by James Glaser
March 2, 2005

George Bush goes to Europe and we watch on the news and it looks like any other Presidential trip, but it isn't. Bush's trips are big and they cost you and I millions, because George goes in style.

About the only reason we don't know this is because the American media doesn't inform us. America's media tells us all about President Bush's trip to Europe, but they neglect a few facts of interest. Like when George goes, he brings his own armor plated limousine. I guess we can't get armor for all the troops in Iraq, but George has his own.

When President Bush drives anywhere in this limo, he has a convoy with 19 American vehicles in the procession. According to Canadian correspondent Don Murry, Bush has a team of 200 Secret service agents, 15 sniffer dogs, and a Blackhawk helicopter flying overhead. I guess George even brings 5 cooks along and 50 White House aides.

According to the European press, whole cities are emptied so that the President of the United States can drive through towns with no protests and no traffic.

Tom Engelhardt writes for Antiwar.com and says this about a Bush trip.

"American presidential trips abroad increasingly remind me of the vast, completely ritualized dynastic processionals by which ancient emperors and potentates once crossed their domains and those of their satraps. Our president's processionals are enormous moving bubbles (even when he visits alien places closer to home like the Big Apple) that shut cities, close down institutions, turn off life itself. Essentially, when the president moves abroad, like some vast turtle, he carries his shell with him."

In the last election, I doubt if George Bush ever had an audience on the campaign trail that wasn't vetted for him. Many events required those attending to sign a form stating that they were for George Bush. Now, when he is in Europe, he won't talk to any groups, because he doesn't have control of who will ask questions.

When George Bush came to Minnesota last fall, they shut down downtown Saint Paul and sent the workers home, so that George could have a quiet, people free town to visit. Yes I know that sounds crazy and it is, but that is what happens when the President of the United States comes to town now and the rest of world gets that reported to them by their media, where here at home, they never mention that Bush events are staged events,

We read that President Bush pays journalists (with tax money) to write and give talks about things he wants to push. In the last few weeks we have seen that right wing Republicans have been let into the White House Press Corps, so that they can ask "soft ball" questions of the President. Everything Bush does is controlled, but our media lets that slide. When George gives a talk on Social Security, the American media reports it like it was a real talk, to real Americans, but it isn't. Bush is talking to "his people," people who have been screened to clap and cheer at that right times.

The media in Canada and the rest of the world report the truth about what goes on in Bush's talks. They show what it is like to have an American President come to your country and they tell how it takes tens of thousands of police and the military to make things safe enough so that the President of the United States can travel.

It wasn't always like this for American Presidents, but George Bush is different. The man has an ego as big as a house and he acts like a little Napoleon. The world watches our President and wonders what happened to American democracy.