Propaganda, Bubble Boy, and your tax dollars

Dan Froomkin asks a very good question; Should Tax Dollars Fund Bush's Bubble?

A controversial president barnstorms through the country attending carefully controlled events where tickets are distributed by his own party, where no one disagrees with a word he says and no one puts him on the spot.

When this happened in the heat of the political season, the events and at least part of the president's travel costs were being paid for by his campaign. But now it's a post-election president spending tax dollars and ostensibly acting in the public interest.

There is only one word for these trips with one sided "dialogue", propaganda.

Bush stays in the bubble because his aides figure that, just like during the campaign, events like these are an effective way of getting his message out without any downside risk. They work, they make nice sound bites and headlines, and nobody complains, at least not much.

Of course Bush's handlers keep him in the bubble for a reason.

As for the president himself, last fall's debates with Sen. John F. Kerry indicated that he doesn't much like it when people disagree with him. And one reason Bush is avoiding tough questions could be that he hasn't quite figured out how to answer them.

Consider this exchange at Friday's Tampa event, where a woman (whose question was somehow not transcribed by the White House) asked how the private accounts would fix "the red problem." She was referring to Bush's snazzy charts illustrating what he said was Social Security's "red ink."

So what was Bush's response to this unscripted question? It wasn't pretty.

"Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised.

Does this gibberish from the "leader of the free world" make any sense to you? I think not. Even the smallest break in the bubble makes it obvious to most that "our leader" is a blabbering idiot. Pass the bananas please. Of course these utterances of idiocy won't ever make the TV news. So we are all paying to keep the bubble inflated, paying for propaganda. Welcome to the Banana Republic of the United States.