Holmes: The bubble president floats away (MetroWest Daily News)

[struggle4progress]

By Rick Holmes/Local columnist
The MetroWest Daily News
Posted Jan 18, 2009 @ 12:30 AM

... Like the ragdoll figure in the "Falling Georgie" screensaver (you can watch it at www.planetdan.net ), Bush tumbled clumsily through his first months in office. But he got help from the bubbles. There was the housing bubble, and a consumer credit bubble, which helped reinflate the economy after the Internet bubble burst. There was also a general airiness in the first half of 2001, months of relative peace, relative prosperity and low expectations of a president who seemed to float along unencumbered by gravitas ...

f we knew then what the 9/11 Commission reported years later, Bush would have been crucified for being asleep at the switch when Bin Laden struck. Instead, a traumatized nation rallied to their tough-guy president. Instead of falling, Bush was lifted by a bubble of patriotism ...

There were bubbles of pseudo-victory in Iraq: The pulling-down of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad - stage-managed by Americans, we later learned, with Iraqi ex-patriots flown in as extras; the capture of Saddam; the Iraqis' blue-thumb elections. Americans eager to believe this invasion wasn't a disaster ate up the photogenic moments, barely noticing a series of defeats in 2004 that nearly turned into an American rout.

There were made-for-TV bubbles, like the "rescue" of Jessica Lynch, which turned out to be mostly a fabrication, and the heroic death of Pat Tillman, which turned out to be from friendly fire ...

http://www.dailynewstribune.com/opinion/x694603159/Holmes-The-bubble-president-floats-away

[Skittles]

1. good, except that last part

the bastard should be held accountable - America not only needs it but DESERVES it - fuck this "let's move forward" bullshit - how about we move forward AND hold these lying, stealing, cheating, murdering bastards accountable?

[struggle4progress]

2. I agree. But essentially all the editorials have some such BS in them: either

they praise No Child Left Behind as a great leap forward in education, or they babble somewhere about how W has "kept us safe," or .. or ... I don't know for sure what's going on: it could simply be that the writers feel heck, I really ought to try to say something nice, but maybe it's not that at all

Back in 2004, there were a lot of very strange endorsement editorials: these editorials essentially listed all the things that had gone wrong since W took office -- and then inexplicably enorsed him! I suspected then that publishers had told editors: Write an endorsement editorial, so editorial writers (who couldn't actually find any reasons to endorse Bush) simply wrote what they wanted to write -- and then stuck on an endorsement. I wonder if that's not what's happening here: publishers told editorial writers to be sure to say NCLB is great or W kept us safe!, and the writers dutifully pumped the required bilgewater into otherwise accurate text