From The Palm Beach Post:
Bush is nothing if not consummate con man
By George McEvoy
Palm Beach Post Columnist
Saturday, October 22, 2005
The late and wonderfully caustic George Burns used to flick the ash off his cigar and say: "The secret of success in show business is sincerity. Once you learn how to fake that, you've got it made, kid."
That's the main problem now with the administration of George W. Bush. The faking isn't working anymore. And if you don't think politics isn't show business, you just haven't been watching.
The con that landed him in the White House, and then got him reelected, suddenly is being seen for what it is, the old flim-flameroo. A majority of the public isn't falling for his ah-shucks routine anymore.
For a while, the most obvious con jobs worked for Bush the Younger. That landing on the aircraft carrier, with him squeezed into a flight suit, strutting across the deck in front of a huge sign reading "Mission Accomplished," was so blatant that, watching it on TV, I figured all those sailors and Marines would burst out laughing at any moment. But no, they must have been under orders to be cheerleaders for the head cheerleader. And the public fell for it all.
Motion picture critics often caution their readers that they have to "suspend disbelief" in order to enjoy a certain film. That's what a majority of the public did watching W. strut across that flight deck. They forced themselves to forget the fact that he managed to dodge all bullets during the Vietnam War by joining the Texas Air National Guard and that he then went AWOL for almost a year. No, there he was on their screens, a genuine hero holding his flight helmet.
Even after he and his cronies in the White House were caught in lie after lie — the weapons of mass destruction, the purported link between Iraq and the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon — the public swallowed his routine as if it were gospel.
But now, suddenly, the emperor's new clothes are seen for what they really are, a royal pretense.
The big con came a cropper when W. held that video conference Oct. 13 with 10 U.S. soldiers and one Iraqi. The troops were handpicked from the Army's famed 42nd Infantry Division.
It turned out that the whole thing was as phony as any TV commercial. The soldiers were assigned to ask certain questions and were given a list of topics they could use.
What did them in was the language they used to answer questions. It obviously was scripted. When a captain from Idaho was asked whether the Iraqis wanted to fight and were capable of defending their homeland against the insurgents, he replied: "The Iraqi army and policy services, along with coalition support, have conducted many and mutiple exercises and rehearsals. It was impressive to me to see the cooperation and communication that took place among the Iraqi forces."
Another of the troops supposedly picked at random knew that voter registration was up 17 percent in north central Iraq, and said, "the Iraqi people are ready and eager to vote in this referendum."
That's not the way soldiers, or any other group of Americans, talk. That's the way Pentagon or White House hacks write.
The troops' replies reminded me of a guy I worked with in New York years ago. He was a legman — that is, he covered events but never wrote a story. He would call in the bare facts to a rewriteman, or woman, who would assemble them into a readable yarn.
But he griped so much and pleaded so long to be allowed to write that they let him knock out a story on a routine auto accident. He had interviewed a witness, and this is how he had the man answer: "I was walking down the street with my son, Tom, 14, and my daughter, Susie, 12, when... "
He left the paper soon after that. I wonder, could he be working in the White House?
Wrap...
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