DEM BONES GONNA RISE AGAIN

By sheer happenstance, I saw the most astonishing video on MSNBC tonight. I don't often watch TV news, and I clicked in for no apparent reason. I see our boy George W asking in a manner worthy of the surliest of underpaid fast food servers, "How may I serve you?"

What was Rove thinking? His boy has been completely insulated from the public for three years and he thinks he can counter the "Kerry hugging the man he saved in the Nam advantage" by dressing W up in denim and throwing him into a local blue collar joint?

There was Bush, behind the cash register, obviously confused by unscripted questions and desperately clutching the shoulder of the owner, who at one point was almost visibly struggling to get away, while he delivered a snippy lecture on the economy and how these folks out there (that were unseen) were making all this money and not spending it, and denying this woman and her staff a decent living and not tipping well either.

It was appalling. At the moment when he gripped her shoulder and wouldn't let her leave, she flinched like someone caught in the grasp of a deranged person and then realizing the camera caught her, forces a smile and assumed a good camera angle. Her relief at escape was almost palpable.

He immediately clutched the shoulder of the next scripted person, a regular clerk and repeated the same sort of remarks. It was painful to watch. Nothing went to script and by the end even George knew he blew it.

The segment noted that this was just the customary awkward banter among Bush and the White House press corps. I expect that's true enough. It felt like a inside joke to me but I don't think it played well in Peoria. The viewers who believed Karl's war spin, won't make that distinction. On video it looked like he was talking to the average man in line at the local fast food joint. I think he insulted some core voters in that little fiasco.

As much as I hate to take pleasure in other's misfortune, I loved seeing our peerless misleader caught in such an unmediated moment. Even Rumpelstiltskin couldn't spin this one into gold for him. The name of the piece was Got Ribs?

After watching this and the following story on Kerry and the the Vietnam guy, on the theme, Photo Op or Actual Act of Providence?, (I believe it's the latter), all of a sudden it feels like the mainstream press is finding the same spine they're reporting to have discovered in the Democratic party.

I hope some technogenius out there figures out how to find and save that video permanently, I couldn't find it at the site and I would love to have it for the archives.