Shrub is the Potemkin President.....

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September 17 / 18, 2005

New Orleans as Potemkin Village
One Big Sham
By DAVE LINDORFF

Three cheers for Maureen Dowd for exposing the sham of President' Bush's Jackson Square speech to the nation announcing his "recovery plan" for New Orleans, and a big fat raspberry for the electronic media-and for Dowd's own New York Times-for failing to mention it in their "hard-news" coverage of the speech.

For those who missed it, Bush, dressed in a pressed, blue, open-collar dress shirt (not "badly tailored" this time), was backed by a beautifully blue-lit St. Louis Cathedral. What Dowd pointed out in her 9/17 column, was that the lighting was flown in by the White House advance team, along with generators (most of New Orleans is still without power). To spare the American public from seeing the darkened ghost town of the surrounding French Quarter, the Bush advance team also flew in military camouflage netting, which was strung up behind the president to block out all buildings but the cathedral.

As Dowd pointed out, the setting, on TV screens, resembled nothing so much as the Disney castle-an appropriate metaphor for the whole Bush presidency, with its focus on imagery, stagecraft and hocus-pocus.

What boggles the mind is how our national media has become so inured to this kind of manipulation that reporters don't even bother to mention it. Viewers are left in the dark about the way they are being deceived.

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What Dowd showed us in her excellent column was a Potemkin president. What the president announced in his carefully staged address from New Orleans was a Potemkin recovery program.
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<link> http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff09172005.html

when the general public stops believing everything that comes from that glowing box.