Potemkin Village: the World Tour

I can't vouch for the validity of this piece, which is the reason I usually avoid linking to blogs and stick to news outlets. However, it isn't surprising in the least. From Dickhead Cheney we had the ludicrous pronouncement that the Iraqi insurgency is "in its last throes." From Bush we get hand-picked crowds with pre-screened questions all designed to sell a policy no one wants.

Now it appears that Laura Bush has decided to join in the whimsical world of illusion and misdirection. Read on:

Upon Laura Bush’s recent trip to Egypt, it was planned that she, along with her host Mrs. Mubarak, would visit a USAID funded school in Alexandria. One week before the scheduled visit, the tattered school was painted anew, tidied up, and the sewage system was fixed. The dirty roads around the school were cleaned up and trees were miraculously planted all around the area. A sign in English was written to welcome the 2 first ladies.

Nevertheless, the Alexandria education officials didn’t like how the Om el Qura school kids looked like! The girls were poor and wore dirty school uniforms. Instead of cleaning them out and distributing clean clothes that would have definitely drew a huge smile on their faces, the officials decided to replaced the kids with new kids brought from a language school! Not only that, they gave the entire school staff a one week leave! Can you imagine how humiliated the school kids and the teachers are feeling right now!

It's vintage W (not to mention vintage Mao and vintage Stalin)--if you don't like the truth, make it up yourself. And get plenty of photos. Again, the jury's still out on the accuracy of the piece. But it's spreading like gangbusters on the blogs.