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Firemen to... the Bush PR camp!
September 07, 2005 ( politics )
Via DailyKOS and TPM, an article from the Salt Lake Tribune on firefighters, 1,000 of them, brought to the disaster areas to... hand out FEMA flyers and walk with Bush for PR shots:
ATLANTA - Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?" As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta. Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers. Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA. On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency. Federal officials are unapologetic.
"They've got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified," said a Texas firefighter. "We're sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven't been contacted yet."The firefighter, who has encouraged his superiors back home not to send any more volunteers for now, declined to give his name because FEMA has warned them not to talk to reporters.
But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.
The key to this regime is that they live in their own reality created with props, seeded questions, and hollywood-style special effects and scenes, and they pump these images and stories out, fully developed, to news stations, which can use them easily. The key to defeating this is to force the media to deal with reality again, for which Katrina might be our only real wedge, the reality being so grim and at such loggerheads with the regime's imagining of it.
BoingBoing points out this wonderful photoshop of two photos taken on the same day:
Posted by griffjon at September 7, 2005 08:16 AM
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