Nobody Likes to See Dead People on TV

As I started listening to Bush's prepared remarks tonight, I felt a strange sensation. I paid close attention to his delivery, which I generally find absurdly inept. This time, though, he spoke, at first, with a careful, delicate pronunciation - quite the surprise to me. My standards had been set so low that to hear such careful attention paid to the nuance of spoken language delighted me. Candidly, I must note that blood began to flow more freely to delicate portions of my person, language nerd that I am. Fortunately, though, the man grew more careless as he eased into the rest of his speech, and my excitement waned. Not, however, before he pronounced "militia" as "mill-ish-ee-uh," which was nice.

He speaks always with his head cocked and his eyebrows constantly squishing around above those beady rocks of evil he uses for eyes. It's almost feminine. On a similarly less heterosexual note, Condoleeza Rice is certain to be revealed as C. Montgomery Burns in blackface drag soon, perhaps even before the handover date. It would make an exciting announcement, to be sure.

Two of the funnier questions came from the fox news and washington times reporters. The first asked, essentially, "Isn't 9-11 the FBI's fault for being so incompetent and giving you shitty information?" The latter asked, "Some people say you acted too hastily with regard to Iraq, but with the same, shit-filled mouth they say you didn't act hastily enough on the pre-9/11 terror warnings. Don't these people suck?"

Whenever asked the "apologize, bitch, for your transgressions!" question, Bush refused to admit any failures but easily confessed to the grief he felt on 9/11 and how he's comforted the families of the victims. Which doesn't really answer the question, but is more an attempt to portray sympathy with those who hold him most accountable and feel the most personal venom towards him, namely the victims' families.

One of the funnier iterations on this theme was the question "What mistakes have you made since 9/11?," which the bitch just couldn't process. He stood there, swaying gently in the breeze, utterly incapable of admitting any sort of failure. He then said, in a sentence, that he'd done the right thing with Afghanistan. Following this, he delivered an extended, multi-sentence defense of the Iraq war, exclaiming its virtue despite the failure to find (yet, W adds, full of hope) weapons of mass destruction. The questioner, of course, had not mentioned Iraq, but Bush felt compelled to talk about Iraq when asked what his biggest post-9/11 mistake was.

Of course, I shouldn't parse the performance so - it's really just a distraction from the substantive issues. Instead of worrying about policy questions fully of gravity and implication, we bitch and moan about ties and performance and "convincing argument" and all that nonsense which we should eschew in favor of the real question.

Namely, has William Safire ever creamed his jeans while listening to Bush?