TBT: The Brutal Truth

It's The Cover-Up, Stupid

As the Bush Administration's stonewalling over elusive pictures of King George schmoozing with Jack Abramoff hasn't convinced the WH Press Corp to let Clueless McClellan come up for air anytime soon, we now find out that Bush's latest goalpost is the very one Ms. Shakes predicted would be tossed onto the field by the Dictator-In-Chief himself:

"I mean, there's thousands of people that come through and get their pictures taken," Mr. Bush said. "I'm also mindful that we live in a world in which those pictures will be used for pure political purposes, and they're not relevant to the investigation."

Uh-huh. Interesting how that works -- photos and documents on the previous Democratic President was certainly relevant to the GOP just 10 years ago but now with a SCOTUS-selected, Republican, card-carrying member of the Tali-Born Again destroying the country a hell lot more than Bin Laden could only dream of, there's that big rush to change the standard. It's something that I noticed about 5 years into my former life as a fellow Fundy Fristian Kool-Aide drinker and after two years of self-imposed soul-searching, I found the answer: Republicans and Christian Conservatives walk hand-in-hand with a mindless Leo Straussian-esque assertion that one standard exists for all of mankind while another standard should be used for themselves.

In other words, when Clinton's repugnant moral character became the cashcow of big media and the perfect boogie man for Christian Conservatives to latch onto, they all screamed in unison, "How can he commit adultery and perjury and still claim to be Christian?!?" Now with the tables turned on a rightwing "Christian" President's repugnant moral character becoming the hot button issue the media doesn't want to deal with, mum is the word from those very same people. Nobody in rightwing Christianity has jumped up and bellowed, "How can Bush have fellowship with a convicted fellon and still call himself Christian?!?"

And it won't happen -- the standards must be different when dealing with leftwinger and rightwinger (Christian or not) because, as far as Red Staters are concerned, we leftwing Christians have no souls. Since souls come from God, the lack of having a soul is analogous to being "Gawdless" in their mind. Thus, that's how they try to get away with these hypocritical double-standards and it's exactly how we've gone from relevant pictures of Clinton to irrelevant pictures of Chimpy in such a short period of time. Henceforth, it comes to no surprize that Josh Marshall catches Reflections in the act of sweeping the irrelevant under the Papal rug:

After a few minutes, she returned and proceeded to pull up the photo in question on the CD. Then, to her audible surprise, she told me the "photo was deleted" from the CD.

That, as you'd imagine, caught my attention. So I asked what that meant. The woman from Reflections told me that that this sometimes happened when the White House wanted to prevent the public from accessing certain photographs of the president.

When I asked her when this had happened she told she didn't know and wouldn't be at liberty to tell me even if she did.

This was back on January 11th. From what we could tell, the photograph had been removed from the site roughly a week earlier ... But early this afternoon, I decided to take one more go at Reflections. I talked to company president Joanne Amos. We went back and forth over various questions about whether photographs at the site were available to the public and why some had been removed. When she, at length, asked me who it was in the picture with the president. I told her we believed it was Jack Abramoff.

Amos very straightforwardly told me that the photographs had been removed and that they had been removed because they showed Abramoff and the president in the same picture. The photos were, she told me, "not relevant."

Don't you just love that shit? The elitism, the haughtiness, the snobbery is just so dripping. Somehow, she was annointed with a level of infallible authority to whit she and her clients (e.g. The Bush Administration, and to a greater degree their clients; The GOP and the MSM) will ultimately decide for the public what is relevant and what isn't despite the fact that we're the sonsabitches paying (in more ways than one) for the unmitigated damage her crooked-assed clients and the felons she's trying to protect are doing to this country every single second of every day.

What makes her think she was bestoyed this unmitigated awesome power of influence and diction over us mensch? Why, she dropped a few thousand dimes on the horse and its breeders -- this fact unearthed by Dave Donnelly:

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Amos gave $2,000 to Bush in 2003 and $2,000 to the RNC in 2004.

This goes back to what I said earlier about Republicanism today being ruled by Race, Religion, and Revenue. The demand for the Bush/Abramoff photos is so huge that even Abramoff himself can't decide which of the myriads of offers he should take (read: Revenue) which itself is compounded by the apparent fact that Amos isn't so much as concerned with cashing in on these photos as she is with making damned sure her horse isn't put out to pasture by a impeachment pretzel-er ... process stuck in its craw. That requires steadfast, fierce, religious-like fervor in protecting a guilty-as-all-get-up President despite it being against her best interests -- just like the Red State poor and middle class. There's nobody more dangerous than a brainwashed minion licking the snake-skin boots of its benefactor especially when he can change into a malefactor (Joannie, yer doin' a hellava jawb).

Unfortunately for her and her clients, this "business decision" has made the "irrelevant" much more relevant now and practically guarantees these photos showing up any moment from -- I predict -- another GOP source (afterall, when your President's approval rating is nearing the freezing temperature of water, one visit to a back-alley fence and you're off to a warmer climate for a while).

It's the cover-up, stupid ...

posted by Sizemore at 9:09 PM

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