I caught the last twenty minutes of Bush’s press conference last night, and, as usual, found myself wondering why I’ve been stuck in this nightmare for so damn long, and what exactly I’m going to have to do to wake up. You’d think that, with three years of practice, he’d be able to put two sentences together without sounding like a broken Speak & Spell, or suppress that nauseating smirk, or spout something other than nonsequitors when confronted with a question that his paid ventriloquists haven’t fully prepped him for. But no. All he’s learned is the gutter art of ramble and circumlocution; and not even circumlocution, really, because he’s not actually talking around questions, so much as fleeing from them, leaving contrails of feckless babble in his wake. And what’s he fleeing towards? The four or five stock phrases he’s memorized, the ones that his handlers hope will cover every possible permutation of every possible question that’s lobbed his way.
They don’t, of course, so he has to spend a little bit of time making his way over to them. You can see it happening, too, his progress toward that nirvana of the familiar: his face goes into serious frat-boy mode, twitching through various shades of smirk, and he begins to gesture nervously, irrelevantly: the motion I’ve noticed him doing most, recently, is the one where he draws his hands up and touches his chest with the tips of his fingers, and then sort of rolls his shoulders forward and points back at the questioner. Kind of a Me President, you Jane gesture, except it hardly ever seems to bear any relation to what he’s actually saying: “You see, because what all those terrorists [points to self] don’t understand is that we love freedom, not killing and torture [points to questioner]“. And then, after a lot of fumbling, he finally eases himself onto the track of one of the safe lines, and calms down, visibly, and goes on for a good five minutes about resolve, and heart, and his soul, and destiny, and so forth.
Ugh. Truly an execrable performance. All of his hagiographers will say what they’ve been saying all along, it’s the message that’s important, not the medium, and that, yeah, maybe he’s the teensient bit aphasic, but it doesn’t matter because he gets the message across. That’s ridiculous. The President is his bully pulpit, and if he hasn’t mastered the basic facility of speech he’s at a serious disadvantage, not just in his relationship with the people he represents, but with the rest of world. The United States has a big stick, the biggest stick in the world, and so people listen to its leader; it would be nice if the stuff they were listening to rose above the level of babble, or empty, scripted homily.
4 comments ↓
i don’t have a teevee so i couldn’t see the smirk or the gesturing. over the radio he sounded like an absolute idiot with a lag time that sounded like someone was telling him what to say. i found myself listening in utter amazement to the repetition spewing forth. maybe he is simply a puppet who is told what to think, but the smug attitude makes me think he’s pleased about getting away with something.
i loved how the reporters kept busting his balls
Well said. Like you, I never cease to be horrified by the display. I simply cannot believe that this fellow is the leader of the free world - and each time I see him standing there gesticulating wildly as words fail him, I wonder if there are any foreign leaders who aren’t shaking their heads in amazement. But anyway, my favorite part in the whole thing was when a journalist asked george something about if he felt he had made any mistakes since 9/11 (or something along those lines). First, he joked that he wished the guy had sent him the question beforehand so he could have prepared. I started to laugh then realized he was most likely serious - but then there was a long pause as he looked at the podium and shuffled his feet trying to extract some intelligible answer. And what was amazing is that he couldn’t come up with even a non-answer. He actually said something like - “I don’t know”. He amended his comment shortly thereafter and went on some wild tangent that had absolutely nothing to do with the question (as usual) but I was struck by the response. The question wasn’t a fact-finding query, it was a question about his feelings and he said ‘I don’t know’ (maybe ‘I don’t have an answer’). How can you not have an answer to that question? You either do feel that way or you don’t - you could just tell that he was trying to find the answer that would satisfy his political agenda. He just couldn’t do it. My theory is that he spends so much of his time being trained by handlers that he simply cannot form an opinion of his own. And this is one question for which his handlers had not prepared him.
Perhaps his foot shuffling was to move the “ball” back to its prefered location within the confines of the podium cabinet. Who know, maybe it was trying to flee.
I kept finding myself yelling “pull up … pull up” while watching. Somehow thinking that he would hear me and realize that he is coming across as a mindless puppet looking for a new hand up his ass.
Leave a Comment