""The great motorcade," wrote Canadian correspondent Don Murray, "swept through the streets of the city… The crowds … but there were no crowds. George W. Bush's imperial procession through Europe took place in a hermetically sealed environment. In Brussels it was, at times, eerie. The procession containing the great, armour-plated limousine (flown in from Washington) rolled through streets denuded of human beings except for riot police. Whole areas of the Belgian capital were sealed off before the American president passed."
”In a sense, our President's world has increasingly been filled with nothing but James Guckert clones. Guckert is, of course, the "journalist" who, using the alias Jeff Gannon, regularly attended presidential news conferences and lobbed softball questions George's way. The Gannon case, or "Gannongate," has -- are you surprised? -- hardly been touched on by most of the mainstream media despite its lurid trail leading to internet porn sites and a seamy underside of gay culture -- issues that normally would glue eyes to TV sets and sell gazillions of papers (and that in the Clinton era would have rocked the administration). On the other hand, it did cause an uproar in the world of the political Internet, where, if we were to be honest -- and stop claiming to be shocked, shocked -- we would quickly admit that almost all of George's world has essentially filled up with Gannons (though not necessarily with the porn connections).
After all, even the President's Crawford "ranch" is really a Gannon-style set. And in Germany and France, George and Condi, his new Secretary of State, managed to have town-hall style meetings only with audiences of European Gannons; audiences so carefully combed over that, on a continent whose public is largely in opposition to almost any Bush policy you might mention, not a single challenging question seems to have been asked. That certainly represents remarkable advanced planning. It's no easy thing, after all, constantly to rush ahead of a President and his key advisors and create a Potemkin world for them from which reality has been banished and in which no rough edges will ever be experienced.”
It is my opinion that the Bush White House actually does exist in a bubble of its own making. They have people whose job is to collect information and if it does not match the ideology they are selling at the moment, bury it. Condi Rice is the chief example of this information processing.It isn’t an accident or unintentional pathology. It is planned. They operate on the theory that everything is political and there is no significant reality outside politics. Therefore, the key to accomplishing what they want is their “will”. If their “will” is strong enough, then they can accomplish things others consider impossible.
Their “will” is maintained by ensuring that data contrary to their ideology does not reach the key decision makers. This is accomplished by maintaining the “bubble” around the White House.
I suspect that the effort to destroy the Social Security system will test their “will” against their “hubris.” As in the quagmire in Iraq, it will take a while for the reality about Social Security "reform" they are ignoring to sink in. This is going to soon be followed by the problems caused by the drop in the international value of the dollar and the deficit, and probably also the health care crisis.
It’s a race. Can they maintain the “bubble” for the next four years before they pass the disasters they are building up off to some other poor sap? I doubt it.
No comments:
Post a Comment