Pot, Meet Kettle (Again)
An unidentified “senior official” in the Bush White House, explaining why Barack Obama won’t be the next president: “It’s sort of like, ‘That’s all I need to get by,’ which bespeaks sort of a condescending attitude towards the voters … and a laziness, an intellectual laziness.”
My. Condescension toward voters and intellectual laziness. Imagine a country where such a man could be president. (More here.)
While I don’t put much stock in reporter Bill Sammon generally, his piece (which is an excerpt from a forthcoming book on Bush) is interesting. It (perhaps inadvertently) gets at George W. Bush’s utter inability to understand how he looks and sounds to others. It also mentions that the White House is assuming Hillary will be the Democratic nominee. Although it’s a safer bet this time, the Bush gang called it right four years ago, predicting that John Kerry would be the nominee at a time when he was far behind in the early polling.
Elsewhere this morning, Gary Kamiya has a review of the PBS series The War, the latest Ken Burns film, which is airing this week and next. (If you’re not watching, start, or see it later this fall when PBS begins running it in weekly installments.) Although making a statement about our current war was by no means Ken Burns’ goal, a viewer can’t help thinking about the two in contrast to one another—just war/noble cause versus politically motivated and shameful war-of-choice—and wondering how a Ken Burns of six decades hence might frame a similar film about the Iraq War.
Such wondering is probably a waste of time, though. Sixty years from now, the Iraq War probably won’t be over yet.
Posted: September 25th, 2007 under Bushco, Hillary, Iraq, Obama.
Comments: 5
Comments
Comment from Josh Hammond
Time: September 25, 2007, 9:54 am
Obama will not be the next president because it too lousy a candidate–all hope and no audacity. Hillary has her work cut out for her, but she is our Manchurian candidate! And Jesus will sit this one out. The only one who can beat her is McCain, if he can pull things together.
I caught the first 90 minutes of Ken Burns latest offering and I’m surprised I lasted that long. As far as I am concerned, it is a badly constructed movie, with no soul or emotion. The four-city ploy is very confusing and gets in the way of the story. I’ll be surprised if it does well in the ratings.
There is no way this effort by Burns is an anti-Iraq war statement. For that you need, dare I say, must, see “In the Valley of Elah” with an Academy-winning performance by Tommy Lee Jones. Paul Haggis, who directed “Crash”, makes you work to find the anti-war statements. And this entire movie is about Iraq and the impact on the soldiers who fight it, the families who suffer through it, and a country that toys with.
Comment from timr
Time: September 25, 2007, 10:04 am
JA, doesn’t the comment about Obama show just how unthinkingly racist gwb is? BTW, I am pretty sure that gwb is simply aping the words of turd blossom and giving them the good old gwb logic twist. I have seen what gwb had to say about Sen Clinton, and how, with his help, she could be beaten easily. I really have to wonder just where gwb gets his information. Years ago in a throwaway remark he said that he never read a book or a newspaper, now we keep hearing about the number of books that he reads, and how he peruses daily papers. Yet in spite of all his reading he still thinks that the majority of people are on his side, that when he throws his weight behind the repig candidate, that person will win easily over the dem, whoever it is. Then again, gwb actually admited that he believed that his potty was going to win in 06. I think that is the result of karl’s input. It looks like, in spite of karl being totally wrong in 06, gwb still thinks that karl and only karl knows the truth-just remember that karl has his own math, and dispite 06, his math is always right.-110 days and counting down to war with Iran, more stories are appearing from papers all over the country telling why we should go to war with Iran. In the end, it is all about the oil, or rather it is all about the multi’s wanting to control the oil. There are now only 5 multi’s who control about 80% of the MSM, and they are working hard at making it 100%. The MSM feeds us pap and pablum, and the CPN ( couch potato nation) neither knows nor cares. The CPN only wants its football (or sports) and beer. The begining of the decline and fall of the american empire? Fear rules!
Comment from jabartlett
Time: September 25, 2007, 11:23 am
To respond to both comments above: I’m astounded, Josh, that you find no soul or emotion in the Burns film. Although it’s vastly different from his Civil War film, it is in many ways more emotional, since we see the actual faces and voices of those involved rather than merely hearing their words recreated. The narrative style–interlocking stories with different characters–also strikes me as pretty standard Burns. I wasn’t confused at all. If it bombs in the ratings, it won’t surprise me, either, the American attention span being what it is. PBS didn’t help by launching it during major network fall premiere week, so it gets buried.
I didn’t say the film was *intended* as an anti-Iraq statement—all I meant was that anybody who compares the motivations of American leaders then and now can draw their own conclusions.
Regarding the racism versus Obama–surely that’s at work in the “laziness” remark, although it’s a subtly coded message. Lots of those who would respond to it probably won’t get it.
Comment from Nosebetter
Time: September 25, 2007, 11:47 am
With Bush predicting a Hillary win, he has critics who accuse him of being racist. Had he predicted Obama to win the primary, he would have critics accusing him of being sexist. Six of one…half a dozen of the other.
He is not alone in believing Hillary will win the primary. She’s 20 points ahead of her closest competitor. Obama was correct when I heard him say “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”
We’ll know by this time next year.
Bush gave this prediction during an interview for his new book. I find it amusing the book’s title refers to him as an evangelist. Evangelist means bringer of good news. I have never seen President Bush as Mr. “I Bring You Tidings of Great Joy.”
Comment from Josh Hammond
Time: September 25, 2007, 12:10 pm
More on Burns’ documentary. Maybe it got better, but the first hour and a half was one of the most disjointed films I had every seen and the attempt to establish a “narrator” from each of the four representative communities failed. Trying to make the movie about its impact on four communities also failed, it left the “national” fishing around throughout the movie. I had no objection to the “real person” narrator, but there were simplying too many and this film would have worked better with a guiding narrator to take us from jump scene to jump scene.
My wife and I usually get hooked on WW2 movies, but even she gave up.
Maybe we were expecting more, especially after seeing “In the Valley of Elah”. Or maybe we are getting tired of explicit war movies.
I would also add that Burns is really saying the causes of WW2 were real, we were ironically late for it, but the causes of Iraq were not real, even though we we there first. Of course, many see Iraq, on both sides of the conflict, as unfinished WW2 business.
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