I am Confused.
Mar. 15th, 2004 12:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eruthrosFrom a NYTimes.com story on what Bush does with his time:
"To break it down further, the president is generally awake by 5 a.m., when he has coffee and reads the newspapers in bed with his wife."
Now, if I'm not mistaken, this quote is about the exact same president who said he didn't read newspapers because they were biased; instead, he got his news from his (absolutely unbiased!) advisers and also from a couple of really friendly lobbyists who happened to be hanging around the White House.
Now that president reads newspapers in bed with his wife? Not only that, he generally reads newspapers in bed with his wife, implying that this is the status quo, the typical morning throughout his entire presidency, and not a sudden change? Did I miss something? Was there a big news article three months ago saying "Bush Decides to Check Out Actual News Sources Rather Than Dick Cheney?" (Really, who'd want to check out Dick Cheney?) Was there a sudden revelation that actually, all that stuff about not reading newspapers was a lie, prepared by the RNC to make Bush seem more like the common people, and in fact he reads every major newspaper in the country and has a Ph.D. in political science and international relations?
Somehow I'm thinking "no."
And yet the article doesn't address that contradiction at all. Instead, it sounds rather as though Bush is totally overbooked and busy and smart. (Whoa. That's approaching AU territory, there.) There's another big problem with it, too, by my standards, which is that it's trying to analyze what Dubya does with his time -- while focusing only on the time he spends in D.C. I might have liked an analysis, say, of how many hours Bush has worked last year compared to most employed Americans. The author could have pointed out that Bush has more vacation than any other President, say, or that he seems to have no problem vacationing in Texas during the early stages of a war. Seems to me that that would be a better indicator of what Bush values and what Bush time means.
But maybe that's just me.
In other news, I clearly need a set of political icons. I should get on that. A nice "wtf?" one for ridiculous media coverage of, well, anything, say. And I'm sure I can think of something snarky to say for an icon of BushCo. I should get on that.
"To break it down further, the president is generally awake by 5 a.m., when he has coffee and reads the newspapers in bed with his wife."
Now, if I'm not mistaken, this quote is about the exact same president who said he didn't read newspapers because they were biased; instead, he got his news from his (absolutely unbiased!) advisers and also from a couple of really friendly lobbyists who happened to be hanging around the White House.
Now that president reads newspapers in bed with his wife? Not only that, he generally reads newspapers in bed with his wife, implying that this is the status quo, the typical morning throughout his entire presidency, and not a sudden change? Did I miss something? Was there a big news article three months ago saying "Bush Decides to Check Out Actual News Sources Rather Than Dick Cheney?" (Really, who'd want to check out Dick Cheney?) Was there a sudden revelation that actually, all that stuff about not reading newspapers was a lie, prepared by the RNC to make Bush seem more like the common people, and in fact he reads every major newspaper in the country and has a Ph.D. in political science and international relations?
Somehow I'm thinking "no."
And yet the article doesn't address that contradiction at all. Instead, it sounds rather as though Bush is totally overbooked and busy and smart. (Whoa. That's approaching AU territory, there.) There's another big problem with it, too, by my standards, which is that it's trying to analyze what Dubya does with his time -- while focusing only on the time he spends in D.C. I might have liked an analysis, say, of how many hours Bush has worked last year compared to most employed Americans. The author could have pointed out that Bush has more vacation than any other President, say, or that he seems to have no problem vacationing in Texas during the early stages of a war. Seems to me that that would be a better indicator of what Bush values and what Bush time means.
But maybe that's just me.
In other news, I clearly need a set of political icons. I should get on that. A nice "wtf?" one for ridiculous media coverage of, well, anything, say. And I'm sure I can think of something snarky to say for an icon of BushCo. I should get on that.
