Down at the end of yesterday’s Froom is an item he found over at US News:

“Current and former Bush administration communications officials tell the US News Political Bulletin that they now believe they relied too heavily on traditional media and the White House press corps to get out the President’s message about the broader war on terrorism and the booming economy. ’We didn’t use the new tools of communication’ like the Internet, blogs and mobile technology, said a former key official. As a result, added another official, the President’s message was filtered through the mainstream press which eventually got bored with the story and stopped reporting the President’s repetitive messages. ’You’ve got to use the new tools. They can reach far more people than TV or the papers,’ said an administration official. ’A video on the Internet or some blogging can reach millions and we should have played with that much more,’ said the official. White House insiders, however, dismissed the complaints, mostly from former communications officials, claiming that they have worked with bloggers and non-traditional media but that the tide has turned against them.”

How many ways can you find that this statement is not just off-base, but in typical “Bushian” fashion is 180 degrees away from reality? We’d have found what Bush was saying believable if we’d read it on a blog? If I was a rightwing blogger I’d be pissed, enraged and heartbroken at being so dissed.

No, anonymous “administration official.” The “mainstream press” reported your lies just fine. And over and over again, tragically, to the point where there are still measurable numbers of Americans not confined to institutions for the mentally incapacitated who think that we’re killing Iraqis to pay them back for 9/11. And that “booming economy”? Please, my eyes hurt enough already. Somehow sending our manufacturing capability overseas in exchange for part-time, no-benefits, no-security jobs in service industries would somehow improve life? And the former “breadbasket of the world” is now so hard up we have to import both pet and human food contaminated with poison in order to make more money? This is what you mean by “booming” perhaps?

Yeah, I’ll believe that if I read it in a blog rather than the NYT or WaPo.

Voting Americans—or just enough of them anyway—believed your shit, starting with the big lie of “compassionate conservativism” way back when, to elect your sorry ass twice. Or at least to make it close enough to steal, take your pick. We’re stuck with you and the consequences either way.

We are conditioned from the first time in kindergarden that we recite the Pledge of Allegiance (talk about repetition!) to believe that, once elected, our heads of government are at least trying to do what’s right and in our best interests. Or that “older and wiser heads” among their advisors will give them information we don’t have access to, so we have to take on faith that they know what they’re doing.

Here’s your “at the end of the day” discovery. You “Lessons Learned” moment. (Any other of their infinitely repeated hackneyed catchphrases you particularly detest? Those are mine.) Repetition Does Not Make Right.

You own the biggest, baddest, loudest megaphone on the planet, you schmuck. You think repeating “We will stay in Iraq until victory is won” on a blog is going to make people believe such an absurdity when saying it seven brazilion times in the Rose Garden hasn’t worked.

And while you might like to think that “History doesn’t matter because by then we’ll all be dead,” you invoke history all the time. You honest to God want people to think you are Lincoln because he also took some liberties with the Constitution during wartime—never mind that it was war genuinely forced on him, and a genuine and inarguable threat to the very existence of the United States, unlike this nonsense halfway around the world.

“Lincoln did it,” your (usually paid) synchopants in the public and history press croon in effete chorus, “so it is indisputably okay for Bush to do it.” “Lincoln was hated by many, and Bush is hated by many, therefore Bush is as good, and will be as beloved later, as Lincoln is. And we will put him on the penny!” BZZZZT. Wrong. Johnny, show our contestant his lovely parting gifts, then show him to the door. And check his pockets for any little trinkets which might have fallen thereinto.

Not even a John Wilkes Booth could save your sorry ass now, Mr. Bush. And Lincoln, despite being, indeed, “dead by now,” will still tell you why. Why he is beloved and inspirational to millions, while you will be scorned and reviled to the end of time. Infinite repetition—even on a blog, sorry to tell you—will not turn a lie into a truth. And it was Lincoln who said it best, and twice besides:

“If you call a tail a leg,” he said once, “how many legs does a horse have? Four. Because calling a tail a leg does not make it one.”

And the final lesson you never learned throughout your famously, and mysteriously, charmed life and career: “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can never fool all of the people, all of the time.” In your arrogance to think that “compromise” means repeating what you want until everybody else throws up their hands in enraged bafflement and lets you have it, that’s the one you never learned.

Of course maybe you’ll believe it now that you’ve seen it on a blog.