ATLANTA - Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"
As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.
Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.
Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.
On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.
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But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.
Bush's use of firemen: props : This post contains the photographs with the firemen who thought they would be deployed as emergency workers used as human background for President Photo Op.
The Potemkin President, Part II
So what's next? Will they round up some doctors and have them tag along with Shrub while he visits patients at an emergency field hospital? (Ideally, a tidy tent full of young, attractive African American patients -- nothing bloody or threatening.) Surely that can be arranged.
Or how about a town meeting with the engineers plugging the levee breaks? They could explain what they're doing and show Shrub their plans, and he could nod his head and pretend like he understands what they're talking about. That shouldn't take more than a half a day out of their schedule. And what's another half day when most of those people have been trapped in their attics for a week already?
But of course, cops and soldiers always make the best stage props. So why not pull them all off the streets for a speech, or better yet -- a turkey dinner? The president could serve!
One thing that really makes me angry watching this disaster coverage is how many times people talk about Bush's "leadership" during 9/11. What a joke. Everything Bush did on 9/11 and afterwards was a giant photo op, and the press ate it up & pushed it as though it were the truth.
Remember? George Bush never actually did anything. He read "The Pet Goat" to children. He hopped on his plane and flew around the country for hours, landing in Louisiana and Nebraska. He spoke briefly in Florida that morning, from Barksdale Air Force Base that afternoon, and at 8:30 that night. All those speeches were written by others, and he is reading them. It wasn't very inspiring, and his absence from the long day of rescue, collapsing buildings and death was in great contrast to the reassuring presence of Rudy Giuliani. I don't particularly like Giuliani, but I felt like he was president that day. He was reassuring, he captured the tragedy when he said the number of dead would be more than we could bear, and most importantly he was there. He didn't run and hide like George W. Bush.
Bush and his loyal aides began to go to the press with stories of the inspiring words Bush had spoken to them while he was on the run. There were no objective witnesses to these stories; they were all from Bush's political aides and allies. Here's how CBS News unquestionly reported their recollections:
Aboard Air Force One, Mr. Bush had a job for press secretary Fleischer.
“The president asked me to make sure that I took down everything that was said. I think he wanted to make certain that a record existed,” says Fleischer
Fleischer’s notes capture Mr. Bush’s language, plain and unguarded. To the vice president, he said: “We’re at war, Dick, we’re going to find out who did this and kick their ass.” Another time, Mr. Bush said, “We’re not going to have any slap-on-the-wrist crap this time.”
The President adds, “I can remember telling the Secretary of Defense, I said, ‘We’re going to find out who did this and then Mr. Secretary, you and Dick Myers, who we just named as chairman of the joint chiefs, are going to go get them.’”....
Mr. Bush had a question for CIA Director George Tenet. "George Tenet was just asked, 'Who do you think did this to us,'" recalls Rice. "He said, 'Sir, I believe its al Qaeda. We’re doing the assessment but it looks like, it feels like, it smells like al Qaeda.'”....
“At one point, he said he didn’t want any tinhorn terrorist keeping him out of Washington,” Fleischer says....
“He decided that the primary tone he wanted to strike that night was reassurance,” remembers Hughes. “We had to show resolve, we had to reassure people, we had to let them know that we would be OK.”
Just off the Oval Office, Mr. Bush added the words that would become known as the Bush Doctrine - no distinction between terrorists and those who harbor them. The staff wanted to add a declaration of war but Mr. Bush didn’t think the American people wanted to hear it that night.
He prepared to say it from the same desk where Franklin Roosevelt first heard the news of Pearl Harbor. Now Bush was commander in chief, and 80 million Americans were watching.
“Today our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts,” he said from the Oval Office that night.
The Oval Office speech came at the end of the bloodiest day in American history since the Civil War.
Mostly it was all photo op. The bullhorn moment, pure photo op:
In the afternoon, word spread that President Bush was about to visit the site. Beckwith couldn't see much, so he climbed on top of an excavated firetruck to get a better view. A balding guy in a suit joined him - Beckwith thought it was a Secret Service agent - and asked if the truck was sturdy. The stranger told him that a VIP wanted to stand there.
The stranger was Bush's senior political aide, Karl Rove, and the VIP was Bush. Moments later, Bush joined Beckwith, threw his arm around him and raised a bullhorn to deliver some of the most memorable words of his presidency: "Well, I can hear you. The whole world can hear you. And the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon."
The pitch at Yankee Stadium which the Republican convention made so much of? Throwing a pitch is probably the only thing this dim-witted exercise freak could be counted on to do competently by himself, without stage management and someone putting words in his mouth.
Yet the press presented all this to us as real, as true. It wasn't true. It was a huge political photo op. Bush & Karl Rove got away with it then, and they think they're going to get away with it now. I feel betrayed by the corporate media. They were complicit in allowing this incompetent boob to stay in office. Will they have the courage to report that everything he is doing right now is political, for show, a photo op? Based on recent history, I am deeply pessimistic.
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