Friday, October 14, 2005

On all the news that's fit to fake

Okay, so I know I might be reaching a little bit, but I'm thinking - or at least hoping - that no intelligent person in the US was under any illusions that Bush's recent teleconference with troops in Iraq was anything but the stagiest of photo ops. I'm sure there are one or two diehards who won't admit, even in the privacy of their own sensory deprivation chambers, that Bush had any ulterior motives, and will insist to the death that he wanted only to thank them for their hard work and hear their questions and concerns, but anyone with sense ought to realize that t'aint necessarily so.

Regardless, if the administration wants to maintain the illusion that Bush gives a crap and that our troops are just thriiiiiilled with the progress we're making in Iraq, it might help to not coach them while the cameras are rolling.

I'll grant them that managing ten troops, AV equipment, a satellite feed and a president who can't generally be trusted to assemble a coherent sentence without significant coaching is a challenge, probably one worthy of a bit of rehearsal. And thus the rub: if you have to organize, rehearse, choreograph and script, you probably don't want to tell people that it's unscripted and unrehearsed, Scottie McClellan. Call me naive, but I'm consistently taken aback by the sheer volume of bullshit the administration is willing to foist on the American people without expecting at least one person to sniff it and say, "Hold on, these aren't brownies."

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