SJ Mercury: Bush won't meet Sheehan because she departs from his script

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

Posted on Fri, Aug. 19, 2005

Bush won't meet Cindy Sheehan because she departs from his script

By Peter Beinart

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/opinion/12423064.htm

But if Sheehan's vigil says something important about Iraq, it also says something important about President Bush. Sheehan, after all, has only one demand: She wants to confront the president face to face. The demand is so provocative because one of George W. Bush's defining qualities is his aversion to exactly this sort of challenge. Former administration officials portray a president carefully shielded from unpleasant or dissonant information. According to former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, ``There is a palace guard, and they want to run interference for him.'' Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described Bush as ``caught in an echo chamber of his own making, cut off from everyone other than a circle around him that's tiny and getting smaller and in concert on everything.''

And while this cocoon may be partly the work of zealous aides, there's reason to believe it is exactly what Bush wants. In 2004 the president told a Washington Times reporter that he doesn't watch news on TV or even read the newspaper except to scan the front page. ``I like to have a clear outlook,'' he explained. ``It can be a frustrating experience to pay attention to somebody's false opinion or somebody's characterization, which simply isn't true.''

Bush clearly dislikes being challenged by reporters. In his first term, he held fewer individual news conferences than any president in almost a century. And he dislikes being challenged by his political competitors -- as the country learned during last year's first presidential debate, when Bush repeatedly scowled during John Kerry's answers. In fact, Bush aides were so scrupulous in shielding him from criticism during the campaign that they routinely expelled people wearing Kerry paraphernalia from ostensibly public rallies.

On Iraq, officials bearing bad news have been similarly expelled. When Gen. Eric Shinseki suggested the occupation might require several hundred thousand soldiers, the Pentagon hastily announced his replacement, rendering him a lame duck. National Economic Council director Lawrence Lindsey lost his job soon after telling the Wall Street Journal that the war could cost up to $200 billion. Had the Bush administration heeded these warnings -- rather than punishing the people delivering them -- America would be far better off today.

[bballny]

1. George Bush

is by far the worst president we have ever had. Not only are his decisions pitiful but how he makes them has been
the pattern of his life. He has slways avoided discussions because he intellectually can't handle defending his position. He was intimidated at Yale by people who earned their way in. He failed in business because he never looked at business decisions with a skeptical eye and he has failed at President because he surrounds himself with sycophants.

[Al-CIAda]

2. Kerry had him by the short hairs repeatedly during the debates

the Retard-in-Thief was on the ropes time after time, but Kerry let him off.
It is my opinion that if he wanted to, Kerry could have destroyed the Christofascist nutbag. Why he didn't is a mystery to me.