September 2007: "It's That Time Again"

September 11: time again, says watertiger, for
"A moment of silence"...

(Photo: AP/Charles Dharapak)

Whitehouse.org Newsroom stops adding new material this month. This, after more than six years of channeling the Bush inner frat boy accurately—if far more articulately than the original.

The news reports end on 9-14, with President Addresses Nation on the Way Forward to Surging Back Towards Desperately Spinning the Clusterfuck That is Vietraq.

Which followed the President's Remarks Preceding Moment of Compulsory Silence Commemorating Annual Orgy of 9/11™ Patrio-Grief, and the 9/6 Transcript of President's Call of Support to Un-Resigning, Embattled Family Values Warrior Senator Larry Craig of Idaho.

Craig resigns, then takes it back and returns to the Senate.

The Minneapolis airport men's room experiences a tourism boom.

"After all, I have my reputation to maintain"—as watertiger puts it—Craig being back at work in time to vote against the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes bill.

Since mid-August, peaceful protests in Burma continued to grow, under the leadership of Buddhist monks. The brutal crackdown begins September 26.

In Finding George Orwell in Burma, Emma Larkin writes of traveling the country and meeting people who joke bitterly that Burmese Days was not the only book Orwell wrote about the place.

From a Mother Jones review—

What Larkin discovers is, well, Orwellian. Describing the junta, she writes, "The grand plan, if there is a plan at all, is to abolish the power of thinking." In Mandalay she finds a George Orwell book club debating the author’s legacy. Not surprisingly, 1984 is banned there, but a book collector digs up an old copy of Animal Farm, calling it "a very Burmese book... Because it is about pigs and dogs ruling the country!"

Published under a pseudonym, with concealed identities of quoted Burmese, Larkin's book is a touching, sad read.

If his experiences in Burma were what inspired Orwell's most significant work, the "Orwellian" practices he discovered there are not unique—not with their usefulness to repressive rulers everywhere.

It's "abolish the power of thinking" that the "senior Bush aide" of Ron Suskind's interview is talking about, when he says of journalists—

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."