presidential candidates to do — to run a brutal, scorched-earth, anything-goes campaign [like George Bush, e.g., against John McCain in 2000]. They now have their man.” So, is the nation longing for more invective, more viciousness, more accusations of scandal and conspiracy? A strong plurality of voters in Republican primaries seemed to agree [which is weird, because my party has been telling them 'two plus two" for years now and all they keep shouting is "four!"].

 

We will now see how the national electorate responds. As a starting move, Trump has accused Bill Clinton of rape and intimated that the Clintons are guilty of murder. It is hard to imagine going lower from here, but Trump will surely manage.

 

Some Republicans keep expecting Trump to finally remove the mask of misogyny, prejudice and cruelty and act in a more presidential manner [like George Bush, e.g., with ACTUAL misogyny of restricting reproductive rights, ACTUAL prejudice of restricting voter rights and ACTUAL cruelty of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay...]. But it is not a mask. It is his true face. Good Republican leaders [like, um] making the decision to support Trump will end up either humiliated by the association, or betrayed and attacked for criticizing the great leader. Trump leaves no other options.

 

Here is the problem in sum: Republicans have not been given the option of choosing the lesser of two evils [they actually had the option of choosing the lesser of 17 evils]. The GOP has selected someone who is unfit to be president, lacking the temperament, stability, judgment and compassion [of someone who nicknames a top advisor "turdblossom"] to occupy the office. This is a terrible error, which has probably cost conservatives a majority on the Supreme Court. But the mistake was made by Republican primary voters in choosing Trump — not by those who can’t, in good conscience, support him.

 

Read more from Michael Gerson’s archivefollow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. [But definitely don't mention he used to be a top advisor to George Bush while Bush was being SUCH a better president than Trump would be.]

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Mourning Nation Remembers Muhammad Ali, Not What It Thought of Him When It Mattered

America is in mourning today for the legend it once referred to variously as “Cassius Clay,” “uppity nigger,” and--in transcripts of FBI wiretaps--simply “C,” the FBI’s derogatory replacement for the name the man called himself: Muhammad Ali.

In remembrances around the country, Ali was not remembered as standing for everything America stood against. He was not memorialized for his opposition to asinine U.S. wars. He was not paid tribute to for seeking social and economic justice. He was not celebrated for becoming Muslim. He was not honored as a man hated for his skin almost as much as he was hated for his mouth.

No one mentioned that the world’s most beloved man of the 20th century was hated by America for not hating himself. But if anyone ever forgot that he was a blazing star of charisma, a transformative figure in American history, a quick and hilarious showman, and an athlete of unprecedented skill and accomplishment, Ali was happy to remind them. 

Ali, convicted in court of dodging the draft, was demonized by the mainstream media, targeted by death threats, and faced five years in prison. It took the Supreme Court to rule that the draft board should have specified what Ali’s reason was, despite the fact that he was pretty fucking clear he thought America was a bigger piece of shit than usual for telling Americans they had to go kill people who had never done anything as bad to them as America had. Only the court’s conviction couldn't stand; Ali’s always did.

Had he been convicted then, today, almost fifty years later, Ali would not have been allowed to vote in his home state of Kentucky. Today.

At times an ally of Malcolm X, who was hated by much of white America until he was silenced by gunfire, and an ally of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was hated by much of white America until he was silenced by white gunfire, Muhammad Ali was—unlike them--hated by much of white America until he was silenced by Parkinson’s Disease.

Parkinson’s Disease can be caused by repeated blows to the head, which can be caused by the reality that repeated blows to black bodies have been one of the few avenues to economic success not historically closed to black men (except for when they were). Parkinson’s Disease can also be exacerbated by inflammation of white boxing authorities, causing career blockages in every fucking state in the country during the years when you are quickest--and best able to avoid a Parkinson’s Jab or a Parkinson’s Hook.

But it was not Ali’s political positions that first led American boxing to cast him out. He was stripped of his titles first for joining the Nation of Islam, because America has never read the Treaty of Tripoli. A federal judge even found that other draft dodgers had been allowed to keep boxing as long as they remained Christian while punching the shit out of other men’s brains.

Ali’s contributions to society include every fucking thing white America hated him for, as well as helping anti-FBI activists by fighting his first bout with Joe Frazier, which so distracted the patriotic, TV-watching guards at an FBI office, that the activists were able to break in that night and uncover a trove of FBI wiretaps—including those of King and Ali talking on the phone.

 

In later years he became revered by white Americans for graciously not reminding them every fucking day of the thousand indignities large and small they had visited upon him. In an emotional tribute posted online, white America said, “Muhammad Ali really brought us together today in common erasure of just how small and scared and shitty we are. Only by not recognizing how fucked up we treated him can we move on to continue treating people of color the same way today when they celebrate themselves or try to fix our fucked-up systems. Thank you, Cassius.”

Ali is survived by his family and a nation that reveres him as an American icon while simultaneously reviling the activists he supported and who do today exactly what he would have been doing. Funeral services will be held in his hometown of Louisville, which in 1975 voted 6-to-fucking-FIVE to name a street for him.

Muhammad Ali was 74 years old. And timeless.

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