Somebody has to: how else to explain his recent run of assignments? Today Todd is forced into ignoble service as A1's fluffer to Laura Bush ("A More Relaxed Laura Bush Shows Complexity Under Calm"). (Teaching the valuable lesson that we must never think the Times has reached bottom in its effort to curry favor with our Republican masters—taxing as it is to imagine something more debased than today's installment.) The lead offers us the War First Lady in historical context:

She sits on a red damask settee in the White House Map Room, where Franklin D. Roosevelt plotted the Allied victory in World War II, stroking Miss Beazley, her new Scottie puppy, a tiny feminine form of Roosevelt's beloved Fala. Her gray pinstriped pantsuit is soft and perfectly put together, and so is she.

But, either the strain imposed by the historical elevation proves too great, or Todd may be deliberately parodying his assignment. It's possible that, even if A1 proves incapable of embarrassment, Todd Purdum has found his own personal level of shame. (And, based on his track record, it's a dire sign indeed when you've sounded Todd Purdum's level of shame.) Consider the not-so-implicit protest—a passage hinting, astonishingly, almost at political rebuke—registered in Purdum's third and fourth grafs:

The book on her night table these days? The "really, really wonderful" "Essays of E. B. White," that gentle liberal who wrote at the height of Eisenhower era conformity that "democracy, if I understand it at all, is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home."

Her favorite topic of campaign conversation with her mother-in-law last year? "We loved to complain about various media." Institutions or individuals? "All."

That "all" has kind of a chilling ring, doesn't it? (Especially when you consider Waura's profoundly scary interlocutor.) Given the cowardice that reigns in the Times' Washington bureau, Purdum here might as well be running down Pennsylvania avenue waving the hammer and sickle. You almost wonder how his editors allowed it. (Oh my God: have I found the Times' dreaded liberal bias at long last?)

For the rest, it's a sad enough spectacle, and one has the sense of wanting to draw the curtain for Todd out of sympathy. Let's just cite a representative graf:

In a 45-minute interview with reporters in Washington the other day, [Mrs. Bush said] that she hates it when people suggest that her husband "doesn't like to read or, you know, whatever." She said the 41st president of the United States "is the sweetest man you've ever known" and a "wonderful grandfather to the girls," while his wife is a "terrific mother-in-law" but "more intimidating, maybe"

where the chopped-up quotes suggest nothing so much as the writerly equivalent of someone carrying a particularly redolent diaper at arm's length. So possibly any protest here is simply a courtier's pique: no doubt Todd feels the Ladies-of-Bush-II beat (first Condi, now Waura) as an affront to his dignity. Somebody should tell him that dignity is too expensive a commodity for A1 these days.

posted by michael  2:11:31 PM  
tell me about it []