Or how I learned to stop bitching and love Bush’s Advance Team
Or It’s the Photo-Op Presidency Stupid!
Last night after reading some other blogs I realized that we give Bush a hard time, too hard of a time. Sometimes we extend ourselves and try to make life difficult for the president. Who are we to push the envelope? Really, we’re just a bunch of rabble rousers who are hoping that the minority party we identify with takes a moment from the “Washington Game” and talks about the Bush Administration policies and how they affect people in our communities.
If Bush is an arch-conservative ideologue who is able to push his ideology through a friendly congress, who are we to say, or do anything. We’re the activist voice for a minority in Congress, and the Senate, who don’t really care what we think. We can point out Bush’s problems, his near religious devotion to making sure that the very rich are able to move along uninhibited in this country. We can talk about his beliefs that the government that does least does best. At the end of the day, we’re the minority party in the House, Senate and we obviously have no controls over the presidency. Most of the time we can’t even get the people we vote for in Congress to listen to what we think or say. We are the ultimate rabble rousers, talking, bitching about this presidency, and Congress. It’s all that much more hopeless since Bush has decided he’ll do whatever is necessary to eek out the magical 50+1% for the Republican Party.
With that in mind, I think we should all take a moment out and congratulate the president and his team for what they’ve been able to accomplish. For everything that’s wrong with the Bush Administration, there’s a photo opportunity that proves them right. The end of the Iraq war, (you knew it ended, right?) was commemorated by a magnificent landing on an air craft carrier outside of San Diego. The ban on partial birth abortion was captured by this beautiful shot of the president signing a piece of legislation with men who had a stake in curtailing reproductive freedom. Cuts in Social Security benefits were supported by friendly audiences of through the country. His magic hour speech in front of the statue of liberty conveyed to New Yorkers in perfect sense why they wouldn’t be seeing the $20 billion that was promised after 9/11. His support for the troops was conveyed through photographs from inside Iraq as he delivered a beautifully buttered turkey to our friends who are fighting inside Iraq. He was able to briefly bring out the full forces of FEMA so that a photo op would look more successful as he “surveyed” the damage. Then they went away.
Let’s face some facts; we are cowards and nay sayers. Anything we write on this or any other blog is going to be negated by the forces of ideological purity, western supremacy and Bushite moderates. We can’t compete with Bush’s advance team, we’re just not worthy to be in a political debate with these people. So in that spirit I believe we should stop for a moment and realize that we’ve lost. We are up against the best advance team money can buy. You can pull out your “facts” from news articles to prove that FEMA was way behind in helping the poor people of New Orleans. In response the president can stage a photo op hugging victims, and standing in front of the force that would be rescuing those same poor people if they didn’t have to assemble them for a photo-op to prove you wrong. You can assemble the truth about cuts in FEMA, or the privatization of the federal and emergency workforce. The president can summon those brave rescue workers to be there for the brief time that he flies over the wreckage. When you say that Supply Side Economics has failed, his advance team can capture him staring at the disaster from Air Force One. Dig up all the dirt you want on how the FEMA director is incompetent, the advance team will just make sure that Bush is praising the same FEMA director on the runway of a refugee camp. For every reaction there’s a stronger reaction from the advance team. The advance team is built to make sure everything in the frame captures the rebuttal to what you write. They are there to make sure that everything is rehearsed, that the man of the people who is president knows and can stand in front of the right backdrops to prove that he is indeed a leader and man of the people. Even when you get Bush to concede that he wasn’t doing enough, his advance team can make it seem like he’s the critic of the system he rules.
We are puny and worthless in a fight against the advance team. Just stop, and go pick on Coulter! We can’t beat the Bush advance team, they will out photo-op anything you write. How about the 2008 Republican convention in New Orleans?