It’s been a long time since I’ve posted a Tom Tomorrow cartoon. Looking back over my archives I see that is something I used to do quite often. Right now I feel kind of how Fallenmonk put it:

Looking around the Internets you see that a lot of other bloggers are writing their farewell posts to the Bush era. I guess there is something worth saying on the changing of the guard and the final departure of the worst President in the history of the Nation but I think I will let everybody else scatter the ashes. A lot of the posts here have been about the injustice, depravity, cowardice, avarice and hate that is the Bush presidency and frankly I don’t feel like writing anymore about it. I have made my opinions and disgust clear enough I think, and there is just no sense in saying it all over again. Let’s just say it was a moral and ethical atrocity and leave it at that.

What I find myself looking forward to now is seeing how everyone from Tom Tomorrow, to Fallenmonk, and in between, handle the New Presidency. That and seeing if I can keep my own cynicism in check, to be unleashed when it’s most appropriate.

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Laura Bush was dwarfed by the image of her husband, whom she introduced at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

…and the band played on.

Cross-posted @ GFA51

• Bush shoe-ing worst Arab insult
• Bush defends war in trip to Iraq
• Bush Shoe Incident: Video

This is the summation of the Bush pResidency. It should be the closing frames of any montage historical look back. I wonder if we will hear more from the journalist who threw the shoes than his predecessor, the Tiananmen Square tank man.

Via the master of disaster Agi.

-You think it’s hard to read that teleprompter now Johnny boy, wait till you see what you look like in the monitor.

Tonite on Larry King (please don’t ask why I was watching Larry King) I watched Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R – Texas) say she wouldn’t, “be in a position” to to accept an offer for the position of McCain’s Vice President. The only thing funnier than her running away from McCain as fast as he ran away from Hagee was that the day after the effective beginning of the General Election season Ari fucking Fleischer shows up in the very next segment shilling for McCain. Ya, that Ari Fleischer. Bagman and habitually compulsive lair. Bushist. Oh, but we use “McSame” too much.

“A liar needs a good memory.”

Message Machine
Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
By DAVID BARSTOW

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

You know the ironic thing about this, I caught the Dalai Lama on NPR the other day–I know, I had everything but the latte in my hand–Anyways, he said the following:

The Dalai Lama said “millions of Chinese — those innocent Chinese — who have no other way to access the situation, totally rely on the government information. These millions of Chinese then really feel anger towards me. At that I feel very sad. What’s the way to tell these innocent Chinese brothers [and] sisters the reality? But there’s no way to send information or to send news.”

What is reality, anymore?