Dowd: Disney on Parade (MoDo's Scathing Review of Speech)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/17/opinion/17dowd.html?hp

The president, as he fondly recalled the other day, used to get well lit in New Orleans. Not any more.

On Thursday night, Mr. Bush wanted to appear casually in charge as he waged his own Battle of New Orleans in Jackson Square. Instead, he looked as if he'd been dropped off by his folks in front of a eerie, blue-hued castle at Disney World. (Must be Sleeping Beauty's Castle, given the somnambulant pace of W.'s response to Katrina.)

All Andrew Jackson's horses, and all the Boy King's men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. His gladiatorial walk across the darkened greensward, past a St. Louis Cathedral bathed in moon glow from White House klieg lights, just seemed to intensify the sense of an isolated, out-of-touch president clinging to hollow symbols as his disastrous disaster agency continues to flail.

In a ruined city - still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers - isn't it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?

<snip>

Read my lips: By the time all this is over, people will be saying that Poppy was the true conservative in the family.

MoDo, Krugman, Herbert, I'm going to miss you all next week. But the NYT can go Cheney itself before I pay. I'll catch in hard copy in my local rag a day late.

[Carolab]

1. Cont'd.

The slick White House TV production team was trying to salvage W.'s "High Noon" snap with some snazzy Hollywood-style lighting - the same Reaganesque stagecraft they had provided when W. made a prime-time television address from Ellis Island on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. On that occasion, Scott Sforza, a former ABC producer, and Bob DeServi, a former NBC cameraman and a lighting expert, rented three barges of giant Musco lights, the kind used for "Monday Night Football" and Rolling Stones concerts, floated them across New York Harbor and illuminated the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop for Mr. Bush.

Before the presidential address, Mr. DeServi was surveying his handiwork in Jackson Square, crowing to reporters about his cathedral: "Oh, it's heated up. It's going to print loud."

As Elisabeth Bumiller, the White House reporter for The Times, noted in a pool report, the image wizards had put up a large swath of military camouflage netting, held in place by bags of rocks and strung on poles, to hide the president from the deserted and desolate streets of the French Quarter ghost town.

The president is still looking for a tiny spot of unreality in New Orleans - and in Iraq, where a violent rampage has spiked the three-day death tally to over 200.

[jackster]

2. same here....

won't pay a dime - I'll catch it all in a free hardcopy somewhere

[Booster]

3. God, this woman has become truly beautiful in my eyes. Her

past few articles have been scathing to Bush, and it's like a breath of fresh air. Go, Mo, Go.

[madrchsod]

4. yes i will miss her

i want to have a few drinks with her in a cheesy hotel bar.....

[agates]

5. I just gave in

and paid the 39.95 subscription. My local paper only carries crap conservative columnists. I know, we should all hold out, but I just couldn't do it.

[RamboLiberal]

6. Hope you'll bless us with the best 4 paragraphs

and make us eat our hearts out. :evilgrin:

Price is $49.95 now I think, how did you get for $39.95?

[elfin]

7. I signed up free

since am already a hard copy customer. I bet people like me will inflate their "subscription" numbers so it sounds like they made a smart move.