Oh…And…Happy Mission Accomplished Day!
As presidential spectacles go, it would be hard to surpass George Bush’s triumphant ”Top Gun” visit to the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln yesterday off the California coast. President Bush flew out to the giant aircraft carrier dressed in full fighter-pilot regalia as the ”co-pilot” of a Navy warplane. After a dramatic landing on the compact deck — a new standard for high-risk presidential travel — Mr. Bush mingled with the ship’s crew, then later welcomed home thousands of cheering sailors and aviators on the flight deck in a nationally televised address.
The scene will undoubtedly make for a potent campaign commercial next year. For now, though, the point was to declare an end to the combat phase of the war in Iraq and to commit the nation to the reconstruction of that shattered country….
-Editorial, May 2, 2003, The New York Times.
The tail hook caught the last cable, jerking the fighter jet from 150 m.p.h. to zero in two seconds. Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.
He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max with joystick politics.
Compared to Karl Rove’s ”revvin’ up your engine” myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies look like ”Lizzie McGuire.”
This time Maverick didn’t just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MIG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning.
–Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, May 4, 2003
And many others, either equally fawning or equally passive in their complete willingness to simply jot down all of President Junior’s talking points and pass them along as news, without so much as letting a peep be heard from the dissenters. Oh no. To read the New York Times back then you’d have thought there was no dissent anywhere regarding the threat Iraq posed to the world, or that it had weapons of mass destruction, much beyond a few dirty radical hippy leftists who nobody needed to pay any attention to. It was "You provide the pictures, I’ll provide the war…" all over again. except this time it wasn’t the William Randolph Hearst of our era doing it, but the Gray Lady herself.
Ah well… The Times has yet to admit its culpability as a willing participant in the Whitewater smear campaign either…
