Wow, and to think Page is not exactly a raving liberal. This guy is a veteran of the McLaughlin Group who made his mark as a “maverick” minority voice – aka a conservative black – before it was mandatory to renounce all sense and logic to be considered a conservative. Now even he’s taking pot shots at president photo-op… What’s next?
It's time to remove your news filters, Mr. Bush
Sanitizing the truth may become Bush's downfall
Published November 2, 2003
President Bush.… No matter how much he tries to feed his message to the media about how great things are going in Iraq, we keep asking impertinent questions, like whether he can promise that within a year from now he will have reduced the number of American troops in Iraq.
That's "a trick question, so I'll ignore it," the president said during a news conference Tuesday. Translation: It's an uncomfortable question, so let's move along so I can stay on message.
Bush is annoyed by "the filter," his dismissive label for the national media.… But while delivering his message unfiltered, the president preferred to receive his own information heavily filtered.… Well, his filtering staffers didn't seem to serve him so well last week. Questions came up in a White House news conference about the appropriateness, in retrospect, of the "Mission Accomplished" banner that towered above him during his televised Iraq victory celebration on an aircraft carrier on May 1.…
But Bush shifted the blame for the banner. It was erected by the ship's crew, he said, and its message referred only to the end of a lengthy tour of duty in the Persian Gulf. "I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff," he said. "They weren't that ingenious, by the way."
Well, not quite, Mr. President. As Bush staffers later acknowledged, the White House had arranged for the banner's production and display. Some of us knew that back on May 4, when a Washington Post editorial reported that "Aides say the [`Mission Accomplished'] slogan was chosen in part to mark a presidential turn toward domestic affairs as his campaign for re-election approaches."
That's the sort of thing you learn when you get your news unfiltered. Maybe the president was too preoccupied at the time to know what his image handlers were doing. Since it was only his place in history that was in question, that's hard to believe.
Or maybe the information from Bush's aides failed to penetrate Bush's own filters.
And maybe he simply fibbed, rather than admit that he didn't know where that dad-blamed banner came from.
None of those possibilities sounds very reassuring for the nation. If this White House can't handle its own semivictory celebration, how is it handling the war?
With that in mind, it is rather disquieting that the administration seems no less willing than any other to sanitize the truth about its own war message through contrived media manipulations. For example, the Pentagon is enforcing for the first time a policy that dates back to the Persian Gulf war of banning photos of flag-draped coffins that arrive in Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
The administration really does want to honor its servicemen and servicewomen who have been killed in action, once the tragedy of their deaths has been filtered for public consumption. So the welcome mat for the media gets rolled up.
Time to remove your filters, Mr. Bush. It's a messy world out there, but we all have to live in it.
5:14:30 PM 
|
