corrente

So the WashPoodle runs a hagiographic piece of crap miserable excuse for a story today about "Bush's Seven Minutes" reading about the goat to the schoolkids as planes are falling out of the sky in multiple places.

The piece offers up all the standard Rove revisionisms like "Da Preznit did not want to scare the children" by shrieking like Janet Leigh in the shower and stampeding out of the room, as if that was his only alternative. You would think anybody with as much practice in lying as Bush has had could think up a line like "Aw shucks...kids, ya know how you hate it when you're having fun and your mom yells that it's time to come in and do your homework? Well even the president gets yelled at like that sometimes." Exit stage left, pursued by a bear but with a smile and a wave. Instead..

The commission report portrays a discombobulated government that can't even keep track of the hijacked planes.. Everyone's flying blind. The president borrows a cell phone to try to get through to the White House.
Symbolically and substantively, the ship of state was foundering.

But the line that's setting everybody off was this:

But even the harshest critics concede that the nation's spiritual leader rallied in the days thereafter.

Maybe the WaPo writer's children are being held at an Undisclosed Location and he can't be held responsible. But just for the record, down in Comments (via Atrios) is a WAY better description of what some real "spiritual leaders" did that day:

Bush leads our country in the same sense that a hood ornament leads a Buick.
For 9/11, the turn-out here was close to 100%. People you wouldn't think had any community feeling at all offered their services. Bike messengers spontaneously organized themselves into runners between Ground Zero and the hospitals. My super (and I expect, every super in town) head-counted the building and asked me to get on the horn and chase down every tenent who wasn't snug in bed come Tuesday night, then got together with his Ecuadorian londsmen's group to figure out a way to account for every Ecuadorian in town. Dog-owners who use the dog run down the street figured out who among them was missing, walked their dogs and had new homes for them by the next day. I worked the am shift in a hospital kitchen (a lot of workers were stuck in the bouroughs). Little girls across the street sold lemonade for the Red Cross. And that's not counting all the people who practically ran downtown (no cars or subways) to dig it out with their bare hands.

And immediately after that, the whole rest of the country came to help. Then the rest of the planet.

And Bush is taking credit for this? He claims to have led this? He contributed to this in any fucking way? I know the Secret Service gets antsy if anyone says they want to kill the president. But what if you just think he should be slapped?
Molly, NYC |

We know what this is about, of course. While purporting to be about the 9-11 Commission report that shows what a clueless clown Bushco was that day, it does double duty immunizing against Fahrenheit 9/11's opening Friday. I don't think it's going to work, but we can all discuss it next weekend after we've seen the movie.