Bush, Parade-less? Send in the Clowns!
I've agreeably shilled for Dan Froomkin here before (one in a company of a half-dozen or so). The work he does in wading through wads of MSM stuff (and, mercifully for him and us, on-line material that tends to be less fettered to the established thinking in DC and thus more interesting and in general more rewarding), is estimable. And then he crafts full, coherent sentences about it and offers cogent opinion! By damn this is almost like having an inside track with a Journalist! By Jove he's got it!
Relax, I will not be breaking into any "rain in Spain" here.
But this end-of-the-year offering seems well worth sharing. Admittedly most of the content is made up of prior Froom-posts. I suspect there is more than one column here that I may have stuck your nose in already - hopefully with your eventual approval. But it is all very timely and clearly in the tradition of the year-end wrap-ups we will be inundated with for the next 10+ days. This is one of the ones you actually need to attend to and pass on. To me the intro material is some of the most potent and laudable stuff DF has published in this venue.
Froomkin called it Bush Loses His Parade, I tagged it "Shoots, Hides, and Leaves: the Sequel" when I circulated it at work (shhh).
The year 2006 started with President Bush firmly in denial about how terribly wrong his war in Iraq has gone. It ends that way, too.
But in between, something changed: Bush lost his parade.
Somehow, Bush had managed up until this year to lull voters -- and seduce journalists -- into complicity with a worldview that was simply not based in reality.
There's been plenty of evidence for years now that Bush was living in a self-imposed bubble of non-reality, particularly when it came to the situation in Iraq.
But it wasn't until Bob Woodward's book "State of Denial," came out in September that it was definitively established, to the full satisfaction of Washington's cocktail-party circles, that the president is not to be taken seriously on Iraq.
It wasn't until November, when the voters resoundingly threw Bush's congressional enablers from power, that it became undeniably clear that Americans reject Bush's leadership.
And Bush's response to this month's report from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group is making it manifestly obvious that, for all the White House's attempts to give the impression that Bush listens to people who disagree with him, he does not.
He appears to still listen pretty much only to two people -- Vice President Cheney and political guru Karl Rove -- even though both were proven catastrophically wrong in 2006.
The Iraq debacle, after all, is Cheney's doing almost more than it is Bush's. It was Cheney who whispered into Bush's ear that it would all work out just fine. Apparently, that continues.
And it is Rove who is responsible for Bush's aversion to finding common ground with his political enemies. That also appears to continue, even though this year's election proved quite conclusively that the politics of division have a limit.
These days, when Bush turns around to see who's marching behind him, he sees Cheney and Rove -- and increasingly few others.
A Look Back at 2006
Here's a look back at the year that was, through a sampling of White House Briefing columns:
* Feb. 3: It's the Credibility, Stupid
President Bush's fundamental challenge as he tries to regain his political footing is that most Americans don't trust him anymore.
* Feb. 8: The Captive President
President Bush almost never hears criticism to his face. Certainly not in public.
But yesterday, at the widely-watched funeral of civil rights icon Coretta Scott King, a fidgety president had no choice but to sit quietly and listen as several speakers reproached him for not having learned the lessons that King and her martyred husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., spent their lives teaching.
* Feb. 13: Shoots, Hides and Leaves
The vice president of the United States shoots someone in a hunting accident and rather than immediately come clean to the public, his office keeps it a secret for almost a whole day. Even then, it's only to confirm a report in a local paper.
And still from the White House, no details, no apologies, and no Cheney.
No one is suggesting that Cheney shot his hunting buddy on purpose. But could he have been negligent? What does he say happened exactly? What do the others there -- not just their hostess -- say took place? Shouldn't there be some sort of investigation? Does Cheney take any responsibility?
And just when was he planning on letting the press know?
-clip-
* May 1: All Kidding Aside
President Bush on Saturday night had the audience at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner in stitches. With doppelganger comedian Steve Bridges alongside -- playing his inner self -- Bush poked gentle fun of his own mangling of the English language, his belligerence and his feelings about the media.
Then Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert ripped those stitches out.
Colbert was merciless, reserving his most potent zingers for the people in spitting distance: The president who took the nation to war on false pretenses and the press corps that let him do it.
-clip-
* Oct. 27: Most Ridiculous Moment?
It may go down as one of the most ridiculous -- and ridiculed -- utterances of the Bush presidency.
In an interview with ABC News broadcast on Sunday, President Bush gamely suggested that "we've never been 'stay the course'" when it comes to Iraq.
With mid-term elections just around the bend -- and with public opinion starkly and unhappily focused on Iraq -- it's understandable that Bush might want to rewrite history. But his attempt failed miserably.
-clip-
As the Year Ends
Michael Abramowitz writes in this morning's paper: "Yesterday, in an interview with The Washington Post, while acknowledging that the United States is not winning in Iraq, Bush bluntly dismissed the suggestion that the midterm elections meant voters want to bring the mission in that country to closure. He said he interpreted the election results 'as people not satisfied with the progress' in Iraq."
In other words, he can't hear what the voters were really saying.
-clip-
Relax, I will not be breaking into any "rain in Spain" here.
But this end-of-the-year offering seems well worth sharing. Admittedly most of the content is made up of prior Froom-posts. I suspect there is more than one column here that I may have stuck your nose in already - hopefully with your eventual approval. But it is all very timely and clearly in the tradition of the year-end wrap-ups we will be inundated with for the next 10+ days. This is one of the ones you actually need to attend to and pass on. To me the intro material is some of the most potent and laudable stuff DF has published in this venue.
Froomkin called it Bush Loses His Parade, I tagged it "Shoots, Hides, and Leaves: the Sequel" when I circulated it at work (shhh).
The year 2006 started with President Bush firmly in denial about how terribly wrong his war in Iraq has gone. It ends that way, too.
But in between, something changed: Bush lost his parade.
Somehow, Bush had managed up until this year to lull voters -- and seduce journalists -- into complicity with a worldview that was simply not based in reality.
There's been plenty of evidence for years now that Bush was living in a self-imposed bubble of non-reality, particularly when it came to the situation in Iraq.
But it wasn't until Bob Woodward's book "State of Denial," came out in September that it was definitively established, to the full satisfaction of Washington's cocktail-party circles, that the president is not to be taken seriously on Iraq.
It wasn't until November, when the voters resoundingly threw Bush's congressional enablers from power, that it became undeniably clear that Americans reject Bush's leadership.
And Bush's response to this month's report from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group is making it manifestly obvious that, for all the White House's attempts to give the impression that Bush listens to people who disagree with him, he does not.
He appears to still listen pretty much only to two people -- Vice President Cheney and political guru Karl Rove -- even though both were proven catastrophically wrong in 2006.
The Iraq debacle, after all, is Cheney's doing almost more than it is Bush's. It was Cheney who whispered into Bush's ear that it would all work out just fine. Apparently, that continues.
And it is Rove who is responsible for Bush's aversion to finding common ground with his political enemies. That also appears to continue, even though this year's election proved quite conclusively that the politics of division have a limit.
These days, when Bush turns around to see who's marching behind him, he sees Cheney and Rove -- and increasingly few others.
A Look Back at 2006
Here's a look back at the year that was, through a sampling of White House Briefing columns:
* Feb. 3: It's the Credibility, Stupid
President Bush's fundamental challenge as he tries to regain his political footing is that most Americans don't trust him anymore.
* Feb. 8: The Captive President
President Bush almost never hears criticism to his face. Certainly not in public.
But yesterday, at the widely-watched funeral of civil rights icon Coretta Scott King, a fidgety president had no choice but to sit quietly and listen as several speakers reproached him for not having learned the lessons that King and her martyred husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., spent their lives teaching.
* Feb. 13: Shoots, Hides and Leaves
The vice president of the United States shoots someone in a hunting accident and rather than immediately come clean to the public, his office keeps it a secret for almost a whole day. Even then, it's only to confirm a report in a local paper.
And still from the White House, no details, no apologies, and no Cheney.
No one is suggesting that Cheney shot his hunting buddy on purpose. But could he have been negligent? What does he say happened exactly? What do the others there -- not just their hostess -- say took place? Shouldn't there be some sort of investigation? Does Cheney take any responsibility?
And just when was he planning on letting the press know?
-clip-
* May 1: All Kidding Aside
President Bush on Saturday night had the audience at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner in stitches. With doppelganger comedian Steve Bridges alongside -- playing his inner self -- Bush poked gentle fun of his own mangling of the English language, his belligerence and his feelings about the media.
Then Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert ripped those stitches out.
Colbert was merciless, reserving his most potent zingers for the people in spitting distance: The president who took the nation to war on false pretenses and the press corps that let him do it.
-clip-
* Oct. 27: Most Ridiculous Moment?
It may go down as one of the most ridiculous -- and ridiculed -- utterances of the Bush presidency.
In an interview with ABC News broadcast on Sunday, President Bush gamely suggested that "we've never been 'stay the course'" when it comes to Iraq.
With mid-term elections just around the bend -- and with public opinion starkly and unhappily focused on Iraq -- it's understandable that Bush might want to rewrite history. But his attempt failed miserably.
-clip-
As the Year Ends
Michael Abramowitz writes in this morning's paper: "Yesterday, in an interview with The Washington Post, while acknowledging that the United States is not winning in Iraq, Bush bluntly dismissed the suggestion that the midterm elections meant voters want to bring the mission in that country to closure. He said he interpreted the election results 'as people not satisfied with the progress' in Iraq."
In other words, he can't hear what the voters were really saying.
-clip-
posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:08 PM
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