"George Bush has my grandma in lockdown"

This post at Daily Kos illustrates everything that's wrong with the Bush Administration:

Classic.  George W. Bush, not content with locking up foreigners in Cuba, has sent my 88 year-old grandma to her room.

A brief news item on NPR piqued my interest this morning.  They announced that the President would be visiting a retirement home near Rochester to tout his drug benefit plan.  My grandmother lives in a retirement home near Rochester, so I checked the local papers online and, sure enough, the Commander-In-Chief was headed for my grandmother's community at  Ferris Hills.

I emailed my family to share the bad news, and received this response from my Republican father:

"The residents are rather upset.  Only a chosen few get to see GW and the rest have to stay in their rooms while he's there."

Classic.  George W. Bush, not content with locking up foreigners in Cuba, has sent my 88 year-old grandma to her room.

The point of moving to a facility like Ferris Hills is to be able to get out of your room, get some exercise, interact with your peers, and enjoy the view of Canandaigua Lake.  But today all these residents - the ones who don't pass the loyalty test - are shut-ins.

So this is the state of the nation:  When the president and his security team visits a retirement home, his ego is so fragile that he must be protected from octogenarians.  

UPDATE:

Just off the phone with gran as the retinue arrived. Here are the details:

- They are not restricted to their rooms, but are restricted to their floors. The meeting is taking place in the lounge area on the ground floor. The restriction is for 1-2 hours, then they are free to move about the building once he leaves.

- There was a meeting with presidential advisers some weeks ago for anyone who wanted to attend. A group of 10-12 people was picked from this group.

- She doesn't know how they were picked since she didn't attend - she has a nice company plan from my grandpa's years at Kodak! She did note that the fellow resident interviewed in the Finger Lake Times article is known as being politically active for the Repubs.

- Residents were asked if they wanted to attend the other event at the Canandaigua Academy, but as this entailed spending about four hours waiting on a bus, then in the auditorium, she declined.

- The shared internet PCs were shut down and cars cleared out of the garage a few days prior to the visit.

Other Links:

This is the spin: "When President Bush comes to Canandaigua today to talk up the Medicare Part D prescription drug program, he'll likely face multitudes of people like Joseph LaGeorge."

This is the reality: "Bush and the panel took no questions from the audience or the media. The event lasted about 30 minutes" and "Then he let each [panel member] talk about the plan, from their perspective, reacting to questions that Bush provided..all comments were supportive"

It's no wonder Bush is getting up in front of crowds and saying that there's no civil war in Iraq and everything's going great. It's no wonder Bush was on tape saying that the Federal government was prepared for Hurricane Katrina. He may really BE kept in a bubble so protected that he doesn't know what's going on.

His supporters will use this as an excuse for the sins of his Administration. However, no one forced him to run for President. He should have known the risks of the job when he took it, and one of those risks is that things go wrong and the president must be accountable. But which is it? Is he a ruthless dictator-wannabe, or just an overgrown kid playing dress-up, pretending to be a president while others pull the strings?

If it's the latter, and you want to buy the "shadow government behind a sock puppet" theory, you might want to keep your eye on George Allen -- another nitwit many think will be the Republicans' useful idiot in 2008.