Well, maybe it was late, maybe I was tired, but many of you had a very different take on Bush’s press conference yesterday. Here’s a typical email:
Did you watch a different press conference than I did? I mean, that the baseline is average means you’re going in the wrong direction. Bush looked tired, nervous, easily confused; he had troubling answers questions, he couldn’t address points, and at times he looked just purely uninformed. Two friends of mine, one conservative and one liberal, called me after the conference. The conservative said that “Bush looked like the first year (law student) who didn’t do his reading and just wouldn’t admit it to the [socratic] prof[essor].” The liberal said “The sad part about this is that conservatives are going to call it a strong performance. We now have a President whose not much different from a Special Ed student. We clap and cheer every time he has his shoes on the right feet.”
I mean, what standard are we going to hold our President to? Do you know the answer to any of these questions that we’re asked?
– What was the Administration’s biggest error in judgment (and what, if anything, is being done about it)?
– Why is Bush meeting with the 9/11 Commission with Cheney?
– What is going to happen on June 30th, who will be involved, and what then?I mean, if a press conference is meant to actually inform people, then he did a poor job. This one clearly was just meant to up the votes; and I don’t think it did a good job of that either. How can reasonable and intelligent men justify that performance given that the President of the United States should be held to the standard of person capable of running the free world? If you can’t name 25 people that you know personally off the top of your head who could have exceeded the performance of Bush in that speech, then you need new friends. I can name 25; and most of them I would run very, very, fast towards Canada if they ever were handed the keys to the military.
But this was not a generals exam. It was a political event. the point of press conferences is not to naswer every question in full; some of those questions might not yet have answers; some of the answers may not be wise to state publicly yet. But impressions like these are inevitably subjective. I gave my honest assessment.
ONE MAN: Can make a difference. A very simple invention in Nigeria may transform part of that country’s economy and society: one pot placed within another. I don’t know why, but this is the kind of story you don’t read about in the papers, but it gives you hope for Africa.
BARRED FROM THE SCHOOL BOARD: The anti-gay backlash is in full swing in Iowa. And it’s in a gruesome phase in Durham, North Carolina.
The Dish 