National Geographic has been running ads for George Bush's 'first' interview about 9/11, during which Bush whips out all the SAT words his staff looked up for him and still comes across as having about as much depth as a puddle in the desert.
But if you blink you'll miss some tiny little moments in the preview alone that should make you think twice about just how Bush is being sanitized for your protection.
The preview features Bush looking even more bewildered than ever, trying to express himself without Cheney doing the string-pulling. "I was determined and....." He can't find words to express the concept of 'horrified beyond all belief' or 'suffering from extreme grief and other emotions' perhaps because he simply doesn't feel that deeply and thus has little experience with the appropriate vocabulary. At no point is there any gravitas at all, bringing to mind the way he joked about the 'trifecta' mere months after nearly three thousand people whose welfare he was responsible for were killed. Or then there's the moment----captured on film----where, on the golf course, he makes some boilerplate announcement about fighting terrorism, then says---with that perpetual smirk----"Watch this drive."
There's two shots of him on Air Force One, looking out the windows at what seems to be Ground Zero. In one shot he's in shirtsleeves, in the other, he's in an Army PT jacket (which frankly he's not entitled to wear, given that he ought to have been booted into Leavenworth for dodging eighteen months' of service).
Look at those windows. The shots in both scenes are obviously Ground Zero, but the second one----taken at night----makes the illogic of both scenes very apparent.
In the second shot, in particular, the view of Ground Zero is especially clear.
Too clear.
Keep in mind, Air Force One is a jumbo jet, and lower Manhattan is and was full of buildings---and jittery people. And if you've seen the Naudet brothers' documentary about firefighters on 9/11, you've seen pretty much that exact same shot.
That's because a few days after the attack, the Naudets followed some firefighters up the stairs of a thirty story building overlooking the site and unfurled a huge American flag. The view in that airplane window looks almost exactly like the view from the top of that building.
More than that, that shot from Air Force One is at a peculiar angle----it's as if the plane was heeled over during a tight turn to the left.
Yeah, let's imagine that scene for a second or two. With the nation still traumatized by planes over lower Manhattan, Bush directs his pilot to circle the area---dodging skyscrapers and turning the plane sideways to slip between buildings----at night so he can get a closer look, and all of this is so low it's lower than the planes that actually hit the World Trade Center?
It's the perfect photo op. Or maybe I should say photo shop.
I should point out that just because Bush was and is a gaffe-machine and his handlers were not above trying to doing a little airbrushing here and there to make him look less like a moron, that does not mean that this is any way an endorsement of Truther theories. In fact, if anything, the ham-handedness of this crap just proves that Bush couldn't plan a trip to the loo----and keep it secret-----much less a huge conspiracy that had to have taken thousands of unusually tight-lipped conspirators years to pull off.
It just proves that Bush was an is a pathetic excuse for a man, not to mention a President, and that people still want to make him appear to be a better at it than he ever was. And people voted for him twice?! Not to mention that morons were stressing that he seemed like the kind of guy you could go have a beer with. You know why you can have a beer with that kind of guy? Because he probably starts drinking at noon, having lost yet another job the way many stupid guys do----they always think they're smarter than everyone else. It's easy to forget, in view of Bush's endless gaffes, that while he was a bumbler and an intellectual lightweight, he was also an arrogant, supremely self confident buffoon, who really did think he was better than anybody else. Even Obama----who really is that smart-----isn't arrogant, but of course his confidence in his actual abilities is read as arrogance by people who still want the phrase "The White House" to be not just a location but an admittance policy.
A Ground Zero photo op from Air Force One is just the kind of wingnut wish fulfillment that people should be most skeptical of. Rush Limbaugh's based his career on this kind of thing; it's a wingnut feature, not a bug. Look no further, for example, than John Boehner----the world's biggest Cheeto-----calling pampered and cossetted and bloated billionaires job creators---while they in fact cut employee rolls to satisfy stockholders and to pay their own ludicrous salaries.
The important thing is that when they try and pull stuff like this, we call them on it, every time. It may not be a big thing, but it does add up.