Tony Snow: "A President who just fell off a turnip truck"

[ProgressiveEconomist]

Is this how Snow, Rove, Bartlett, Card, and other White House handlers secretly talk about Dubya behind his back?

The White House faces simultaneous sudden meltdowns of PR images of superior "family values" and "national security" competence for Republicans.

Obviously rattled by a "perfect storm" of House Predatorgate and "State of Denial", WH Press Secretary Tony Snow made at least two apparent Freudian slips in Monday's White House Press Briefing.

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(1) The first I saw came in response to a question about Snow's very flippant remark about Predatorgate over the weekend:

From http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001653.php :

'White House: Foley Scandal Nothing More Than "Naughty Emails"; By Paul Kiel - October 2, 2006, 11:16 AM

White House spokesman Tony Snow on CNN this morning:

"there have been other scandals, as you know, that have been more than simply naughty e-mails.'

Snow deferred questions about details of Pretatorgate to Speaker Hastert, said something like, "WE HAVE TO FIND OUT HOW THEY DID IT--I mean, we have to see the documents".

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(2) The second Freudian slip was in response to a question that made it seem as though Dubya relied mightily on Saudi Prince Bandar for foreign policy advice. Snow replied, "THIS IS NOT A PRESIDENT WHO JUST FELL OFF A TURNIP TRUCK". This is a very odd comment. Did Snow just make it up on the spur of the moment, the way Senator George Allen maintains he just spontaneously thought up the word "macaca"?

I suspect Snow may have used this phrase many times before, but never in front of the "White House Press Corpse" before today.

Is this how Snow, Rove, Bartlett, Card, and other White House handlers talk about Dubya behind his back? The phrase brings to mind the end of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", where one of the pods that take over people while they sleep and turn them into alien zombies falls off a truck, verifying actor Kevin McCarthy's unforgettably wild saga his psychiatrists are finding impossible to believe.

IMO director Don Siegel's 1956 "pod people" are perfect metaphors for Dubya and the millions of "anti-terra" zombie replicants his 9-11 hysteria has spawned. 9-11 provides our leaders with an unquestionable rationale for slow destruction of our Constitutional rights, and for making violence and escalation our country's answer to every one of many manufactured threats.

At the next WH press gaggle, IMO somebody should ask Snow,

"What did you mean Monday when you said, "This is not a President who just fell off a turnup truck">

"Have you seen director Don Siegel's 1956 film, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers?"

"Is this the way you and your friends secretly speak about George W. Bush, as a 'pod person' created by Karl Rove and other 'handlers' to spew zombie-like pre-programmed talking points?"

[DavidDvorkin]

1. Clinton reference

They're trying to paint Clinton as a country bumpkin and show us that Bush is the mature, intelligent adult by contrast.

[WI_DEM]

9. Yeah, but Clinton and Monica were two consenting adults not a 55

year old man and a 16 year old page or ex-page.

[DavidDvorkin]

10. Facts, facts, facts

When did the GOP ever let those get in the way?

[Submariner]

2. Are you okay Georgie?...Yoo Hoo..Yoo Hoo..Georgie

[dogday]

5. That's why all these fundies seem different

OMG They are POD PEOPLE

[ProgressiveEconomist]

11. !!! GREAT photo, spot-on! Thank you!

[FormerDem06]

3. The turnip truck comment is used where I am fromthough not commonly...

It's the same as "I wasn't born yesterday". From a listserve Google Search:

=====================================================
This is now a very common phrase, as a search of Deja News
will show. But Merriam-Webster reports that it has no citations of
the whole phrase earlier than 1988, and no citations of "turnip
truck" earlier than 1985. R. J. Valentine writes: "This phrase
has been used for many years by Johnny Carson, who hosted The
Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on NBC from the early 1960s to
the early 1990s. He used it in precisely in the context discussed.
He may not have originated it, but he certainly popularized it, and
began doing so long before 1985."
=======================================================

[ProgressiveEconomist]

12. Interesting dictionary entry. Hadn't heard it before, but as a cinema buff,

I immediately thought of Don Siegel's 1956 image of a "pod" falling off a truck.

[DrRang]

13. I've heard it for decades as "just fell off the cabbage truck."

[CJCRANE]

4. If not a turnip truck, then what kind of truck did he fall off?

[cry baby]

6. My ears perked up at that point, too.

Couldn't believe he actually said that! I laughed.

[A-Schwarzenegger]

7. The American people deserve to know if their President...

just fell off the turnip truck.

[Justice Is Comin]

8. He fell off a garbage truck.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

14. '9-11 McCarthyism'. Have you heard this phrase before?

For years now, I've been trying to find a phrase that captures succinctly the regime of fearmongering we've all experienced since 9-11-01. Before an odd Tony Snow WH Press Conference remark triggered an image in my mind from one of my favorite films, most of my metaphors for the current regime came from a book: Eric Blair's "1984".

The Department of Homeland Security is the "Ministry of Fear". The reverse-incentive "No Child Left Behind" program brings to mind Orwell's "Ministry of Love". Abrogation of the "Freedom of Information Act" in the name of security opens up a vast "memory hole". And every mention of Osama bin Laden by Dubya seems designed to precipitate a national "Two Minutes Hate".

But "9-11 McCarthyism" puts Dubya's regime in context. We now have the kind of government we would have had in the 1950s had "Tail-Gunner Joe" McCarthy been elevated from the Senate to the White House.

Several reviewers of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" see it as a kind of allegory for McCarthyism. From now on, I will watch that 1956 film as an allegory for Dubya's and Rove's "9-11 McCarthyism", wherein millions of zombie replicants may interpret votes to preserve the Geneva Conventions or habeus corpus as tantamount to treason in Congress.

From http://www.filmnight.org/invasion.htm :

"INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

1956 80 min

Veteran director Don Siegel called it "probably my best film," and continued to express a stubborn pride in it throughout a career that included such great films as Riot in Cell Block 11, Crime in the Streets, Baby Face Nelson, Hell is For Heroes, Madigan, Coogan's Bluff, Two Mules for Sister Sara, the wonderful civil war masterpiece The Beguiled, Dirty Harry, and John Wayne's great last film, The Shootist. (He was also Clint Eastwood's directing mentor and the man Eastwood credits with being his greatest inspiration as a filmmaker.)

The title seems to be so much a part of the time period as well as the pervading paranoia that makes the film what it is ... -- representative of the paranoid creeping McCarthyism that had swept the nation only a few years before. After all, isn't the lead actor named McCarthy?

Perhaps the film works on those levels, but Siegel had something more pervasive and less specifically political in mind when he brought Jack Finney's chilling story to the screen: "I purposely had the prime spokesman for the pods be a pod psychiatrist. He speaks with authority, knowledge. He really believes that being a pod is preferable to being a frail, frightened human who cares. He has a strong case for being a pod. How marvelous it would be if you were a cow and all you had to do is munch a little grass and not worry about life, death and pain. There's a strong case for being a pod. That's why there are so many of them. The pods in my picture and in the world believe they are doing good when they convert people into pods. They get rid of pain, ill health, mental anguish...."