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Video-conference buffoonery

I’ve seen some weird shit in my day, and this definitely qualifies as weird.
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I suppose Roget’s Thesaurus could provide me with a more eloquent or evocative term, but weird is all I can think of that fits to describe that so-called video-conference that the Sociopath-in-Chief held with ten of the most haplessly humiliated officers and NCOs in the military, and one Iraqi collaborator.

Their fatigued faces almost sagging with temporary muscular failure from twenty-minute rigor mortis smiles (that surely seemed like 20 years), these unfortunates were required by the chain of command to leave their regular jobs on behalf of the slaughter and occupation and become public relations meat muppets for maybe the most inept perception management stunt yet performed by the Oval Office.

All you counter-recruitment activists out there! Invite teenagers and ROTC students to watch this “teleconference.” Join the military and be put on display as ventriloquist dummies. Join the military and be humiliated before the whole world in a thespian performance on par with a third-grade Haloween skit.

Show this buffoonery to prospective troops, and the recruiters will have to hang around courtrooms — like in the old days — to offer convicted felons armed service as an option to prison.

During this sorry stunt, Dubya danced around behind his podium like a six-year-old about to pee his pants, fidgeted with his notes until he lost them, and had his earpiece fall out about five times. He would lose the thread then talk over the lines of the other performers — whose performances weren’t wooden; they were petrified. Under his smile, you could see the muscles in his face twitching with the mounting rage of a Caligulan blueblood as the whole thing went from bad to bizarre in its ineptitude. Someone had to face the wrath of the pipsqueak afterwards, if reports from Capitol Hill Blue have any validity; they claim the Prez has been pretty unhinged lately.

Even the network news outlets found the whole thing so horrid in its execution that they were obliged — if they were to salvage even a shred of self respect — to ridicule the whole episode. When Scott McClellan attempted to field questions later that day, and the reporters pounced on the whole excruciating exhibition, and the best the Press Secretary could muster was, “I think what the American people heard was some very important information from our men and women in uniform.

The Press Secretary denied that the event was scripted, a denial that would have made an ass out of him even had the networks NOT obtained and broadcast footage of Allison Barber, a Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary, coaching the meat-muppet troops on their lines prior to the performance.

McClellan looked bad. He’s been looking very bad lately. With Rove and Libby (and Judith Miller, too) spending their days in legal offices trying to get their story straight, and with Cheney attending to his dark malfunctioning heart, the center is not holding.

Poor baby-faced Scott — privileged son of Barr McClellan, a conspiracy theorist who claims LBJ killed JFK, and Carole Keeton Strayhorn, the former comptroller of Texas — looks these days like he is retaining water. Scotty is sallow and puffy, and behind his smile there is no joie de vivre. Yesterday, he snapped. During his news conference, he grew surly, then combative, and finally walked out of the the room with the grimmest smile imaginable, the waves of press-laughter lapping at his back.

Criminals won’t be turned out by the body politic; but laughingstocks will. The Bush administration has now lost any vestige of dignity, all the way out to the White House Press Secretary. This is a very bad omen for George W. Bush and his control-cell.

The Miers nomination has surfaced just in time to give Bush’s own right-wing the excuse it needed to abandon ship. After this sensationally stupid exhibition of mediocrity, the lifeboats will be loosened.

Ridicule is weapon of resistance.
 
 

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