Once again--just as the White House had been manipulating the public from its press room by hand-picking the self-hating, $200/hour, aging, gay-in-the-closet, neo-con prostitute, Jeff Gannon AKA James Dale Guckert, to toss easy, partisan-tinged questions during Bush's and McClellan's daily press meetings--President Bush continues to carefully choreograph what images the country sees, particularly as those images directly relate to the public's acceptance or rejection of his proposed policies.
Today (February 16, 2005), Boston radio station WBUR reported that the White House has hand-selected the New Hampshire audience who will watch and listen (live, in person) to Mr. Bush peddle his partial privatization plan for Social Security. This will be a biased audience who the nation will view on television responding (positively, no doubt) to the president, an audience chosen so as to influence national opinion about his dubious plan to save social security (
see my recent diary for some of my thoughts about social security). As masterful at this as he is shameless, the president's image-management should become a major, public-flaunted integrity issue--either a personality flaw or a calculated deceptive stance to be repeatedly exposed and opposed. Now is the time to behave exactly as the media behaved toward Howard Dean at and after the 2004 Iowa caucus: relentlessly carnivorous. Dean's mistake, in my opinion, was not that he was too passionate on the night of his now infamous holler (which, I must confess, I did not see live on TV when it occurred), but that he was not passionate enough in taking the flesh-eating media to task for first inventing a wound that simply was not there, and then (like a hungry school of piranhas) feeding on that wound until the Dean candidacy was a skeleton. Like the current administration had been doing in its press meetings during the Gannon-Guckert era (and apparently again will do tonight on television), the media literally created reality--a reality that said, "Dean is a nut and it's a good journalistic story to end his candidacy by saying he's a nut." But enough about the wonderfully talented Howard Dean and the unfortunate demise of his 2004 presidential candidacy.
Now is the time for Americans--including and especially the media--to stand up and ask the President (repeatedly, until he wants to claw his eyes out) why, if he is so confident about his policies, he works extremely diligently to manage the country's impression of the reaction to his policies by deceptively selecting who is allowed to listen to him and talk to him about those policies. The White House not only selects who gets to hear him and talk to him for purposes of impression-management, but it also appears to be complicit in the Internal Revenue Service's newly launched investigation of the NAACP's not-for-profit tax-exempt status after the leader of that organization (Mr. Julian Bond) spoke critically about Mr. Bush's repeated refusals to meet with them. To the credit of the NAACP, the last I heard is that they flipped the IRS a firm middle finger by refusing to cooperate with the IRS's investigation.