Bush Administration in full damage control mode

First the Bush Administration decided to ban any and all photography of corpses that might turn up as New Orleans drains. I can understand that; one wouldn't want people to find out what happened to their loved ones by seeing their bloated corpses on television. But the motivation seems to be less one of protecting those who have already lost more than most of us can imagine. It seems more an attempt to keep hidden the huge death toll that we are going to see. A chapel in Shelbyville, Tennessee, has been told to accept up to 40,000 bodies -- a truly staggering death toll, especially when juxtaposed against the Administration's callousness from Monday-Wednesday of last week, its shameless staging of photo-ops for political gain, and FEMA's ongoing ineptitude. That's THIRTEEN 9/11s, folks.

No wonder they don't want us to see. We might start asking questions, and that must not be allowed.

In fact, they're so scared shitless of the potential fallout that Bob Brigham of Swing State Project is reporting (via Americablog) that ALL reporters are being banned from New Orleans. ALL of them. Presumably that means the Fox News guys too.

It must be really, really bad. It will be interesting to see if this marks the end of the long honeymoon between the Bush Administration and the media. Will they continue to carry his water for him after this?

The water is a toxic stew of lead, chemicals, oil, and sewage. The last holdouts will be removed by force -- this is now coming from the mayor, not from FEMA. “It’s going to be awful and it’s going to wake the nation up again,”, he said on yesterday's Today show.

What's going to be revealed is going to be beyond anything we saw on 9/11. And if those images are permitted to get out, they're going to be juxtaposed against images of the President of the United States yukking it up with friendly audiences of rich senior citizens, accepting a guitar, eating cake with John McCain, and telling people who have lost everything that he's looking forward to sitting on the front porch of Trent Lott's fabulous new house.

The French Revolution was started with fewer such images. No wonder he's keeping journalists out.

Only one problem...there are bloggers who aren't classified as journalists -- people actively working on the relief effort. And we have to rely on them to bear witness, because God knows our government doesn't want us to see what its policies and decisions have wrought.