(HOST) With a growing sense of unreality, commentator Bill Seamans thinks that the credibility gap – between events in Iraq and the administration’s public image efforts at home – is getting wider.
(SEAMANS) President Bush’s misguided war is killing an average of five of our troops every day as they carry their burden of the disaster in Iraq. As criticism grows and more of his own cohort jump ship he has become perhaps the most unpopular and least respected president in living memory. Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner could now be replaced by another one declaring “Lame Duck Walking.”
Bush may be walking his last presidential mile but he hardly appears to be limping as he performs in a theater of the absurd produced to enhance his remaining time in the White House by the Karl Rovian political illusion machine.
Bush has recently entertained President Vladimir Putin of Russia out at the family residence at Kennebunkport. Presumably Bush did more than take a second look into Putin’s soul and he, or his father, presumably discussed diplomatic problems. But we could ask just what good were these talks by a president disrespected by his nation and who now is said to have little diplomatic credibility overseas.
This absurd photo-op scene followed peripatetic weeks of traveling overseas where Bush was cheered in Albania as the first president to visit – hardly a moment of significant geopolitical import – and then he was jeered at other more important stops in Europe – a theater of the absurd performance that produced little more than more staged photos for his legacy file.
Back home Bush seems to be spending as much time aboard Air Force One as in the White House hopping around the country creating daily media coverage of little consequence except for his controversial commuting of Scooter Libby’s jail sentence. There also is the performance of multiple immediately forgettable Rose Garden ceremonies produced for the camera’s eye. Thus the relentless staging of the Bush theater of the absurd is creating enough pseudo news noise to virtually drown out the responding remarks by his Democratic adversaries.
If we strain hard enough we might hear what are supposed to be fiery combative proactive responses by House leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate leader Harry Reid. But instead of the sound and fury of vigorous champions of the team that won control of Congress their laid-back attitude appears to need a big dose of Schwartzenager charisma to expose the Potemkin character of Bush’s theater of the absurd.
Time and again after Progressives have seen yet another Bush performance and weak Democratic reply I hear them ask: “Just who won the election?”
Meanwhile, as we consider the answer, President Bush’s theater of the absurd continues to divert the public’s attention away from the worsening tragedy in Iraq.
Bill Seamans is a former correspondent and bureau chief for ABC News in the Middle East.