Thursday, October 28, 2004

Are They Insane or Just Hopeless Screwups?

Of the two possibilities, I lean toward insane. It looks to me like BushMeister Karl Rove thinks the 1997 movie “Wag the Dog” is a documentary. In the movie a Karl Rove type opts to handle negative publicity about the President by hiring a Hollywood producer to invent a fake war to distract the public. Fake footage is shot and fed to the media. But Karl Rove has one-upped “Wag the Dog”. He not only produced fake heroic scenes for Prez Bush to act in, he conjured up a fake President. And it has worked to a point. The only problem is that Karl Rove’s version of presidential heroics is starting to look like a plotline for the nine-year-olds in “South Park” with Cartman as Karl Rove. Newsflash to the BushMen: “Wag the Dog” was a movie. It can’t really be done. You’re amateurs. Just yesterday a blogger discovered (and published) a photo of Bush supporters where the pic of the same soldier had been inserted many times. Frank Rich’s New York Times October 31 column (available online today) once again tells it like it is about the Bush administration and its virtual reality news movies. But I would quarrel with Rich about his final conclusion that Kerry would be boring for the next four years and that boring would be a bad thing. Oh please God, let us be bored. Let us have four years of uneventful maid service. Let us have a president who methodically goes about cleaning up the mess the Republicans have left. We long for a president who does what a president is supposed to do without drama or fanfare. Let us have a president who tells the truth and doesn’t try to win us over with trumped-up photo-ops and fake news footage. And if that means we’ll be bored...we don’t mind. We are so tired of a barely-adequate actor playing President. We are so tired of fake news produced by Karl Rove and his Wacky Dog filmmakers. Give us John Kerry and for four years we’ll happily deal with the lack of fear and upheaval in our daily lives.

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