[Another interesting site is BAGnewsNotes and well worth checking out. The Ed.]

BAGnewsNotes offers a daily analysis of news images from a progressive point of view. The BAG calls out media bias, breaks down right wing visual propaganda, and helps turn its readers into sharper “visual consumers.”  The photos are always carefully chosen, and the analysis brings new understanding to media politics and political psychology.

As the end approaches, “W” is regressing more-and-more into a familiar cocoon, seeking out the military — both masses of young conscripts paid to pay respect, as well as those either dumbstruck or simply struck — for hearty cheer and farewell.

The pictures from Tuesday’s jaunt to West Point are startlingly, if unsurprisingly revealing when you separate the non-posed, non-thoroughly staged photo-ops (1, 2) from those in which the former Yale cheerleader enters the picture (more the source of freakish attraction himself, really) and, acting more their age (and sticking closest to the females), commands some cheap giggles.

Yet, far more grotesque (and stolen, in fact), is Dubya’s embrace of the severely injured Iraq war veteran. (If you follow “The BAG,” you’d remember this.)

Highlighting the self-appointed comforter-in-Chief‘s propensity for the kiss, the man famous for never reflecting and never looking back perpetrates this bitter act of false intimacy on two discernibly-transformed, all-too-young Iraq veterans at the White House just after helicoptering in from the Military Academy.

It was always my feeling this mission would end in disgrace, but now I see I’m wrong. Exceeding that, George Bush is fully landing in perversity.

(images: Larry Downing/Reuters. caption: U.S. President George W. Bush (C) visits with two U.S. Marines wounded during a suicide bomber attack in Iraq after arriving back at the White House in Washington, December 9, 2008. From left are Patrick Paul Pittman Sr., his son, Lance Corporal Patrick Paul Pittman, Jr. of Savannah, Georgia, Bush, Lance Corporal Marc Olson of Coal City, Illinois, and his mother, Pinky Kloski.)

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