 = 
Neither John Kerry nor MoveOn.org could have bought a better anti-Bush ad than the "president's" televised live performance tonight. Not for millions of dollars.
What in the hell was the Bush regime thinking when it decided to put "President" Monkeyboy on live television for an hour during the lowest point of his presidency thus far? His public delivery is dismal even when things are going his blissfully ignorant way. Under stress, he's really a public-speaking disaster. They should have kept him on vacation at the ranch; no nationally televised live appearance is better than a shockingly bad (even for Bush) nationally televised live appearance.
I know that Bush's diehard supporters would think that he gave a good performance tonight if he'd had an episode of Tourette's and spouted off dirty limericks during his little "Iraq...blah blah blah...freedom...blah blah blah...democracy...blah blah blah...terrorists...blah blah blah...stay the course...blah blah blah..." speech.
But after the spike in the number of unnecessary deaths and the utter chaos in Iraq during the past few weeks and the 9/11 commission's hearings that have been steadily eroding the Bush regime's 9/11 protective layer, Bush didn't need to reach out to his core supporters, who are so far gone that they'd still support him no matter what; he needed to reach out to those in the middle, those undecideds who comprise only single digits in the nationwide polls and who will determine the November election, if the Republicans don't perpetrate another presidential election fraud.
So how did he do tonight?
Bush could barely eke out a coherent sentence. He spoke in generalities and platitudes and I lost count of his grammatical errors. (He seems to have an especially hard time when it comes to subject-verb agreement; the third sentence out of Bush's mouth tonight was: "This has been tough weeks in that country." [He was speaking of Iraq, of course.])
Bush refused to straightforwardly answer reporters' simple questions, most notably the simple question of why he and Vice President Dick Cheney won't appear before the 9/11 commission separately, but insist on appearing together. (Because the commission wants to speak to both of them was his repeated non-response.)
Bush employed a tactic that his mouthpieces have used and that his puppetmasters have had him use over and over again: When asked an unpleasant, potentially politically damaging question, frame the response in such a way as to recast the question. (It's a lame attempt at a Jedi mindfuck. These people really think that we're all stupid.)
When a reporter asked Bush tonight what he thought about the belief of some that the "coalition of the willing" isn't a true coalition but is "window dressing," Bush dodged the question by responding that the smaller nations' contributions shouldn't be denigrated. No one was denigrating the smaller nations' contributions; the question was whether or not the Bush regime had exaggerated its international support for its invasion and occupation of Iraq. Of course it had, or Bush would not have recast the question in his non-response.
Similarly, several times in the past the Bush regime has tried to twist criticisms of its bungling of its Iraq venture into attacks on the troops. Bush employed this tactic again tonight, when he was asked what he thinks about the comparison of the quagmire in Iraq to the quagmire in Vietnam. "I think that analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops and sends the wrong message to the enemy," he said, strongly -- and wrongly -- suggesting, of course, that to criticize his regime's handling of its Iraq venture is to harm "our troops" and to help "the enemy."
But such shit that has worked for Bush and the members of his regime for three years now appears not to be working anymore, or at least not working as well as it used to -- and they don't appear to have a Plan B, as evidenced by the fact that they keep parroting the same old tired 9/11-terrorism-Iraq-war-freedom-democracy script. (Much like the "the-economy-is-improving" script we've heard for the past three years without actually seeing any significant improvements in the economy.)
9/11 is no longer a sacred cow. It's now safe to ask questions about the Bush regime's handling of 9/11, pre- and post-, and to ask about those elusive weapons of mass destruction in Iraq without fear of being branded a traitor. And as tonight demonstrated, the mainstream media's reporters' testicles finally seem to have descended. When Bush was evasive, which was frequently, at least two or three reporters repeated or rephrased their questions, so that when Bush still evaded the questions it was clear that he understood them.
Probably Bush's worst moment tonight was when a reporter asked him to name one mistake he has made as president. Bush said he couldn't think of one, telling the reporter, "You just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one." (He's just the "president" of the United States; don't put him on the spot, now, by asking him any simple questions at a press conference!) Whether Bush truly believes that he has made mistakes but couldn't think of one (as he claimed), whether he actually believes that he has made no mistakes, or whether he knows that he has made mistakes but refuses to admit it, he looked bad tonight all the same. He is an embarrassment to the office of president of the United States of America.
Even if you correct for the fact that I (like millions of other Americans and millions of others worldwide) despise him, Bush's performance tonight, which was somehow supposed to help him, has only dug him in deeper. Bush appears to be imploding almost as quickly as did Howard Dean. (In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that Bush's performance tonight will prove to be as fatally pivotal in his "re"-election campaign as Dean's "scream" in Iowa was fatally pivotal in his fight for the Democratic presidential nomination.)
It will be interesting to watch Bush's poll numbers drop over the next few days.
And come January, it will be nice to have a president who can speak an intelligent, coherent sentence and who restores dignity to the presidency.
It will be nice to no longer have to be embarrassed to be an American.
9:38:54 PM 
|
