My question is, for whom is this photo gallery intended? Does anybody seriously think blacks are going to be swayed by one staged photo op after another, in which time and again their confederates are cast as the pitiable recipients of an ostentatious display of kingly compassion?
Maybe it's for the president's white supporters, anxious lest they be visited by tinges of self-doubt over their own arguable racism in continuing to support such a state of affairs. Maybe it's all just a mistake -- some staffer messed up.
(Although in this context it's worth recalling Bush's own reply to a journalist in 2001 who, citing the new president's highly unusual refusal to address the annual meeting of the NAACP, had asked how he might respond to critics who said his "civil rights record was less than stellar." Smirking, the president replied: "Let's see. There I was sitting around the table with foreign leaders looking at Colin Powell and Condi Rice." End of discussion. Even some conservative commentators were taken aback by the glibness of that answer. Tucker Carlson called it a "lame response" and insulting to Powell and Rice for Bush to say, "I was sitting with black people when I was criticized.")
So let's just say that the Compassion photo page was some staff screw-up. Surely heads are going to roll; somebody is going to be held to account, right? They'll take down the site and somebody is going to take the fall. In fact, maybe they'll replace the Compassion file tab with a new one: I don't know, say: Accountability. And that slide show will display the administration's forthright approach in consistently facing up to and correcting policy lapses, featuring, one after the next, all the Bush appointees who, for failure to head off variously egregious foul-ups, have been required to resign. You know, people like ... well, like ... hmmm ... oh heck, never mind.
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Lawrence Weschler, author of the forthcoming book "Vermeer in Bosnia," heads the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. The photographs discussed here also can be viewed on the Web at www.moveon pac.org/compassionmirror.
