Anyone who has studied magic tricks will know that a key part of many tricks is the act of deception. An example would be creating a fancy distraction with one hand, while the other does whatever it needs to. The result is that in a flashy show coins, cards and handkerchiefs galore appear and disappear as if by magic, while all the time the viewer was blind to the slight of hands going on behind the scenes.

As far as I can tell George W. Bush has spent the last three and a half years pulling off slight of hand trick after trick, while all the time the greater part of the country has been mesmerized by the magic show he keeps telling us is going on. Here are some examples:

Well now it appears that perhaps a few people watching the magic show have finally noticed its not magic at all. Of course a good number have been been screaming from the back of the hall "its a trick, its a trick!" for years. However their feeble shouts have consistently been drowned out by the amplified applause machines of organized media deception.

The first awakening award goes to Howard Stern who I mentioned last month in Indecency used as a smoke screen to silence shock-jocks new anti-Bush stance. Since being canned by Clear Channel Stern has gone on to take every opportunity to point out that the next President elected in November should be anybody but Bush again. Now Culture War May Find WMD tells us the full story and how Clear Channel is engaged in Bush's magic tricks, firing Stern for indecency and hiring Michael Savage, whom MSNBC fired for calling a viewer a "sodomite" and telling him to "get AIDS and die?".

I can only hope that this is just the first of many more awakenings in the mesmerized Bush audience, and hopefully they will all have a voice at least as loud and well focused as Stern's.