As if he didn't already have enough to worry about, Dear Leader is about to lose some crucial support. His toehold at the New York Times has just gotten a bit less secure, as Elizabeth Bumiller hangs up her pompoms:
In today's New York Times Week in Review,
la Bumiller offers her very own GBCWH diary, in which she bids a fond farewell to the beat she's covered so, um,
effectively for the last 5 years. She starts by noting something that might be a revealing insight into why she has been such a shameless apologist for the Chimp in Chief:
My first day on the White House beat was Sept. 10, 2001.
So she never had the opportunity to observe Bush in his "pre-heroic" period. I guess that could explain why she's always portrayed him as though he sprang fully-formed from the head of Zeus.
A possible reason why she's lasted as long as she has:
....one senior editor at the paper cheerily told me that he could not stand to cover the beat for a single day.
Translation: they can't find anyone else who can stick to the talking points without having their head explode (messy!).
Here are the moments that made her heart beat faster:
I was steps away when President Bush grabbed the bullhorn that day in Lower Manhattan. I was in Aqaba, Jordan, in June 2003 when he and the Israelis and Palestinians pledged once again to make Middle East peace. I was at Bratislava Castle in Slovakia when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia archly noted to Mr. Bush that the American electoral college was a secret ballot and "it is not considered undemocratic, is it?"
And how are those achievements working out for ya, Liz? Let's see: one Osama bin Laden still on the loose, one Israeli/Palestinian conflict farther from resolution than ever, one Russian President acting more "undemocratic" with every passing month. Hm.
Maybe we should turn to the answers to all those questions that have been keeping you up at night:
Here are some other misperceptions about the beat:
The White House doesn't care about the press.
Only Ann Coulter and my dumbest cat still believe this.
The televised daily briefing was the essence of my job.
No, no, no. The briefing is theater and has very little to do with covering the White House.
...we worked the phones in concentric circles inward, from members of Congress who were mad at the president, to put-upon State Department officials, to those ubiquitous "Republicans close to the White House." If we were lucky, we could get someone in the West Wing to confirm what we had.
Not incidentally, the anonymous Republicans were often White House-sanctioned leakers -- lobbyists, former party officials -- who would pass on information West Wing officials wanted out. ....
and that's how the
real reporters do it!
White House reporters are ideological.
Most reporters I know are not passionately political, left or right. ....
Here's proof of her impartiality:
One time I wrote that Mr. Bush dismissed an Osama bin Laden videotape at his ranch by saying "I didn't watch it at all." The actual quote was "I didn't watch it all."
I got a furious letter from a reader saying that I was trying to make Mr. Bush look bad, when in fact I was tired and had typed the quotation from a transcript without my reading glasses in a dingy Waco, Tex., hotel room..
Ooops!
The president is a personable guy.
Actually, most regular White House reporters have a friendly, towel-snapping relationship with Mr. Bush, but like just about everyone, he can be short-tempered, impatient and brusque. When I asked Mark McKinnon, the president's friend and campaign media adviser, if he ever openly disagreed with Mr. Bush, his response was that "I prefer for others to go into the propeller first."
Let's just ask Helen Thomas about that towel-snapping, shall we?
There's much much more hilarity in store if you follow the link above.
Sadly, Ms. Bumiller does not tell us where we'll find her byline in the future..... Any suggestions?