Frank Rich: The Faith-Based President Defrocked - New York Times.
... Like most Bush fictions, the latest are driven less by ideology than by a desire to hide incompetence. But there's a self-destructive impulse at work as well. “The best way to get the news is from objective sources,” the president told Brit Hume of Fox News two years ago. “And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world.” Thus does the White House compound the sin of substituting propaganda for effective action by falling for the same spin it showers on the public.
Beware of leaders who drink their own Kool-Aid. The most distressing aspect of Mr. Bush's press conference last week was less his lies and half-truths than the abundant evidence that he is as out of touch as Custer was on the way to Little Bighorn. The president seemed genuinely shocked that anyone could doubt his claim that his friend is the best-qualified candidate for the highest court. Mr. Bush also seemed unaware that it was Republicans who were leading the attack on Ms. Miers. “The decision as to whether or not there will be a fight is up to the Democrats,” he said, confusing his antagonists this time much as he has Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
Such naked presidential isolation from reality was a replay of his response to Hurricane Katrina. When your main “objective sources” for news are members of your own staff, you can actually believe that the most pressing tragedy of the storm is the rebuilding of Trent Lott's second home. You can even believe that Brownie will fix it. The truth only began to penetrate four days after the storm's arrival - and only then, according to Newsweek, because an adviser, Dan Bartlett, asked the president to turn away from his usual “objective sources” and instead watch a DVD compilation of actual evening news reports.
Mr. Bartlett's one desperate effort to prick his boss's bubble notwithstanding, the White House as a whole is so addicted to its own mythmaking prowess that it can't kick the habit. Seventy-two hours before Ms. Miers was nominated, federal auditors from the Government Accountability Office declared that the administration had violated the law against “covert propaganda” when it repeatedly hired fake reporters (and one supposedly real pundit, Armstrong Williams) to plug its policies in faux news reports and editorial commentary produced at taxpayers' expense. But a bigger scandal is the legal propaganda that the White House produces daily even now - or especially now.
The administration's strategy for covering up embarrassing realities with fiction reached its purest expression two weeks ago when both Laura Bush and Karen Hughes were recruited to star in propagandistic television “reality” shows. In the first lady's case, this was literally so: she was dispatched to Biloxi to appear in an episode of ABC's “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.” The thinking seems to be that if Mrs. Bush helps one family on a hit reality series, perhaps no one will notice the reality that no-bid contracts and ineptitude have kept hundreds of thousands of other hurricane victims homeless indefinitely while taxpayers foot the bill for unused trailers and cruise ships. Ms. Hughes took her act on the road in the Middle East. There she conducted a culturally tone-deaf “listening tour” in which she read her lines from briefing papers and tried to win hearts and minds by posing with little Arab kids as if they were interchangeable with the little black kids in Mr. Bush's “compassionate conservative” photo ops back home. She didn't seem to know that this stunt wouldn't even fly on Fox News anymore, let alone Al Jazeera.
How did this guy get elected again?
Tags: Politics, /propaganda
He got re-elected because the Republican fear and greed machine (Diebold, the OH Sec of State, etc.) stole Ohio for him.
I meant, who are the fools who thought this guy would be a competent president? Even with various voting irregularities, nearly half the electorate voted for this willfully ignorant boob.