Not Your Sweetie

Bush's Wake-Up Call Was A Snooze Alarm

"George W. Bush kept seeming to lose interest
in his own remarks last
night as the president did that rarest of
rare things -- for him -- and
held a prime-time news conference. Televised
live on all the major
networks from the East Room of the White
House, the occasion found
Bush declaring this to be "an important
moment" for America and the
world, yet he spoke with little urgency and
no perceptible passion.

Have ever a people been led more listlessly
into war? It's tempting to
speculate how history would have changed if
Winston Churchill or FDR
had been as lethargic as Bush about rallying
their nations in an hour of
crisis. There were times when it appeared his
train of thought had
jumped the tracks.


The contrast between the foggy Bush of last
night and the gung-ho
Bush who delivered a persuasive State of the
Union message to
Congress not so long ago was considerable.
Maybe Bush thought he
was, indeed, coming across as cool and
temperate instead of bored
and enervated, and this was simply a
rhetorical miscalculation. On the
other hand, it hardly seems out of order to
speculate that, given the
particularly heavy burden of being president
in this new age of
terrorism -- a time in which America has, as
Bush said, become a
"battlefield" -- the president may have been
ever so slightly
medicated.



There were brief interludes during the news
conference -- especially the
long languid pauses -- when some viewers
might have flashed back to
the presidency of Richard Nixon. That is, the
Nixon Years at their most
tumultuous and Twilight Zoney, when the old
Trickster would come on
TV and you'd sit there not just fascinated
but a trifle terrified of what
he might say, who he'd accuse of persecuting
him, and whether he
might come completely unglued or just melt
into a hideous puddle
right before your horrified eyes.