Remember this?
Helen Thomas reporting in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on October 15, 2003:
President Bush recently gave an hour-long exclusive interview to Fox TV anchor Brit Hume, who tossed him a series of softball questions.
Among them, Bush was asked how he gets his news. Answer: He relies on briefings by chief of staff Andrew Card and national security affairs adviser Condoleezza Rice.
He walks into the Oval Office in the morning, Bush said, and asks Card: "What's in the newspapers worth worrying about? I glance at the headlines just to kind of (get) a flavor of what's moving," Bush said. "I rarely read the stories," he said.
Instead, the president continued, he gets "briefed by people who have probably read the news themselves." Rice, on the other hand, is getting the news "directly from the participants on the world stage."
How is that strategy working out?
Secretary Rice
may have read the news coming out of the Gulf Coast in the first days after Katrina, but
she wasn't around to brief the President.On Wednesday night (Aug.31), Secretary Rice was booed by some audience members at "Spamalot!," the Monty Python musical at the Shubert, when the lights went up after the performance.
Yesterday (Thursday, Sept 1) Rice went shopping at Ferragamo on Fifth Ave. According to the Web site www.Gawker.com, the 50-year-old bought "several thousand dollars' worth of shoes" at the pricey leather-goods boutique.
The New York Daily News
September 2, 2005
Well, she's Secretary of State now - her responsibilities lie with international affairs, and this was clearly a domestic situation. So, what with Condi being busy going to shows and shopping, I suppose it fell upon chief of staff Andy Card to brief the President on anything in the news worth worrying about. Wonder how that went?
From today's New York Times:
The president, long reluctant to fire subordinates, came to a belated recognition that his administration was in trouble for the way it had dealt with the disaster, many of his supporters say. One moment of realization occurred on Thursday of last week (Sept. 1) when an aide carried a news agency report from New Orleans into the Oval Office for him to see.
The report was about the evacuees at the convention center, some dying and some already dead. Mr. Bush had been briefed that morning by his homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, who was getting much of his information from Mr. Brown and was not aware of what was occurring there. The news account was the first that the president and his top advisers had heard not only of the conditions at the convention center but even that there were people there at all.
"He's not a screamer," a senior aide said of the president. But Mr. Bush, angry, directed the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., to find out what was going on.
(emphasis mine)
He's not a screamer. At the Convention Center on Tuesday and Wednesday, they were screaming for help.
crossposted at my new blog