The political genius of George W. Bush

"Tighter media control"?

President Woodrow Wilson's wife managed to conceal the extent of her husband's disability... and the vast majority of Americans had no idea of the extent of FDR's disability and illnesses...

Nah, political manipulation of the
media is nothing new...

I can't speak to that with any authority. I have some understanding of the rise of Madison Ave techniques under Eisenhower and Nixon, but little knowledge of Kennedy's PR team and what they did and how it differed from earlier administrations.

But it is your second paragraph that points to how unique the Bush administration has been in protecting itself from its leader's mouth/mind. And that began even while he was running for the nomination when his handlers kept a very tight leash on him, and kept reporters' questions away.

I didn't think that was control - I thought that was manners?

They did not comment on the extent of Roosevelt's paralysis, presidential affairs - a whole raft of stuff that is now thought (very wrongly, I believe) to be pig swill for the masses.

One man's "Morality" is another man's "pig swill".

Frankly, I think America has been swindled into buying a heaping troughful.

Nor was genocide anything new in the world when 1935 rolled around. Wilson's wheelchair and the present situation or not equal.

I must say, whenever I read the title of this thread in que, I have to laugh.

One man's distortion is another's dogma... and a third man's punchline...

my life is humorless and pathhetic. Therefore I laff easily