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September 12, 2005

A Very, Very Good Idea___“Go fuck yourself Mr. Cheney

By DOUG THOMPSON

Ben Marble, had the guts to wade into Vice President Dick Cheney’s carefully-staged photo op Thursday and say what many residents of the Gulf Coast wanted to say to the politicians who sat on their butts while the people of Mississippi and Louisiana lay dead and dying.

::::::::

“Go fuck yourself Mr. Cheney,” Marble screamed just off camera as the event played out live on CNN. “Go fuck yourself you asshole!”

Secret Service agents subdued Marble and CNN yanked the video off its web site but copies of it float around the Internet and Marble, who’s homeless after Katrina destroyed his Gulfport home, is offering a copy for sale on EBay.

Republicans, of course, jumped in with carefully-crafted indignation over Marble’s “inappropriate remarks” to Cheney, forgetting the Vice President used the same words to tell off a Senator just last year.

Cheney offered his outburst of obscenity because that Senator had the gall to question his relationship with scandal-scarred Halliburton, the company he used to run and that’s now ripping off taxpayers in Iraq. All Marble had to be upset about was loss of his home, death of close friends and family and destruction of the city he loved.

Yet Marble, who also plays with punk rock bands in the Gulfport area, could become the symbol of frustration felt not only by residents of the hard hit area but every American who recoils in shock and anger at the government’s lackluster and uncompassionate response to the horror, death and destruction left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard cried without shame on national television this week, saying the federal “bureaucracy has committed murder here in the Greater New Orleans area.”

Newscasters abandoned their traditionally-stoic on screen personas and openly challenged attempts by politicians to spin the event.

“Oh come on Senator, let’s forget the hype and talk about the people dying here in the streets,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper said to Senator Mary Landrieu after she recited a canned political speech about “how proud I am of the way Congress has responded to this tragedy.”

On NBC’s Meet the Press, host Tim Russert could not conceal his anger when he opened an interview with incompetent Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff with a curt “are you, or anybody who reports to you, considering resignation?”

Even those who make their living coming up with excuses for Bush couldn’t keep a straight face. When Fox News blowhard Bill O’Reilly offered the usual administration spin, pseudo-journalist Geraldo Rivera shot back with: “This is Dante’s Inferno, Bill. There is no way to sugarcoat it. This is the worst thing I’ve seen in a civilized nation.”

And it is. The debacle is a monumental failure of government at all levels, an inability to serve the citizens when that service is most needed.

Even right-wing Republican firebrand Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House who masterminded the GOP takeover of Congress, recognizes this in memos he recently sent to fellow party members.

“For the last week the federal government and its state and local counterparts have consistently been behind the curve,” Gingrich said in a tartly-worded missive to Republicans. "The American people overwhelmingly know that the current situation is totally unacceptable. It is a mistake to get trapped into defending the systems and processes which clearly failed.”

Gingrich suggests it is time to stop the useless argument about “values” in government and politics and realize that those elected to serve the people are in the business of delivering services to the people.

“We're not in a values fight now but over whether the system is working,” Gingrich told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. “The issue is delivery.”

When it came time to deliver to the hundreds of thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina, government failed.

And when our government fails to deliver, it should, as Dr. Ben Marble so aptly suggested to Vice President Dick Cheney, prove it can also fail at the difficult anatomical act of self-intercourse.

©Originally published by and Copyright 2005 by Capitol Hill Blue

Who is this Thompson guy anyway?

Submitter: Rob Kall

Submitters Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.


Check out his platform at RobKall.com


He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity


He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com


more detailed bio:


Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.


Rob Kall Wikipedia Page


Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel


Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel


Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.


Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.


To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.


For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.


Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..


To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.


Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.


His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.


Join the conversation:


On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution


and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation





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