Dress Rehearsal

Okay, we've all heard about how yesterday's "teleconference" between Bush and the U.S. troops in Iraq was staged. That information's been out there about 24 hours now. In fact, I'm almost shocked that anyone didn't realize it was staged from the very beginning. Everything about this president, everything, has been staged since the very beginning. His entire presidency was planned beforehand by Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and their villainous backdoor cabal years before George Bush took office (or even sobered up!)

I was speaking about this with my grandmother yesterday. She, I think, still takes this stuff personally. She feels personally lied to when her president manipulates situations in this way, as opposed to when he gets some tail on the side from an intern and then lies to the country about it so his wife won't find out. Me, I've kind of moved past those personal feelings.

When George Bush is on TV, I'm reminded of when a Coca-Cola commercial is on TV, or one of those commercials for that little device that can find metal studs inside your walls. His is the first presidency to focus solely on PR as a strategy. Other presidential administrations would actually occasionally model their policies on what the American people might want them to do, as a way of remaining popular and getting re-elected, in between acting out of their own self-interest. The Bush clan just acts however it wants all the time, ignoring the people, and then tries to sell them on its behavior after the fact through clever marketing.

The recent revolt among Bush's hardcore conservative/religious base to his nomination of Harriet Miers, to me, signifies the first realization among average Americans about just how George W. does business. The Miers nomination isn't the first thing Bush has tried to sell them on. He did it with Iraq, most famously, and he tried and failed to do it with Social Security Reform. But his sales ploy has been so obvious, so repetitive, so senseless (essentially he's saying "Trust me! I'm the President!"). And it's the first time he's tried to sell some of his base on something about which they already had an opinion.

These people voted for George W. in many ways because they thought he would make the nation over according their shared religious beliefs. That means a few basic things:

• No married gay people
• No abortions
• No stem cell research
• No euthenasia
• Prayer in schools
• Intelligent Design in schools
• No more of those music videos in which Christina Aguilera wiggles her ass in front of muscular black and Latin men
• Ten Commandments posted everywhere
• Atheists, Jews and Muslims forced to fight to the death in a public arena for the entertainment of the masses
• Free Passion of the Christ Jesus nails for all

And these guys know which judges out there want to make this stuff a reality. And Harriet Miers isn't one of them.

It's hard to get myself into this mindset, because GW has been selling me on crap I don't want for five years now. I'm used to it. He's like the guys who walk up and down Pico Blvd. going into stores and trying to sell us fabulous Las Vegas vacations for $49 a pop! The first time, you listen to the spiel and, in the most friendly way possible, tell the guy that you don't want a super-cheap Vegas vacation and that you have to get back to work. By the eighth or ninth time, you want to chase the guy out of the store by throwing bags of flaming excrement at him, just so he gets the idea never to come back. That's where I'm at with George W. Bush. The fire-engulfed poo-flinging stage.

But for a lot of Americans, this is their first time strongly disagreeing with the President about something, and it's kind of like getting a peek behind the curtain. Instead of just nodding their head and accepting his bullshit propaganda, they're beginning to think for themselves and realize this guy has no clue what he's talking about.

Audio like this won't help. NPR has posted the entire "rehearsal" for yesterday's press conference, between a White House staffer and the troops the President was set to "interview." In it, you can hear how much preparation and PR work goes into any Presidential appearance. Nothing about this man, even when he's pretending to have a frank and honest discussion with our military, is spontaneous or real. Nothing. Get used to it, because we have this doofus and his media-savvy staff of doofuses for another 3 years.