Bush declares slavery "bad." World applauds.

George Bush should be hung up by his balls. No kidding. He should be grabbed from behind, restrained, forcibly stripped below the waist, and a big hook should be pushed through his scrotum. Then the rope attached to the hook should be dragged through a pulley at the top of a flagpole, and the president should be hoisted up and left to swing in the breeze, 60 painful feet above the ground.

I'd volunteer to do the pulling, but that is too much of an honor. Such a privilege should be given to a select group of children in the Head Start program, assuming enough well-nourished ones could be found. I imagine it would take 60 or 70 even moderately healthy preschoolers to lift one president to the top of a flagpole by his nuts.

Once he's up there, the kids should be asked to gather around and take a seat. Joining them in the crowd should be the roughly 1.8 million Americans who live in Section 8 housing. They will have gathered to watch the rest of the sentence carried out: Bush will be forced to hang there, wincing and screaming, while all 10 million sycophantic words written about his trip to Africa last week are haltingly read out through a bullhorn by a one-eyed epileptic with a stammer.

The sentence can begin with the front-page headline in the Buffalo News that I saw when I returned home last week:

BUSH, IN AFRICA, CONDEMNS SLAVERY

I searched frantically for the sub-headline I was sure had to be there: "No Shit, Adds World."

But there was no sub-head.

The Bush Africa trip was one of the most cynical maneuvers this administration has tried?and also one of the worst examples of Hail-to-the-Czar herd reporting you're likely to ever see. That's because at the very moment Bush was unloading his insanely meaningless platitudes on crowds of bewildered Africans, his henchmen here at home were whipping out the rusty garden tools and cutting the very balls out of the black community.

Proposals quietly put forward by the Bush administration in the past few weeks to change the means of distribution of funds for federal Head Start and Section 8 programs went widely unreported in most media outlets. The blackout was inspired by more than just the usual media indifference to the fate of poor single mothers, the group most affected by these proposals. It was also tempered by the fact that the proposals weren't technically cuts: This was simply a switch from a system of direct awards to communities to block grants to states. It looked like the same amount of money was going to be distributed, so what was the big deal?

The big deal is that these Head Start and Section 8 proposals are part of the endgame of a long and admirably sophisticated campaign to steal from the poor and give to the rich. The central gambit in the whole plan is the crippling of the states, who are being forced to do the politically dicey dirty work of slashing social programs while Bush, dressed in his new dashiki, rides into 2004 on a float, tossing $19 tax return checks into the crowd.

There are lots of reasons for the current state budget crises, but Bush policies are certainly a key factor in most of them. Because the income tax levels of many states are tied to federal formulae, Bush effectively mandated large state tax cuts along with the federal ones, causing serious shortfalls in state revenue. Another factor in state budget crises were the unfunded mandates pushed into being by the Bush administration, including the No Child Left Behind Act and the Homeland Security Act. These initiatives forced states to commit their own resources to federal projects, often on a lavish scale, while the federal government itself was often late or not forthcoming at all in approving its own budgets for those same projects. New Yorkers ought to be intimately familiar with this phenomenon. It costs New York City $5 million a week every time Tom Ridge waves his hand to declare a Code Orange alert. Many states are still waiting to be reimbursed for the millions they spent in mandated enhanced airport security after 9/11.

Last but not least, the federal government has traditionally helped bail the states out, at least in part, when they experience budget crises. Not under Bush, and not after the Bush tax cut. Those monies are simply not there?the states are going to be forced to drown on their own.

Places with healthy economies like New York City have a tough enough time in this environment. For a place that was fucked to begin with, like Buffalo, these last few years have been a total disaster: That city is now run by a control board, is laying off scores of cops and firemen and is seriously considering a move to a four-day school week.

That is the backdrop for the new switch to "block grants" for Head Start and Section 8. Once was, federal government gave money to communities directly to help feed underprivileged preschool kids and help poor families pay at least part of their rent. That money is now going to the states first, and the states will be in charge of the euphemistic "administration" of those funds. States in the midst of budget crises won't be able to afford to not cannibalize those funds for other purposes.

As usual, the people most affected will be poor minorities, who in places like East Buffalo will spend their nights licking ketchup packets and peering out at housing cops from behind telephone poles, while folks in places like nearby Amherst (once dubbed "the whitest town in America") will buy new lawn jockeys with the proceeds of their tax cuts.

Which brings us to Africa. In the middle of all of this crap, what does Bush do? He goes to an island in Senegal, to the site of one of the sets from Roots, and gives a teary speech about the "stolen sons and daughters of Africa." It would be hard even for me to imagine something more cynical.

The worst thing is, it worked. Newspapers across the country took this hilariously obvious gesture at face value. Here's the lead by Don Melvin of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "President Bush on Tuesday called slavery one of history's greatest crimes?" As opposed to what, Don? Was he going to call slavery "one of history's funniest episodes?" Newspaper after newspaper went with the "Bush: Slavery Sucked" theme, when the real headline was, "Bush, in Africa, Changes Subject," or even "Bush Feeds Egregious Load of Shit to Unimpressed Africans."

The Daily Telegraph actually came close to the latter headline: "Bush said that the fight against slavery made America a 'different and better nation.'" At least the British headline made it possible to imagine an analogously irrelevant situation?Tony Blair in the midst of a domestic crisis taking a special trip to Harlem to explain to locals why leaving India turned out to be a jolly good thing for the English after all. Could any American reporter cover such an event with a straight face? Then why does Bush deserve one?