While the nation--thanks to the debate--seems to be waking up to Bush as the petulant bubble-boy president, I think there's more work we can do to advance and cement this image.
This is how Bush described the "hard work" he does for America in the debate on Thursday night:
"I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is. But it's necessary work."
When Bush uttered this brain-bendingly ridiculous and appalling statement, which seems to equate the Presidency with watching television, it rang a bell. That locution, "I see on the tv screens," sounded very familiar, so I did a little googling. Confirming my suspicions, as you can see below, I discovered it's one of Bush's absolute favorite rhetorical devices, appearing in speech after speech, in widely different contexts, going all the way back to 2000 and the Bush-Gore debates (no doubt it goes back even further, but I'll let someone else do the Nexis search).
While the obsessive recurrence of this verbal formula raises the intriguing possibility that his handlers purposefully include it in Bush's speeches, supposing that it adds to his "regular guy" image and helps the average "American Idol" viewer see him as one of them, it also resoundingly confirms one of the major negative media narratives now emerging about Bush in the wake of the debate: He's out of touch and living in a "fantasy world."
Bush, as the following litany makes clear, engages reality only as it is filtered through a "tv screen." We already know that he doesn't read any newspapers and that he relies entirely upon his staff to give him "objective information," but we can now see even more clearly that Bush's very notion of reality itself--especially horrifying, bloody, unpleasant reality--is an entirely mediated one. He's like the characters in DeLillo's "White Noise," for whom the actuality of a traumatic experience depends upon its appearance on the tv news (even if it's their own experience). An event does not exist for him unless it shows up on the tv. And it's only when it does show up on tv that he feels obliged to comment upon it, whereupon he usually asserts explicitly that it is simply the fact that he watched it on tv that in itself demonstrates his profound and humane understanding of others' pain or "hard work." Bill Clinton "felt" your pain. George Bush watches your pain on his home entertainment center.
(quotes and more in extended copy)
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