Separated at Birth?


There's something I find deeply disturbing about these individual photos...and no, it's not that Haggard and Foley now both admit to a predilection towards being gay, which doesn't bother me in the slightest.

No, I think what bothers me is that each face seems more like a very creepy mask. And, perhaps it's mere coincidence, but the resemblence between them struck me. In their determination and zeal to hide something, they've adopted a plastic facade that spills over into an expression that I can only describe as sinister. A look that says, in my mind, something John Houston's character Noah Cross mentioned in Chinatown:

See, Mr. Gitts, most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of... anything!

Like a level of hypocrisy that's virtually unprecedented in modern politics.

Well, two of these three stooges have been exposed as the hypocrites they are...despite an almost surreal media atmosphere, particularly given recent history (for several spot-on examples, see Hullabaloo).

In Shrub's personal (closet) case (that's a joke, by the way: I neither know nor care about the chimperor's personal life...well, unless he's also being hypocritical)...anyway, in Shrub's case, it's not teh gay (at least as far as we know, his weird behavior towards bald guys and Cap'n Codpiece notwithstanding)...it's the power. Krugman sums it up as nicely as anyone else:

At this point, nobody should have any illusions about Mr. Bush’s character. To put it bluntly, he’s an insecure bully who believes that owning up to a mistake, any mistake, would undermine his manhood — and who therefore lives in a dream world in which all of his policies are succeeding and all his officials are doing a heckuva job. Just last week he declared himself “pleased with the progress we’re making” in Iraq.

In other words, he’s the sort of man who should never have been put in a position of authority, let alone been given the kind of unquestioned power, free from normal checks and balances, that he was granted after 9/11. But he was, alas, given that power, as well as a prolonged free ride from much of the news media.

The results have been predictably disastrous. The nightmare in Iraq is only part of the story. In time, the degradation of the federal government by rampant cronyism — almost every part of the executive branch I know anything about, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been FEMAfied — may come to be seen as an equally serious blow to America’s future.

And it should be a matter of intense national shame that Mr. Bush has quietly abandoned his fine promises to New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast.

In other words, what SHRUB'S hiding is his patent incompetence.