http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2005/09/da_grate_commun.htmlIt was one of those did-it-really-say-that? instances, a flash of disbelief at the astoundingly inane in print. But there it was, nevertheless, in yesterday’s opening to a Washington Post editorial:
“President Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina has been, to put it kindly, faltering. He has fallen short both rhetorically and substantively. The rhetorical failure is less important but perhaps more surprising for a politician with his strong communications skills.”George W. Bush, yes, that George W. Bush,
has strong communications skills. George W. Bush, as in the oratorical bumbler, the malapropism master, the syntactic offender, the mind-of-mush thinker, the verbal stumbler, the dear-in-the-headlights responder, the cerebral clown - that George W. Bush has “strong communications skills.”
Well, he can read from notecards. Not always flawlessly, but he manages to get the words out eventually. He can memorize and deliver a few soundbites; again, not flawlessly, but he manages the gist. More telling, however, is that Bush has virtually no knowledge of history or economics or sociology from which to extemporize, so when he tries the attempt comes out as muddled nonsense - as ahistorical, aeconomic, asociological, a-everything as understood by the informed world - but, according to the Post, he has strong communications skills.
The genesis of this perpetrated myth seems to be those few minutes in 2001 when he put his arm around a fireman and bellowed through a bullhorn that he’d get Osama, which of course he never did. But that started the myth rolling in right-wing circles and then was often echoed by the MSM - the utter asininity that George W. Bush is a strong, or even competent, communicator.
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