Ezra is hopping up and down about the following passage in this Time article:
Administration sources tell TIME that employees at the Department of Homeland Security have been asked to keep their eyes open for opportunities to pose the President in settings that might highlight the Administration’s efforts to make the nation safer. The goal, they are being told, is to provide Bush with one homeland-security photo-op a month.
Say it with me, brothers and sisters: “Because the appearance of doing something is way more important than actually doing something.” It’s like he’s a summer hire in August whose supervisor has run out of things for him to do. Not that I ever had that experience, mind you.
I’m actually more amused by this bit from earlier in that same paragraph:
Many Bush allies are trying to push up the return of the President’s longtime aide Karen Hughes from her semi-retirement in Austin, Texas, to restore the balance in Bush’s world between Rove’s political instincts, which lean toward tending the party’s base, and her more “Mom-in-the-kitchen sense of the country,” as an adviser described it. “There is a necessary push-pull between the two of them that can’t happen on the phone,” says a Bush official. Another puts it more darkly: “The longer they wait for her to get back, the less it will matter.” On the other hand, Hughes has already been intimately involved in many of Bush’s most controversial moves. She helped craft the poorly received State of the Union address, then closely advised on the much criticized campaign ads that used images of 9/11.
Keep it up, Karen! You’re doing great.
You got an “Amen!” over here.
Blame me, and you and the rest of us who turn on the box and watch these visual poison candies day after day after day. Okay, you and I know better… We rise above it… Or do we?
Back in the ’80’s, for a lark, I took a quick course in NLP — Neuro Linguistic Programming — and read pretty much all of the texts about it available at that time. Having just returned from a long time in good ol’ sane Europe, I found my hair standing on end when confronted with this deft Program for manipulating the minds of fellow Americans. Someone (nuh-uh! not me!) needs to go back and check this stuff out — and note the parallels with the ways in which Karen and Karl and countless marketers have been deftly exploiting us.