How might Bush capitalize on 2nd anny of 9/11

[jor_mama]

Just occurred to me that 9/11 is just around the corner (again). Though it won't be as hyped as the first anniversary, it dawned on me that this could be a cheap and shameless (like we'd put it past them) chance for Bush, Inc., to capitalize on the 'patriotism' and emotion of mindless Americans.

Think it'd work?

How might this look in just two short weeks?

[ComerPerro]

1. Better question is how will he celebrate it?

My guess? Another terror attack.

[lcordero]

2. I looked in the paper edition of the Village Voice

It seems that 200 to 500 organizations are going set up rallies and protests in that timeframe.

[Lexingtonian]

3. bin Laden will determine that

ObL has been sure to provide a lot of distractions in secondary countries recently; I'd say a strike inside the U.S. is overdue. And it would involve, as ever&always, New York City (as neocon/Likudnik central) and/or Washington (W's crew). (Though he may wait until next year and make the Republican Convention a, um, "double whammie".)

Alternatively, the celebratory fireworks could be in Baghdad and involve blowing Paul Bremer's mendacious butt sky high.

[Not a robought]

4. Ummm, this is how...

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0335/hoberman.php

That’s Our Bush! The President’s Re-Election Campaign Kicks Off With a Shameless 9-11 Docudrama

Lights, Camera, Exploitation

by J. Hoberman
August 27 - September 2, 2003

In the end 9-11 turned out to be a made-for-TV movie, or rather, the basis for one—a shameless propaganda vehicle for our superstar president George W. Bush.

The upcoming Showtime feature DC 9/11: Time of Crisis is a signal advance in the instant, ongoing fictionalization of American history, complete with the president fulminating most presidentially against "tinhorn terrorists," decisively employing the word problematic in a complete sentence, selling a rationale for preemptive war, and presciently laying out American foreign policy for the next 18 months. "We start with bin Laden," Bush (played by Timothy Bottoms) tells his cabinet. "That's what the American people expect. . . . So let's build a coalition for that job. Later, we can shape different coalitions for different tasks."

Scheduled for cablecast on September 7, DC 9/11 inaugurates Bush's re-election campaign 50 weeks before the 9-11 Memorial Republican National Convention opens in Madison Square Garden. DC 9/11 also marks a new stage in the American cult of personality: the actual president as fictional protagonist.

There are, of course, precedents. "One of the original aspects of Soviet cinema is its daring in depicting contemporary historical personages, even living figures," André Bazin dryly observed in his 1950 essay, "The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema." It was one of the unique characteristics of Stalin-era Soviet movies that their infallible leader was regularly portrayed, by professional impersonators, as an all-wise demiurge in suitably grandiose historical dramas. So it is with DC 9/11, where documentary footage of the collapsing WTC is punctuated by the pronouncements of Bottoms's Bush.

That Bottoms is reconfiguring his role in the Comedy Central series That's My Bush! (a gross-out sitcom canceled a month before 9-11) provides a uniquely American twist. In the aftermath of the first Iraq war, Bush the elder was brought down in part by Dana Carvey's devastating campaign of ridicule on Saturday Night Live. Drafting the clownish Bottoms effectively preempts that strategy. Indeed, casting a former Bush travesty in the role of the serious Bush only reinforces the telefilm's agenda, namely that the events of September 11 served to render divine Bush's dubious mandate.

:puke:

edit: html fixes

[terryg11]

6. peeuuke!! nt

1

[enough]

5. New Yorkers' rage about the WTT poison-air lies may be a problem for him

See for example Jimmy Breslin's column "The Air is Thick With Lies." Gives a feeling of how very angry they are.

http://www.nynewsday.com/news/opinion/columnists/ny-nybres243426639aug24,0,5876521.column?coll=ny-opinion-columnists


I was a few hundred yards up on Liberty Street when the Two Tower of the World Trade Center blew. I put my nose inside my shirt and ran through smoke that turned day into night. In the smoke were computers, asbestos, pulverized glass, human bodies, lead. I got on another street and One Tower blew up. Again, the air was black with a pulverized 110-story building.

I did not feel well for two months. I never said anything because I was too embarrassed. A couple of thousand had died. So many others were scorched and broken and maimed. I had no right to open my mouth, I thought. Besides, from the first day, the government's Environmental Protection Agency had announced that air was remarkably clean. Work on. Breathe on. You're fine.

They lied. They lied because the administration did not want people not going to work. They lied the first week and they lied the week after that and they have lied every day of the past two years to the people of this city.

Christine Whitman was the EPA head until recently. I wasn't disturbed that her education was a jump horse school, but I thought she was better than standing up and doing what she was told by George Bush's White House, telling lies to a public who had to breathe this air. Turns out she isn't much of a human being.

The EPA has just admitted that they lied for all this time

more>