I watched the now infamous
Pet Goat video. Well, I'd seen a short clip in the news back in 2001, and watched Fahrenheit 9/11 in the theater, but with the video clip at my fingertips, I found it was
much worse than I thought.
- 0:58 Andrew Card, having waited for a break in the reading, tells the president that a second plane has hit the second tower and it is confirmed that we are under attack (you can't hear it in audio, but it's pretty well accepted that this is what he said.)
- 1:00 - 1:10 The president sits still while students get their books.
- 1:10 - 1:45 The president sits still while students begin to drill.
- 1:45 - 4:25 The president picks up his book and the students continue to read.
- 4:25 - 4:30 The president, knowing we're under attack, tells jokes... "Really good. <teacher laughs> Wheawh! <pause> They must be sixth graders. <more laughter>"
- 5:14 - 6:00 The president takes questions, praises student's reading, talks about the importance of reading more than watching tv.
I turned my volume all the way up and listened several times. Our President was, in fact, telling jokes just minutes after being told our country was under attack.
[much, much more below, a disturbing trend unfolds...]
[If you intend to recommend, please do so early, as it's scrolling quickly]
The time stamps are based on the Real Player 30 megs, 320 x 240 clip, but I assume they're all the same on all six formats at the link I posted.
What's so funny? -- America Is Under Attack?
As I said, I saw Fahrenheit 9/11, so I knew our president sat there for five minutes with that dazed, confused I-Don't-Know-What-To-Do look on his face, the one we saw again during the debate. But I didn't realize (because the sound wasn't as good in the theater) that during the natural break when he could have excused himself, he instead decided to joke with the teacher.
His cavalier joking, when he knew we had just come under attack, is inexcusable. Our president should have bolted out of his chair, placed a phone call to get the current intel, and should have immediately authorized fighters to be scrambled--with appropriate orders. Instead, he sat and told his joke and sat some more and then talked for a while. I've heard he did a 20-30 minute photo op even after the classroom incident, but that may just be rumor. (please comment if you have solid facts about this one way or the other)
And even if he was in over his head and just didn't know what to do, this president just has no sense of decorum. There are times when it just isn't appropriate to joke and laugh, and repeatedly I'm amazed that this man either doesn't know or doesn't care.
As I said above, this is part of a disturbing trend for Mr. Bush.
A few days ago, coincidentally, I wrote a diary pointing out two other events when I was shocked by our president's sense of humor.
What's so funny? -- A Recently Slain Soldier?
During the debate, our president said he "laughed some" when speaking with the widow and son of a recently slain soldier.
My jaw dropped when president Bush said this:
You know,
I think about Missy Johnson. She's
a fantastic lady I met in Charlotte, North Carolina. She
and her son Brian, they came to see me.
Her husband PJ got killed. He'd been in Afghanistan, went to Iraq.
You know, it's hard work to try to love her as best as I can, knowing full well that the decision I made caused her loved one to be in harm's way.
I told her after we prayed and teared up and laughed some that I thought her husband's sacrifice was noble and worthy.
Laughed some? Laughed some? LAUGHED SOME?
And so, again, I say... What's So Funny!
I actually had to go to the transcript to remind myself how bad it was.
What's so funny? -- We Were Misled Into War?
Before that were the president's tasteless jokes about not finding the weapons of mass destruction that were our pretext for war.
One pictured Mr. Bush looking under a piece of furniture in the Oval Office, at which the president remarked: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere."
After another one, showing him scouring the corner of a room, Mr. Bush said: "No, no weapons over there," he said.
And as a third picture, this time showing him leaning over, appeared on the screen the president was heard to say: "Maybe under here?"
{video}
I have to say, I wasn't very impressed by members of our media who thought this was funny. Even more so, I'm both saddened and a bit frightened when I think of how many of president Bush's advisors must have been involved in, or seen, this childish skit and didn't say, "gee, maybe since, you know, we went to war saying WMD, and a lot of people are dying, and we're having trouble with international relations over this... maybe we shouldn't be joking about it."
What's so funny? -- War, Recession, Emergency?
So what else does our president laugh at? Anyone remember, "Lucky me, I Hit The Trifecta"? It started as a private joke between President Bush and budget director Mitch Daniels shortly after September 11th, 2001.
Soon, Daniels publicly claimed that during the campaign, in Chicago, the president listed, "three conditions under which a deficit would be acceptable. Those being war, recession or emergency." And... yes, our president's joke about this was, "Lucky me, I hit the trifecta." This was so tasteless that when Paul Krugman reported it, he was attacked by a backlash of people claiming that he must have made it up.
Well, not only did the president say it, but the underlying premise appears to be a lie. An online search yields many claims that no such statement was made in Chicago or anywhere else on the campaign trail, but I could find no evidence in support of a Chicago qualifier on deficit spending.
So president Bush and secretary Daniels made up these conditions, to go along with their joke, as a way of justifying a budget deficit. But it gets worse. Even if you forget, for the moment, that this is about justifying budget deficits with a lie, Paul Krugman was vindicated when this tasteless and insensitive joke became one of president Bush's favorite laugh lines at speeches. In fact, he thought it was so funny that he used it in at least 14 speeches (see them here). Here's a representative sample:
June 13, 2002
Remarks by the President at the 21st Century High Tech Forum
Presidential Hall
Dwight David Eisenhower Executive Office Building
3:28 P.M. EDT
I remember campaigning and somebody said, would you ever deficit spend? I said, only if there was a war, or a recession, or a national emergency. (Laughter.) I didn't think we were going to get the trifecta. (Laughter.)
If you have the stomach for it, here's the audio.
What's so funny? -- Tax Avoidance Schemes?
I almost forgot his recent stump-speech argument against Kerry's proposal to retain the current tax level below $200K and reinstate the Clinton-era levels above $200K. I'm pretty sure I've heard this one multiple times.
Just remember, when you're talking about, oh, we're just going to run up the taxes on a certain number of people -- first of all, real rich people figure out how to dodge taxes. [Laughter.]
As David Corn wrote at the time, "That sounds like Bush was saying that since real rich people know how to duck the tax man, the government shouldn't bother trying to tax them.... Yeah, leave it to this president to yuk it up about tax avoidance schemes."
What's so funny? -- Excessive Wealth?
After a jab at Hollywood, our president speaks to supporters at a fundraiser, "The haves and the have mores. Some people call you the elite... I call you my base. [laughter]" {video}
What's so funny? -- Hunting Terrorists?
Well, not intended to be funny, but said with a grin and callous disregard. While on vacation, again in the wake of the 11th of September, 2001, our president was caught on film by newscasters in a disappointingly revealing moment: "I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Now watch this drive." {video}
What's so funny? -- Selecting A Commander In Chief?
I won't go on to list the unbecoming political ads starting or ending, "I'm George W. Bush, and I approve this message." Enough to remind ourselves of the recent, egregious, ad about windsurfing that our War President felt was the best way to inform our nation on the issues and distinguish the candidates' positions.
This is a disturbing pattern.
I was going to post something lighthearted that I wrote last night, but I ran across that first sobering link. So no humor today. It would feel... inappropriate.
Update [2004-10-4 14:11:00 by Carneades]: I forgot about this practice from our president's past until just now:
An alert for American voters and humane educators everywhere appeared on May 21 in the 61st through 64th paragraphs of a 76-paragraph NEW YORK TIMES feature on the childhood of Republican candidate for U.S. president George W. Bush -- if anyone noticed.
"One of the local rituals for children," reported Nicholas D. Kristof of life in Midland, Texas, when George W. was a boy, "were meetings with cookies and milk at the home of a nice old lady who represented the SPCA. The cookies were digested more thoroughly than the teachings."
"We were terrible to animals," recalled [Bush pal Terry] Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush borne turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out. "Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them," Throckmorton said. "Or we'd put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up."
Kristof made plain that "we" explicitly included George W. Bush, and that George W., the Safari Club International "Governor of the Year" in 1999 for his support of trophy hunting, was the leader among the boys who did it.
Sadly, it reminded me of a clip I caught on television a month or two ago. President Bush made a guest appearance on a fishing show. He, and the show's host, and President Bush's dog, Barney, were all on the boat together. They caught a fish (I think the president caught it) and he made a joke several times about how "Barney likes to lick 'em." Then he tossed the suffocating fish into the bottom of the boat so that his dog could nuzzle and lick the fish. With so much going on in the world, animal rights isn't a subject I think about all that often. I'm not a vegetarian. But this just seemed... cruel. I don't have a video clip, so it's hard to describe, but I went out with some friends the next night and one of them who also saw it had been as creeped out as I was.
Update [2004-10-4 13:14:27 by Carneades]: As suggested by bumblebums, you might also check out Two Faces. One Public, One Private. One Phony, One Real. by Digby.