The Thanksgiving Press Massacre of 2003.

It was a media event without precedent?an elaborately staged production in which a small group of journalists was literally kidnapped, flown into a war zone, stuffed headfirst into the ass of a Thanksgiving turkey and then made to flap its arms for the amusement of all humanity when the commander-in-chief blew into a kazoo. A more dramatic example of Stockholm Syndrome has probably never been shown on television.

There are going to be a lot of Bush-haters out there who will be tempted to evince disgust at the "shock and awe" Thanksgiving trip for the obvious reasons: the stage-managed sentimentality, the humiliating spectacle of our commander-in-chief whizzing in and out of Baghdad under cover of darkness like a campus flasher, the billionaire president's simultaneously hilarious and sickening appropriation of poor-person language in asking for a "warm meal somewhere."

This is wrong. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that this stunt was certainly the closest thing to physical courage that George Bush has ever publicly demonstrated. Not that it isn't tempting to make light of some of the "hazards" he faced ("The president encountered and witnessed traffic for the first time in three years," White House communications director Dan Bartlett told reporters), but there's no denying that the trip was a serious logistical achievement and not without real risks. Even if he were only following the orders of his pollster, Bush should at least be given credit for not shitting his pants in the line of duty.

It's Bush's job, after all, to lead us into disastrous foreign-policy adventures and then try to sugarcoat them with mawkish, grandstanding publicity stunts. No one should be upset with the president for doing his job. What we should be upset about is the national press corps behaving like p.r. agents, which is what happened last week.

Rather than tune out and tell the president to pay for his campaign ads like all the other candidates, the entire American media rolled over and covered the stunt at face value, even after the administration made it clear that the only journalists they would invite along would be the ones who could be counted on to portray Bush as a cross between Christ and Douglas MacArthur.

Take Terrence Hunt of the Associated Press, one of the 13 journalists selected for this courageous exercise in editorial independence. When finally called upon to file his surprise-guest story, Hunt, perhaps moved by his Mesopotamian surroundings, described Bush in mythical tones:

At that moment, President Bush strode forth from the wings in an Army track suit emblazoned with a First Armored Division patch. The bored crowd shot from their seats and whooped. As he surveyed the crowd, a tear dripped down the president's cheek?

It may very well be that in the age of Plutarch, kings not only wept over conquered horizons, but were said to "stride forth from the wings." From reading Hunt, you'd never know that the vocabulary of executive entrance has advanced in a less hysterical direction since then. But such literary trumpet calls were about par for the course for the major dailies, which followed a peculiar pattern in their coverage: First gushingly swallow Bush's p.r. stunt whole on the front page, then later freak out about what they'd done in pusillanimous, self-hating analysis pieces somewhere deep in the bowels of their news sections.

The New York Times was a great example. America's paper of record was one of dozens of publications around the country to run Hunt's piece on its front page, and for the Times this in itself was already a kind of gross public surrender to the White House. After all, the reason they'd had to resort to leading with a shoddy wire-service report was that its own correspondents, like CNN's, had been conspicuously disinvited to the Air Force One adventure.

That this was in retaliation for unfriendly Iraq coverage was obvious. The White House has been quite open about its use of tactics like these for some time now. Citing concerns about the "filter" through which the ostensibly cheerful news from Iraq was reaching ordinary Americans, Bush last month bypassed the major networks to give a series of eight-minute interviews to local television stations. CBS called it the "public relations equivalent of a declaration of war."

Similarly, Bush last spring passed over Washington Post reporters Mike Allen and Dana Milbank at the notorious pre-war press conference, apparently in retaliation for a Post Iraq story entitled "Taking Liberties With the Truth." And Houston Chronicle White House reporter Bennett Roth was frozen out for months after asking an untoward question about Bush's daughter.

So how did the mighty Times react to being forced to take its turn at being publicly slapped in the face with the proverbial presidential rubber chicken? Well, first it dutifully followed the New York tabloids in splashing Bush's Julia-Child-holding-the-turkey pool photo on the front page. Then it ran Hunt's piece underneath, below the loving headline, "Surprise Guest Makes it Worth the Wait."

Then, inside, at the very end of a spineless analysis piece, it had its own Washington bureau chief, Phillip Taubman, whisper the faintest of third-person protests to reporters Jacques Steinberg and Jim Rutenberg:

Mr. Taubman said he respected pool protocol but questioned why the press corps traveling on Air Force One could not have been enlarged somewhat, given the gravity of a visit by the president to Iraq on Thanksgiving.

This, folks, is how the press fights back in America. If the Times had any balls at all, it would have answered Bush in kind?either by ignoring his nauseating trip entirely, or, even better, by burying his turkey picture under a page-19 feature about Belgian anti-fur activists. Instead, it invited its readers to sit in on the pathetic spectacle of its editors and reporters timidly complaining to one another about having been left out of the fun.

The Washington Post also complained, even though it had been included on the trip. Mike Abramowitz, the paper's national editor, ventured to the Times that the abduction of its reporter Mike Allen to a foreign country, and the confiscation of his cellphone, had perhaps in some mysterious way disrupted the editor-journalist relationship. "I don't feel entirely comfortable with that," Abramowitz said. "I prefer to know what our White House reporter is doing." Meanwhile, the Post dutifully ran the Julia Child photo and all the rest of it on the front page.

Outside of America, the response to Bush's stunt was universally savage and unrelenting, with the London-based Independent leading the way (front page headline: "The Turkey Has Landed"). Many papers chose a Caesar theme to lampoon Bush: The headline in the Lebanese An-Nahar paper hissed, "I came, I saw nothing, but I will conquer." Other papers were less flippant in their condemnation: The Barcelona daily Vanguardia prosaically commented that "George W Bush does not attend the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq, but has dinner in Baghdad with those who dream of coming home alive."

Only in the States did reporters swallow the whole thing without irony. Even when Bush pissed in their professional faces, America's intrepid journalists did not blink, instead seeming glad for the attention. Here is how Newsday described one particularly delicious scene:

Soon they touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., taxied into a hangar where another Air Force One jet was waiting, and climbed out into the white and noisy, brightly lit space. [White House reporter Mike] Allen looked up and saw Bush at the top of the plane's stairs? He paused, and holding his thumb and pinkie apart at his ear in the symbol for the cell phone, he mouthed, "No calls, got it?

In case they did not, the president, with good humor, made the "cut" sign across his throat.

I'm not sure a real journalist would have found too much "good humor" in that scene. Then again, how could a real journalist have gotten on that plane?