the documentary made by Alexandra Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's daughter as she traveled as a reporter for a year with Bush's PRIMARY campaign.
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Bush documentary: an "intimate" portrait of an empty vesselJourneys with George, directed by Aaron Lubarsky and Alexandra Pelosi
By David Walsh
9 December 2002
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The second concern of Pelosi is the press corps itself, with whom she travels for more than a year. She is too much of this crowd to notice what a damning picture her film provides of the “free press.” Although there are a few cynical and observant comments of a fairly obvious character, particularly from Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News and R.G. Ratcliffe of the Houston Chronicle, in general the media representatives are docile and deferential to the Bush camp. In an astonishing admission, one reporter tells Pelosi that “everyone goes weak in the knees when he comes back here.”
No member of the media chooses to ask a difficult question for fear of being ostracized. Pelosi learns this first-hand when she asks Bush at a press conference about the record number of executions in Texas. He later tells her that she hit him “below the belt,” and he snubs her for a time. Having learned her lesson, Pelosi never asks a tough question again.
The essential fraud of the Bush campaign, the extreme right-wing agenda concealed behind the slogan of “compassionate conservatism,” is never exposed. Pelosi makes next to nothing, for example, of Bush’s appearance—captured by her video camera—at the ultra-right center of religious bigotry, Bob Jones University in South Carolina. There is unquestioning acceptance throughout the film that Bush, an ignoramus bankrolled by corporate interests to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, is a legitimate and substantial political figure. This was the general line of the liberal media during the election of 2000.
One journalist, trooping from “photo op to photo op,” comments that he and his colleagues are all “lemmings ... we follow and do what they say.” Despite the occasional grumbling, the media can be seen functioning in this campaign primarily to conceal the truth about the threat represented by Bush from the public.
This is not an oversight. The journalists, who travel in what is appropriately termed “the bubble,” constitute a particularly cynical upper-middle-class layer, insulated from the problems of ordinary people. In one of the few half-honest comments in Journeys with George, Richard Wolffe of the Financial Times tells Pelosi, “We’re a lot of really well-paid people trying to convince a lot of other really well-paid people that we know what’s going on in ordinary people’s minds.”
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Journeys with George lends credence to the argument that Bush is essentially an empty vessel, the idle son and scapegrace of a powerful family, a front-man for more conscious and politically motivated forces. He seems fully capable, out of stupidity and indifference, of signing anything pushed across his desk. A war with Iraq, or North Korea, or Iran, with its inevitably bloody consequences, would not trouble his sleep any more than the state execution of poor blacks and whites in Texas. Hannah Arendt’s famous comment about the “banality of evil” seems to apply here.
<snip>
Much more at.....
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/dec2002/jour-d09.shtml
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