I'm in a charitable mood today, and take Maureen Dowd's latest NYTimes.com Op-Ed piece as more evidence that she has turned the corner from anti-Dem, tabloidy quasi-journalist to cogent, focused BushCo critic.
What say you? Vote in the Poll below after perusing these tidbits and the entire article here .
The Body Politic
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 22, 2004
WASHINGTON
Not since Jane Goodall lived with chimps in Tanzania has there been such a vivid study of the nonverbal patterns of primates engaged in a dominance display.
Bob Woodward's new book, "Plan of Attack," reveals that President Bush decided to go to war based mostly, believe it or not, on body language.
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Like his father, Mr. Bush prefers more elemental means of self-expression than the verbal. (Not long before the first gulf war, Bush senior's masseuse told a client that the president's neck was so tight, she assumed we were going to war.)
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Like the silent, cool-hand cowboy he aspires to be, who would shoot a man just because he didn't like the way the varmint was looking at him, the president preferred doing gut checks, visually sizing up advisers and Saddam, rather than dwelling on pesky facts.
He did not probe deeply to reconcile advisers' assessments. He cared only about their spine, figuratively and literally. There was no skeptical debate in the Oval Office like the one before the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
The president explained to Mr. Woodward that he had wanted to talk to Tommy Franks in person about the Iraq war plan. " `I'm watching his body language very carefully,' Mr. Bush recalled. He emphasized the body language, the eyes, the demeanor. It was more important than some of the substance. . . . `Is this good enough to win?' he recalled asking Franks, leaning forward in his chair and throwing his hand forward in a slicing motion at my face to illustrate the scene."
[...snip... read the rest here .]
