*'s "No TV Defense": First Lady Says President DOES watch TV!

Land Shark

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Tue Sep-13-05 03:40 PM
Original message

Edited on Tue Sep-13-05 03:41 PM by Land Shark

In an October 17, 2003, interview on Fox, George W. Bush personally volunteered that he did not read newspapers. Don't we all remember this?

Now Newsweek says we are supposed to believe, for post-Katrina presidential accountability purposes, that it is uncertain whether Bush watches TV or what TV he watches beyond an hour or two of ESPN! Further, we are informed in the same article that an aide had to throw together a DVD of news coverage on Thursday or so to get the President up to Katrina-speed. <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287434/site/newsweek/ >

Collectively, we are advised both directly and by implication that President Bush was not in the habit of watching much TV, and certainly not the TV news. We may be inclined to believe such ignorance in character and therefore plausible enough to require no further investigation, but alas, even the First Lady knows this idea about no news television is not true.

This whole situation reminds me of a favorite egghead practical joke of asking others "Did you know that the word 'gullible' is not in the dictionary?'" Based on responses to this trick question, it turns out, about 90% of all people are, in fact, quite gullible, because gullible is, of course, in the dictionary.

In light of this gullibility, we note a quote from the First Lady:

"I enjoy watching Face the Nation and contrary to popular belief, President Bush and I do enjoy watching television. I just can't let George eat pretzels at the same time."

<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/06/2003060 ... >

In fact, * watches so much television that he spends time with his wife in front of the tube, and he loses himself so completely in that location that he also loses track of his own mastication and peristaltic rhythms such that he engages reflexes commonly called "choking" on food like pretzels, all the while bedazzled by the mystical powers of that tube which Finnish American immigrants of the 20th century referred to tellingly as the flickering "devil's eye", but which modern fundamentalists consume, in one flickering fashion or another, with relative abandon.

Indeed, being a watcher of television news suits Bush very well, both as an apparent and admitted non-reader, as well as suiting the professional politician concerned about his monitoring his image.

The idea that GWB is not watching television after Katrina hits (as a matter of habit and as a ritual of employment) does not pass the laugh test, the gullibility test, or any rule of reason.

Besides, as I pointed out elsewhere, it's clear that his aides ARE watching television, so the knowledge broadcast to us all by the MSM television is known to the administration as a whole through actual knowledge, and imputed through to the President himself vicariously because of the routine laws of agency. So Bush is deemed to know what's on every single TV news show around the country even if it were true OVERALL that Bush watches little television.

Loyal readers may wish to follow up my few minutes of research here on Bush and television by posting prior references to Bush's television watching below, to compare and contrast with the Newsweek alibis fed by anonymous administration sources and printed uncritically (though some other criticisms are made).

The quotes below the line at the end of this essay remind us of what is more likely the real issue with Presidential leadership under *: We have a flat, figurehead, emotionless President systemically incapable of the decisive decisions based on *humanitarian* concerns that would be needed for prompt action on Katrina, and he is surrounded by aides that are ambivalent about the consequences of New Orleans, even seeing some of those consequences as quite positive to the President and his faith-based leadership, given the non-avoidability of "acts of God". However God provides the rain, the biggest tragedies (as we've known since the Greeks) require human hubris.

But even more importantly than the factually misleading claim about the President and television, Newsweek fails to clearly make the obvious legal and patriotic retort to the "no Bush television" claim that accompanies the factual retort already outlined above. Namely, that regardless of whether Bush watches television OR NOT, he has the nondelegable, nonwaivable, irreducible ***DUTY*** TO KNOW WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN OUR COUNTRY. Moreover, as shown in the discussion to the thread linked immediately below, the President and key cabinet officers are virtually ALWAYS in communications through secure links and all kinds of telecommunications. The Newsweek article says the Governor of Louisiana was surrounded by "banks" of televisions. The White House has similar facilities as does Air Force One. Of all the phone calls a President receives, no conversation even mentioned the D-word "devastation" like a hundred million newscast quotes and American conversations did each and every day?
<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph... >

Or perhaps Newsweek DID make this argument about the real D-word of DUTY to know what's going on (ever so obliquely), by politely quoting sources as saying the president has a low level of "situational awareness." In other words, when it comes to a real "situation" the President is not sufficiently aware of the subtle differences between sh*t and shinola.

Bush's "I was asleep at the wheel and not watching television during and after Hurricane Katrina and the levee breaches" defense simply doesn't fly, float, or figure. He now knows this enough to finally today, in some limited sense "take responsibility" for a few things. <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9324891/ >

Still, will someone please ask start asking all Americans if the word "duty" is in the dictionary? Record the answers. Provided we can agree that presidential duty exists as a matter of law and politics, then the presumptive penalty for falling asleep at sentry post NOT watching TV, ASSUMING THOSE YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO PROTECT DIDN'T DIE AS A RESULT, is relief from duty. But given the deadly consequences of this slumber, we are now beyond impeachment, and surging into issues of full court-martial.

--Land Shark
Attorney at Law

==================

Nobody likes to see dead people on their television screens.
-- George W. Bush, April 13, 2004

"This meeting was like many of the meetings I would go to over the course of two years," he recalled. "The only way I can describe it is that, well, the President is like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection." Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill

Bush no longer connects or exists. His principal function has been lost. In this respect he is like an expensive, hand-waxed automobile, gleaming in the darkness of a garage. The car is intended for rapid motion and for public display. When its owner-driver is at the dinner table, he has no need of the car. "The celebrity displays personality," explains Michael Rogin. "He pleases others; intimate before the mass audience, he plays at privacy in public. Neither a repressed interior nor an intractable reality exercise claims over the celebrity for he exists in the eye of the beholder." <14> If Bush "plays at privacy" in public, he cannot act "for real" in private, because he is now in a realm where substance and depth, rather than sheer surface, are called upon.
<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph... >

Appeals for mercy were particularly ardent in the case of Karla Faye Tucker, the convicted murderer who had undergone a conversion to Christianity while incarcerated. Bush, who had claimed in a national debate that Jesus was his favorite philosopher (no one asked him to name his second favorite), refused even to meet with Tucker's many advocates. Not only that, but according to no less a stalwart conservative source than bowtied Tucker Carlson, Bush mocked her imagined appeal to him: "'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me'."

(quoted in <http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=427 > )