These are the people that cover him every day and they’re just now figuring out who he is. It’s typical, it’s stunning. You will find such phrases in this story as: “As he starts his final four years in the White House, President Bush is by far the biggest agent of change in his own cabinet. Whether he’s remaking his team or plotting his second-term policies–” Imagine, he’s the president, and he’s sitting up there in the White House and he’s plotting, ladies and gentlemen, he’s plotting his second term policies. “Bush’s leadership style belies his caricature as a disengaged president who is blindly loyal, dislikes dissent and covets his own downtime. In fact, Bush’s aides and friends describe the mirror image of a restless man who masters details and reads avidly, who chews over his mistakes and the failings of those around him, and who has grown ever more comfortable pulling the levers of power. Of course, those closest to Bush have a vested interest in singing his praises. But they also make a compelling case that the president is a more complex and engaged character than his popular image suggests.”
Who gave us his popular image? Who has created the popular image? None of this comes as any surprise to me. I’m sure it doesn’t come as any surprise to you. And this is the first story since the election that’s actually dealt with this in a straightforward fashion. Most of the story Bush was a caricature created as a dummkopf, as an idiot, as a frat boy, as a cowboy, as a party animal who was being led around the White House by Dick Cheney, and now I think what is going on, just a wild guess, this is probably a prelude to a switch in direction in which the press is going to say he’s now an evil genius or he’s an evil bomber or an evil scientist, he’s in there plotting. This man has been in charge of everything all along and we’ve been fooled. Now we’ve got to really watch out for him because after all he does know what he’s doing and so all these horrible mistakes he’s making he’s making on purpose. He thinks these are good. This is the thing I’m going to predict to you right now that’s coming. He’s an evil mad scientist in the White House plotting all this. He actually wanted all this despair and destruction in Iraq, he wanted it to go wrong, he wanted there to be no weapons of mass destruction, not only did he know it, he wanted it to be the case, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Of course, t doesn’t make sense, but none of what they said about him prior to this story makes any sense either. None of what they’ve written about George W. Bush makes any sense. It’s stunning, ladies and gentlemen, that the media, the people that are arguably physically closest to him in a sense of covering him on a daily basis are the last to figure him out. And those who support him and trust him and vote for him have known about him, who he is and what he is from the get-go. So just another reason not to trust these people in the mainstream press. They simply don’t get it, and they don’t want to get it, and now when there’s no choice but than to get it, they have to re-characterize what they get as something evil and plotting and something that perhaps is even a bit sinister.
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