Bush's Phony Forum.
Nice opening paragraph to Slate's piece on the fake forum in Waco:
This afternoon at the President's Economic Forum in Waco, Texas, President Bush and Vice President Cheney sat side by side on the stage of a packed auditorium for more than an hour. That's the first time they've been that close together for that long in public since Sept. 11. Evidently they're no longer afraid of terrorists. What they're afraid of is Americans.
And the closing paragraph is good too:
Of course, if all these people agreed with Bush beforehand, then the event wasn't about listening. It was about selling Bush's policies. And if the public had already agreed with Bush, the sales job would have been unnecessary. It would have made no sense for Bush to appeal to "those who are watching on C-SPAN" or for O'Neill to apologize to participants "who didn't have an opportunity to say something for the television cameras." In short, the operational premise of the event was that its stated premise was false: The "real people" onstage held beliefs that the real people watching it didn't share. That ruse may have been economical. But it wasn't very presidential, and it certainly wasn't a forum.
So the "forum" by its very existence proves its phoniness. What a joke. [Steve's No Direction Home Page]
I was just about to post a link to this same article when I saw that Steve had already done the honors. So, in addition, may I suggest Maureen Dowd's biting and hilarious "Surfing the Economy."
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