Out of Control!

The winds of Katrina did something no one had been much able to do since 9-11, except, to a lesser degree and a shorter time, Cindy Sheehan. See, Bushco CEO Rove understands full well how important it is to control the message. Not only has he made sure that Bushco's name appears in the "news" every single day, he has crafted the content of the accompanying message and insured that it has been dutifully disseminated by every possible medium.

Cindy Sheehan, by promising to camp out in a Texas ditch until she received an answer from Bushco, managed to wrest control of the media -- unwittingly, I'd bet -- for a brief time in the lazy dog days of August. I mean, what she did was so fresh, so preposterous, that the media just had to take notice. After all, many of the usual voices were on vacation.

And then came Katrina in September. The winds of this massive storm not only ripped the roofs and siding off hundreds of thousands of buildings. It ripped the remote control right out of CEO Rove's fingers and sent it flying far out of his reach. For days the message was not carefully crafted. For agonizingly long days the message was raw and truthful and real and in living color, too.

It was beautiful and horrifying at once.