It's hard to believe that someone this incompetent is.. er.. "leading" our country.
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I was listening to the Randi Rhodes show Friday (webcast from
http://www.airamericaradio.com) when I was galvanized by a short audio clip she played of Bush at a meeting of journalists, where the audience actually broke out in laughter at his inability to formulate an intelligent answer to a simple policy question.
You may have heard of this public appearance (at the Unity conference) since then, because Bush made several statements there that have found their way into the news.
I was eager to get hold of this clip and pass it on to you, because it presented such a perfect portrait of Bush's intellectual inadequacy. I couldn't find it at first (although I later located it at Indianz.com:
http://64.62.196.98/docs/bushsovereignty080604.mp3 ),
but I was able to find the full hour and ten minutes of video on C-SPAN.org
(requires RealPlayer). I also found the official transcript at
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases ... 806-1.html
(Note: C-SPAN only leaves video online for a few days, so check it out ASAP! And if you know any way to capture and save RealVideo streams for later playback, it would be great to have this archived for future reference.)
A curious thing became evident as I compared the unedited video to the news coverage of the event. Although Bush's performance was at best banal and at worst cringe-inducingly inept, most of the news stories reporting on it gave the impression that Bush had delivered coherent, intelligent statements on a variety of topics.
I was particularly surprised when I read that Seattle's Mark Trahant, the journalist who asked the question that functioned as set-up to
Bush's gag, had this to say about it:
So I had no choice but to write this letter to the Op-Ed page of which Trahant is editor:
I don't know how many people have seen Bush's appearance at Unity, the Journalists of Color convention. I've watched it on C-SPAN.org,
and listened at Indianz.com. I know that the P-I's Mark Trahant had a ringside seat, because, as a panelist, he asked Bush about Native American tribal sovereignty. So it's surprising to read Trahant's account (Sunday, Aug. :cool:, which gives the false impression that Bush competently fielded his question.
Trahant asked, "What do you think tribal sovereignty means in the 21st century, and how do we resolve conflicts between tribes and the
federal and state governments?" Bush's response, with his telling hesitations and stammering left intact, was:
"Yeah. Uh, tribal sovereignty means that. It's sovereign. It's, you're, you're a, you're a--you've been given sovereignty, and you're...viewed as a s-s-sovereign entity. (Audience laughter.) And, therefore, the relationship between the federal government
and...tribes is one between s...s-s-sovereign entities."
Trahant relays that as: "When conflicts arise, he said they should be worked out sovereign to sovereign." That's one heck of a paraphrase.
The President's actual words leave one wondering if he's certain what sovereignty is, besides being something "given" to occupied nations.
Trahant indicates that he found encouraging answers in Bush's bumbling evasions. I wonder if he's indulging an overactive imagination. Newsweek's Marcus Mabry more accurately describes Bush as "looking like a schoolboy unprepared at the front of the class" while his audience "snickered."
Likewise with the news that Bush came out against legacy admissions at the same event. One would think he'd announced a new policy. In fact, he was cornered by a Black journalist who slyly asked, if Bush opposes any college admissions system except one that's based on merit, then what about the legacy preference, without which the young Bush could never have gotten into Yale? Bush was cornered, so he apparently tried to save face by repudiating the legacy system on the
spot.
If Bush were as exposed to the public eye as the contestants on reality shows, putting his shortcomings on regular display without
scripts or handlers to make him look good, his political career would be toast. No wonder such unmanaged encounters are rarely allowed.
But why do journalists like Trahant, upon whom we depend to give us the facts, habitually rewrite Bush's embarrassing goof-ups to make them seem like smart, substantive statements? If this is what's currently meant by objectivity, how can we possibly rely upon anything the press tells us about the powers that be?
K H
Seattle
8/8/04
--
We actually misnamed The War On Terror, it ought to be "The Struggle Against Ideological Extremists Who Do Not Believe In Free Societies Who Happen To Use Terror As A Weapon To Try
To Shake The Conscience Of The Free World."
(Audience laughter.) No, that's what they do.
-G.W.Bush,
Unity Conference
8/6/04
