tmpphpyxmnw9.jpgI have written before about the strange connection between the fortunes of President Bush and troubled former pop star Britney Spears.

To wit:

Britney announced that she was ditching husband Kevin Federline the same day that Rummy left the Pentagon and for a short period of time fans of Britney and Bush all did the happy dance.

“Boy howdy, I’m glad that’s over!” they chorused, “Now we can get back to the way things used to be and party like it’s 2003!”

And doubtless they all cringed in unison as their hopes of spreads in “W” magazine, number-one singles, and a Glorious Victory in Iraq turned to ashes. Because K-Fed wasn’t the problem, any more than Rums-Fe’d was, as the ensuing months of increasingly erratic and frightening behavior of both pop star and president have shown.

Britney and the Bush Administration seem to be continuing their tandem downward spirals, what with Bush's parade of embarrassing gaffes at the APEC summit, clearly not knowing where he was or what he was doing there, calling it the "OPEC" summit and nearly starting a war with South Korea. Then we got to the Petraeus/Crocker product roll-out today and not only was the hearing derailed by the failure of Petraeus's backing track (No lip-synching for you, General!), but Petraeus's lukewarm stew of cooked data and vague fist-wavings at Iran was probably as much of a disappointment to the one third of America and the world who still support the war as Britney's spectacular failure to deliver at the VMA's last night was to her fans.

Both performances had a listless, cobbled together at the last minute feel. Britney Spears wandered around on stage like she was lost in the frozen foods aisle at the Piggly Wiggly, seemingly completely detached from her surroundings and bewildered at finding herself on stage before a TeeVee audience of millions, just as General Petraeus today seemed at a loss to discern why his oh-so-predictable blather wasn't being greeted with spontaneous standing ovations and thunderous rounds of applause.

Both exhibitions of aggressive mediocrity will fool the people they were intended to fool, but increasingly both BushCo and Britney, Inc. seem to be finding it harder and harder to recapture those heady days of 2003 and 2004 when they could do no wrong and the world adored them. Already this morning, the pro-surge spinners were trying to dampen expectations:

But as Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution put it in an e-mail message before the testimony began, "I actually think that this week, while clearly very important, will nonetheless be anticlimactic in many ways."

What O'Hanlon meant was that the Petraeus-Crocker testimony is not likely to lead to the kind of significant Republican defections that would produce legislation setting a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. forces. "In all likelihood, Congress will remain disaffected with the war, yet continue to fund it more or less as the president requests."

Sadly, I think this may be the one thing that Michael O'Hanlon will ever be right about in his entire life. What we saw on TV today was the faltering last gasp effort of President Train-wreck and his minions to prove to the world that they've Still Got It, that all it takes is a few kajillion dollars and some minor cosmetic tweaking and they're the same lean, mean media-storming machine that "won" the elections of 2000 and 2004.

The real problem here of course is that neither the Perfect Britney nor President Mission Accomplished were ever all that good to begin with. I keep hearing people talking about whether or not Britney's new songs are any good and how none of them have that certain something that her hits of previous years had, but trust me, gang, that certain something that's missing is the drooling, frantic tidal wave of hype erected around her by squadrons of wealthy industry men. The songs were never good. It was all marketing.

Same thing with Teh Preznint. He has always been exactly what he is. Go back and watch the clips. He is the same fatuous, addle-headed moron that he was on his first day at Yale.

Both of these specimens of jumped-up trailer-trash are creatures whose fortunes were made entirely by PR. Marketing is all that BushCo knows how to do effectively, same with the team of industry professionals who used to handle Britney.

Thing is, you can't run a musical career of any longevity on just PR. Somewhere in there you actually have to sing or dance or play something, not just mime around to your hits while wearing a python. Similarly, running a nation (let alone prosecuting a war) on nothing but PR is about as likely to succeed as raising a child entirely on Crackerjacks and Jell-O pudding cups.

Ergo, the mess we are in today. PR is not policy any more than lip-synching is singing.

I wish the goddamn Beltway Bobbleheads could figure that out. It might save us from a whole lot of catastrophic failures and lives lost in the years ahead.