...here in Hollywood, we expect the spin, the question dodging, the shamelessly untruthful statements ("Though divorcing, my client and her ex-husband remain best of friends," "My client checked into the hospital due to exhaustion"). Hollywood, after all, is the land of fantasy, the world's dream factory, the place where fame-seeking civilians like Brad Pitt and thousands before him have moved with the dream of reinventing themselves (with the help of image handlers, of course) as the Sexiest Perfect People Alive.

Somewhere along this narcissistic path, however, Hollywood celebrity and its PR trickery have become the nation's single most powerful tool of consumer, and now, political persuasion. More than ever, the marketing tools of the Celebrity Industrial Complex are being used to sell shampoo, cars, tampons and now -- as evidenced most profoundly during the past few months of crisis in the White House -- political goals.

When the CIA-leak scandal kitchen got too hot for Karl ("The Architect") Rove, he did what any self-respecting publicist would have his celebrity client do when, like, say, the shoplifting Winona Ryder, the client is all but guilty as charged: disappear. Likewise, when it became clear that the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina was woefully pathetic and ineffectual and thus embarrassing to the White House, Bush did what any image-aware celebrity does during a wave of bad press: the Mother Teresa photo-op. In Bush's case, that meant bringing a media pool the size of the Gulf of Mexico to capture staged images of him pressing the flesh with victims in his blue jeans and everyman button-down shirt. Makes one wonder if the White House now has a wardrobe department.

A movie studio publicist insisting that its latest flop is an Oscar contender is marketing. But the president -- reading from a meticulously crafted script -- maintaining with paternalistic glare and a pointing finger that thousands of Americans dying in the war in Iraq is somehow vital to our national security reeks of propaganda. In Hollywood, a certain level of such drivel is palatable; in Washington, it's nauseating.