From the "Things I Already Knew" File

Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post lets us in on big secret. Chimpy may not be “the commanding, decisive, jovial president you've been hearing about for years in so much of the mainstream press.”

Wow, Dan, there’s a stunner. How long did Annie Sullivan have to hold your hand under the running water for that one to sink in, Helen Keller?

He continues, “it turns out that Bush is in fact fidgety, cold and snappish in private, he yells at those who dare give him bad news and is therefore not surprisingly surrounded by an echo chamber of terrified sycophants. He is slow to comprehend concepts that don't emerge from his gut. He is uncomprehending of the speeches that he is given to read. And oh yes, one of his most significant legacies -- the immense post-Sept. 11 reorganization of the federal government which created the Homeland Security Department -- has failed a big test.”

“Waaa….waaaah,” young Helen, or young Dan Froomkin, as the case may be, cries!

He then adds the clincher, when he states that “for whatever reason, critical observations and insights that for so long have been zealously guarded by mainstream journalists, and only doled out in teaspoons if at all, now seem to be flooding into the public sphere. An emperor-has-no-clothes moment seems upon us.”

Dan, this man has been parading around buck naked since his charming mother bore him. Why are you just noticing this now? According to my watch, it is 2005.

To steal from a great writer, Paul Waldman, who wrote an outstanding book you should buy NOW called Fraud, there is a recipe for building and selling a fraud to the American people:

1) portray son of one of America’s most influential families
as a down-home Texan;
2) berate media as “liberal” until they stop asking tough questions;
3) take advantage of reporters’ tendency not to check facts;
4) mask reactionary policies in compassionate words and pictures;
5) push false stories from the right-wing media into the mainstream media;
6) extol the virtues of workers while systematically pushing
an anti-labor agenda;
7) propose a series of tax cuts aimed at the wealthy, but sell
them as a boon to ordinary Americans;
8) disguise destructive initiatives with friendly-sounding names;
9) BEFRIEND MEDIA WITH “GENUINE GUY” ROUTINE;
10) keep the public from accessing information;
11) maintain message discipline at all time;
12) question patriotism of anyone who disagrees and
13) repeat above until it all seems true.