People believe that actors are the characters they play, too

Actor Michael C. Hall, who played David Fisher on Six Feet Under, once mused in an NPR interview about people asking if he's really gay, when no one asks if he's really a funeral director.

Americans tend to confuse actors with the characters they play, and they tend to think they "know" people based on an image they see on television. This is where the "George W. Bush is a guy I'd like to have a beer with" image came about -- because he's never photographed at the family's Yale aristocratic compound in Kennebunkport; he's photographed in jeans hoisting a near-beer while sitting on the back of a truck wearing a cowboy hat.

But it's far more dangerous to believe that Bush really is the highly scripted, engineered image we've seen on television. Whether Tom Hanks is really a nice guy, whether Michael C. Hall is gay, whether Leonardo DiCaprio really lives as "green" as the image he likes to project, whether Marcia Cross is as obsessive compulsive as her character on Desperate Housewives -- none of these images, if disproven, has an impact on our lives.

But whether George W. Bush really is the strong, decisive, intelligent leader of the image his imagemakers have painted DOES affect all of our lives.

And guess what. He isn't.

Buzzflash:

How Bush "performs" on television is the criteria by which the media judges him, not how he performs for the people of America. Word and deed have taken two separate paths -- and the media may cover deed for a day or two, but is always diverted back to writing reviews about Bush's dramatic reading of scripts written by Rove and Hughes -- or airing visuals of carefully orchestrated photo-ops.

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to put together a pattern of Bush being unable to cope with disaster and protect Americans. There is a straight line going from Bush's paralysis after 9/11 -- sitting in a classroom for nearly 10 minutes reading "My Pet Goat" before his speechwriters could give him something to say, while Dick Cheney oversaw the response, followed by Bush's bizarre odyssey of flying away from Washington, D.C. -- to his failure to respond to the Tsunami disaster for days, to his failure to respond to the disaster in New Orleans for days. We won't even get into the bloody, bankrupting quagmire he got us into in Iraq by lying us into war.

Any corporate board would know that they have a total incompetent on their hands and send him packing. We didn't just have Michael Brown as head of FEMA. Michael Brown is our President!

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That the media seems to bring no historical context to Bush's continued history of blunders and betrayals of America's national security is testament to the decline of a nation that used to value responsibilty, honesty, hard work and integrity. Now, all that counts is "the performance."

And Bush is the actor set out to read the scripts and appear "manly" in photo ops, so that Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld can go about doing their business of pursuing their megalomaniac, psychotic visions and rewarding corporate campaign givers with taxpayer-funded contracts worth billions of dollars.

In the meantime, America's security and economic situation (forever intertwined) grow perilously more dangerous. You have to remember one thing: the guys behind the front man (Bush) have no idea how badly they are doing. People forget this. The Bush "Masters of the Universe" think that they are doing a marvelous job and at some point reality will catch up with them. Only the reality that is catching up with them is the weakening of America to the point that all our lives are threatened by a government so incompetently run, it makes Enron look like a "best practice" model for how to operate a transparent, honest corporation.