The Photo and the Photo-Op:
The worst possible thing has happened for the Bush administration: the majority of Americans have become media savvy, and that means hell for these fuckers who have manipulated images like a horny teenage boy with Photoshop and jpegs of Mischa Barton and the nude, split beaver porn shots of a hundred different women. In other words, we're learnin' what's fake and what's real, and there's nothin' real that Bush, Cheney, Laura, or Chertoff can ever do about Katrina that's ever gonna seem anything more than fake. Doesn't matter how many fuckin' times Bush gets his people to roll up his sleeves just right as he walks, surrounded by prop firefighters, through the ruins of people's lives. Doesn't matter how many times Laura appears in Louisiana to feed a person or two before she heads back to the limo or the helicopter.

'Cause this time we've already seen the real pictures. They exist by the thousands, like the corpses still drifting past the military units behaving as if they are confronting the man-eating CHUDs instead of hurricane survivors. We know what's staged. We know what's real.

A favorite Dostoevsky line of the Rude Pundit's goes something like this: Once something is thought, it cannot be unthought. Once you've seen the images, once the idea has crept into your head that Bush's smirking boobery is a defining factor in how devastating all of this is, you can't unthink it. Sure, you can listen to the rambling bullshit artists of the right spew and sputter, trying to tell you that what you know is real is actually fake, that up is down, that you have to put those bad, bad thoughts aside so we can attack the poor and the Democrats. But maybe, just maybe, you know now that when Bush makes a show of appearing with his cabinet to declare that he's gonna take action, it's just more flimflam, more sleight of hand, more deception - look over there so that he can pull a bouquet from his threadbare sleeve.

There's bodies under the polluted, shit-filled waters of New Orleans. Thousands of them. And whether we see them or not (and that's an issue for another day), we know they're there. Bush will bribe and cajole the survivors, but they were in the pictures. They stepped on the corpses trying to rescue themselves or others. And there's no amount of fakery and photo-ops that'll change that reality.

(Gotta stop. Fuckin' allergies makin' it . . . difficult . . . to . . . what?)