Our commander in chief makes my head hurt sometimes, he really does.
FOXNews.com - Politics - Raw Data: Text of Bush Interview
HUME: How do you get your news?
BUSH: I get briefed by Andy Card and Condi in the morning. They come in and tell me. In all due respect, you've got a beautiful face and everything.
I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves. But like Condoleezza, in her case, the national security adviser is getting her news directly from the participants on the world stage.
HUME: Has that been your practice since day one, or is that a practice that you've...
BUSH: Practice since day one.
HUME: Really?
BUSH: Yes. You know, look, I have great respect for the media. I mean, our society is a good, solid democracy because of a good, solid media. But I also understand that a lot of times there's opinions mixed in with news. And I...
HUME: I won't disagree with that, sir.
BUSH: I appreciate people's opinions, but I'm more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world.
Theoretically, at least, I can understand that it's hard to find time to listen to or read the news when you're the president. On the one hand, I get that.
On the other hand .... while I can appreciate that he thinks his staff are good, why on earth would he think they're objective? I should think, if nothing else, the past few years have shown him that they're not in the slightest bit objective. And he doesn't want that; whenever anyone -- usually Powell -- seems to give him a truly objective viewpoint, they get shot down. And surely, however biased it may be, a president should receive a take on issues that isn't filtered by his staff, just to make sure he has an outside view, objective or not. This makes him sound very out of touch, somehow, and somewhat underinformed.
(Purely a side note: there are some things that just can't take being out of their context, can they? In this case, I mean that without seeing the interview and watching how the president was relating to Britt Hume, we have absolutely no way to understand why the line "In all due respect, you've got a beautiful face and everything," suddenly appears. I expect he was teasing Hume, but it's just wildly out of place where it appears in the transcript.)
Posted by iain at September 23, 2003 01:07 PMComments
