How Stupid Is the Media? Oh.
How Stupid Does the Media Think You Are? Oh

Bush Spokesman Quits and Rove Loses a Post screams the banner on the NYT (as of 5:00pm EDT 4/19/06), with the subhead The Overhaul of the White House Staff Continues...

Rove Gives Up Policy Post; McClellan Resigns yells the WP (same time), with the subhead White House Staff Shake-up Continues, with the first paragraph of the article saying:

Karl Rove, the president's most influential adviser and a dominant force in the Bush administration since its beginning, surrendered key policy responsibilities today while press secretary Scott McClellan announced his resignation.

A second story on the front of WP webpage says Much More Shaking Up to Come, subheaded Nobody's Safe at the White House These Days.

Rove went to The Decider! and said, Here, let's tell the media I'm taking a"hit," and since I'm a lightning rod the media will all lather themselves as if this is a big deal. McClellan's professional lying skills were deemed inadequate, and his "resigning" signals the White House's belief that if only they had a better liar, all will be well.

Changing personnel, even beyond the transparent schlock like this, won't mean a thing if policy doesn't change. The White House believes that the problem is not policy, it's the message. Think about this: after five years of coordinated, sustained, and relentless misinformation, bad faith, and outright lies, finding The Decider!s poll numbers at historical lows, the White House has determined that the lows are caused by not enough and not good enough coordinated, sustained, and relentless misinformation, bad faith, and outright lies.

At least they've got the media hyperventilating over the changes. Stooges.

The DECIDER! is Nucking Futz

Go watch this link at Crooks and Liars.

(I changed the link at 10:45 EDT from CNN to C&L.)

Here're the money sentences:

"I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I'm The Decider, and I decide what is best."

He then puffed his pecs and stalked off.

Watch the video: You don't think The Decider! would rather the whole world incinerate in a mass nuclear conflagration than relinquish his illusions? You don't think The Decider! is dangerously close to a very real psychological tipping-point into clinical megalomania and paranoid schizophrenia? You must sleep better than me: I already think The Decider!'s nucking futz. Seriously.

Cult of Personality

Soviet Propaganda:

O great Stalin, O leader of the peoples,
Thou who broughtest man to birth.
Thou who fructifies the earth,
Thou who restorest to centuries,
Thou who makest bloom the spring,
Thou who makest vibrate the musical chords...
Thou, splendour of my spring, O thou,
Sun reflected by millions of hearts.

American Propaganda:

Our country’s stood beside us
People have sent us aid.
Katrina could not stop us,
our hopes will never fade.
Congress, Bush and FEMA
People across our land
Together have come to rebuild us and we join them hand-in-hand!

Brought to you by Tinfoil Hats for Sanity. Really, we should stop our hysteria. Nothing to look at here. Nope, no comparison at all.

(Hat-tip to Comrade JR, chef, provocateur, conspirator, friend.)

DCU 2, Houston 0

Easily the most encouraging game since last year's team peaked in August. I've not been happy with Peter Nowak's coaching strategies, especially as he stubbornly insisted in the three man backline even as opposing teams constantly ran, and ran successfully, at the wings and whipped crosses into the undermanned middle, but two games in a row he has started four back, anchored in the middle by Erpen and Boswell and leftbacked by the I'm sure I'd hate him in real life but he can play for me Josh Gros, and the defense has never looked more solid. If only they can get Namoff healed and out on the right - once those four have their communication down it will certainly be the most defensively stout AND most offensively dangerous backline in MLS.

I wasn't all that impressed with Adu during the game, commenting to my brother that I wondered why Nowak was playing a natural leftfooter on right midfield, but Adu's play was what the Post beatwriter commented on most. What I took away - besides the defense - is the difference in attitude and speed when Eskandarian is up front on the left: United looks far more potent and exciting with him in than Filomeno (who Esky replaced in 60th minute). It may be a combination of giving Filomeno time to prove himself AND not risking Esky for too many minutes (while working him into game fitness).

First road game this weekend v New York Red Bull (now, to their greater benefit, Alexei Lalas-less). I'd have been happy before the first game to take seven out of nine points in the three home games, but since the two points they gave back was New York, the team they were most likely to have beat, getting three this weekend in New Jersey is - well, not crucial, but I'm greedy.

Pulitzers

Dana Priest, who was awarded Best of the Blogs first Krugie Award for excellence in journalism, today won the really big prize for excellence in journalism, a Pulitzer for her reporting on the CIA prisons in eastern Europe and other aspects of the Bush's war on terror.

When I met her to give her the Krugie she was charming and genuine and smart and funny and seemed genuinely touched to be chosen for our tiny prize, and when you consider how tough she has to be to be reporting on this administration in this town for a paper with a clown for head of editorials and a bigger clown as ombudsman and a minor wanker growing daily in dangerous wankerness as the head of the board, tough is perhaps the attribute that Priest deserves most credit for amongst all her other attributes.

The fiction Pulitzer was given to Geraldine Brooks, who I have heard good things about but have not read. The one who agrees to be married to me read 2002's Year of Wonders about a plague in 17th C Britain and loved it, but it fell off my radar before I could read it. March, this year's Pulitzer winner, is a Civil War novel with the missing father from Little Women as main character, is set, partially, at Balls Bluff, on the other side of the Potomac and down a mile from White's Ferry, a playground of my (continuing) youth. I confess, the Little Women angle turned me off. Small me.

The poetry winner I've never heard of, Claudia Emerson, for her collection Late Wife, from which this poem is taken:


Artifact

For three years you lived in your house
just as it was before she died: your wedding
portrait on the mantel, her clothes hanging
in the closet, her hair still in the brush.
You have told me you gave it all away
then, sold the house, keeping only the confirmation
cross she wore, her name in cursive chased
on the gold underside, your ring in the same

box, those photographs you still avoid,
and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed—
small things. Months after we met, you told me she had
made it, after we had slept already beneath its loft
and thinning, raveled pattern, as though beneath
her shadow, moving with us, that dark, that soft.