As with his life and domestic travels, so in the president’s international travels, he and his entourage - including, as in a previous European trip, American escort vehicles as well as the president’s official car (known to insiders as “the beast”), 200 secret service agents, 15 sniffer dogs, a Black Hawk helicopter, snipers, five cooks, 50 White House “aides”, and the vast press corps that reports on “him” - move inside an enormous bubble, a kind of dream world. All around him the central cities of the planet he’s passing through are swept clear of life in order to create a Potemkin Earth just for his pleasure and safety. For Bush & Co, all life is increasingly lived inside that bubble, carefully wiped clean of any traces of recalcitrant, unpredictable, roiling humanity, of anything that might throw the dream world into question. In a sense, George’s world has been well stocked with James Guckert clones. (Guckert is, of course, the “journalist” who, using the alias Jeff Gannon, regularly attended presidential news conferences and lobbed softball questions the president’s way.) And George himself, whoever he may be (or may once have been), is a kind of Gannon, when you think about it. A character. A creation.

Tom Engelhardt takes a look at the fiction of the presidency. He looks at the scripts, the writers, the stagers and the composite creation that is the First Family.

In fairness, I think this image making and staging has permeated western culture. Last week a very tense Prime Minister made a scheduled stop at a school, cameras rolling. I think the Newfoundland Premier may have been with him, I don’t know. Paul Martin has photographed well with children - the fact he may well be very comfortable around them is not lost. But this was stiff, too loud. And it was sad.
We swallow the myths whole.
Linda Williamson makes that case for Stephen Harper.

Yesterday’s Globe, astonishingly, devoted not one but three prominent articles — a long analytical story and two big-name columns — to the question of Harper’s supposed anger. A caricature showed him in a pit bull collar, foaming at the mouth.

Yes, that Stephen Harper. “Experts” were quoted, gravely warning that Canadians prefer their politicians not to get too hot under the collar, and that Harper’s fury could backfire.

So it begins. And just when you thought attempts to demonize the Conservatives couldn’t get any more ridiculous.