Which part of that article in the Financial Times has anything to do with the alleged question about Brazil?
I must have missed it.
From the Financial Times article:
Apparently indicating nothing of the sort, JacquesAss. Is it just me, or is this a case of the reporter really stretching things to try and make a point. Bush decidedly did not say, “I did not know this, but Chirac assures me French food is quite good.” he simply said Chirac keeps telling him how good it is. Hell the exchange could have gone something like this…
BUSH: Hey Jacques?
Jacques: Hey George, have you eaten yet, our food here is quite good.
BUSH: I am hungry.
JACQUES: Good I will have the chef prepare some of our famous toast, fried potatoes and onion soup. It is all quite wonderful I assure you.
BUS: Yes, you mentioned that already.
Yeah, it’s the kind of thing you say to someone when you’re a guest at their house: “Hey, Martha, I can’t wait to taste that meatloaf of yours! Bob keeps telling me how terrific it is!”
Ace’s link also claims that:
Whereas a bunch of other sources, such as this one, claim:
And they have a clip from the event that bears this out.
What did David Gregory have to say about it?
So, despite everyone’s characterization of it as a “nasty little attack” or a “hissy fit,” looks like it didn’t bother Gregory too much. (Hey, didn’t xenophon say that Gregory probably didn’t think it was funny?)
And, in support of my comments about Clinton earlier in the thread, does anyone remember hearing any flak about this? I sure don’t.
Free ride! Free ride! :rolleyes:
Neurotik, sorry, didn’t mean to lose you…
The link was to buttress the argument that the press does indeed cover for Bush, which allows us move on to debate whether the press cover-up was worse than the gaffe, one of the original questions of the OP.
Pldennison, seems to understand this, hence the ol’ ploy of his digging for comparable Clinton misdeeds – PLD, turning to you, you seem to argue that our current presidents track record of petty anger and embarassing comments is at all comparable to his predecessor. Would you like to state that, so I can tear it apart, or would you rather just continue to compare apples and oranges on your slideshow of a post?
Your argument is meaningless cherry-picking. Watch, I’ll do it too! Does anything stack up to the embarassement and ridicule Bush brought on the presidency for this?
“There’s Adam Clymer – major league asshole – from the New York Times,” Bush said.
“Yeah, big time,” returned Cheney.
http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/09/04/cuss_word/
Free ride indeed :rolleyes:
Face it. The man has a track record of making asine, juvenile comments. If other countries want to call him all that, and callow besides, they don’t have to look so hard, nor create incidents out of whole cloth – a la Mr. Gore.
Don’t take my word for it, take Crossfire’s! There appears to be a new gaffe, the “God Dang it” incident at a Breast Cancer fund-raising run (apparently GW still hasn’t learned about the difference between “Hot” mikes and “Cold” ones) In this excerpt, Dee Dee Myers (sitting in for Begala) makes the same point – Bush has an awful, awful track record when it comes to opening his mouth:
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0206/03/cf.00.html
Is there anyone here who doesn’t concede that the man is Gaffe prone?
So we are into the fourth page of Bush-bashing based on an incident which has not been proved and which most probably never happened but it is “so like Bush that even if it didn’t happen it could well have happened”. Ummm, ok, carry on and have fun.
Ace, I’m pretty sure that you couldn’t tear a hole in a piece of Swiss cheese. In any case, my argument is that:
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Any given U.S. President is capable of saying something stupid into a microphone. If you want to argue that my Clinton example is not germane to that premise, take your best shot. If you don’t like that example, you can also use Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Or Gerald Ford’s comments about Poland not being under Soviet control. Or anything from the Nixon tapes.
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We have not established with any degree of confidence that the comment on which the OP is based even happened.
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The incident from your FT link has obviously been blown way out of proportion, and in fact the FT columnist completely misrepresents what happened. Watch the clip yourself–don’t take my word for it.
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And shouldn’t the FT be more concerned with their own gaffe-prone Prince Philip, anyway? That guy makes anyone else look like a piker.
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Bush hardly got a “free ride” on the Adam Clymer thing. It was all over the papers for days.
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So the President, when told that his live feed to a charity event wasn’t working, said, “God dang it?” Sacre bleu! The horror! What exactly should his reaction have been? “Oh, fiddlesticks, now I’m ever so angry?”
Interesting that you chose not to quote the end of that exchange:
- Far from getting a free ride, the press obsesses over everything Bush says–because they’ve already decided that he’s stupid and prone to making gaffes. They’re looking for them. And you accuse me of cherry picking? They take individual words and three- or four-word bits from what might have been five hundred word speeches. I’ll bet that if you wanted to look back through Clinton’s or Reagan’s speeches, you’d find plenty of zingers, too.
You know what the President said?
When a phone Snafu made him see red?
He muttered, “God dang it!”
He practically sang it.
How horrible! Off With His Head!
Guess I was wrong about that, wasn’t I? I think Gregory made his point pretty well regarding the hypocrisy of Bush’s remark, though.
Defend it all you want, it still comes down to a stupid, petty half-witticism from a small man.
And just for the benefit of all of you decrying the “hijacking” of the thread away from the incident mentioned in the OP, I fully agree that there’s no compelling evidence that that specific incident ever happened. Whoopee.
Actually, Bush has an MBA.
Carry on. Just doing my bit to fight ignorance.
pldennison ,
Are you saying that all presidents in the past have made more or less their share of stupid statements? Is it only me who has a feeling that Bush has built up an unusual repertoire of ridiculous statements?
You didn’t lose me. I knew exactly the point you were trying to make. I just thought you did a terrible job at making it.
How do the press cover for Bush? Because they didn’t print “securitize?” Riiiiiiight. I’d much rather have the press trumpeting up a slip of the tongue than delve into the deeper effects of policy. :rolleyes:
As they said about Daly: “Write what he meant, not what he said.”
Second, the European press must also be in on this big cover-up. Which isn’t surprising as the press on the other side of the Atlantic is generally right-wing and fond of Bush.
As I said at the beginning of this threat, I read the Guardian and the Independent daily, and I never saw any mention of these gaffes that are reported in this guy’s column. In fact, I don’t think the Financial Times reported them outside this column. Maybe the press has finally grasped what is important and what is not important, although I doubt it. Much more likely is that people just don’t care. It’s not like the press is covering up the investigation into how the FBI and intelligence agencies screwed up.
Frankly, I’d much rather have the press reporting on the truly wasteful and stupid policy initiatives that the Administration is pushing…like missile defense, slapping down the CAFE increases, drilling on federal land, etc. It’s just petty and moronic to focus on slips of the tongue when there are other things to criticize. And it makes the people doing the carping (unless done as a joke, cuz the screw-ups are generally pretty funny) sound petty and mean, as well. Just like Republicans focusing on Clinton’s sex life, which I found appalling and wasteful.
I checked the link provided above by pldennison and the recording, and apparently, the journalist only said “pouvez-vous ajouter vos sentiments?”. He didn’t say nor “de cette question” nor “a cette question”. So either the recording has been edited out, either the mistake has been invented out of thin air to ridicule the journalist…
Thanks,Sam, I stand, er, sit corrected. 
I have to thank you for finding that Clinton/Ginsburg story- I was going to look for it myself. I saw that clip one of the very few times I watched Rush’s tv show in 1993. He played that clip, saying that he had gotten several calls from people saying that that incident of temper was the beginning of the end for Clinton. Rush said that he at first hadn’t thought it was so bad, but that after watching it again, that he agreed with those callers, and that Clinton had (IIRC) “lost it.” So Clinton didn’t get a free ride from Rush at least.
I think the whole “God Dang It” fuss is really stupid, myself. Who hasn’t muttered something similar in similar circumstances?
As regards the OP, there is this, which I can’t read (I didn’t study Latin either :D). If somebody can read it, maybe we can get a bit more info. It looks like it’s dated 4/28, so maybe it’s a source for the Spiegel story. JDM
Yes, I’m saying exactly that. Anyone remember Reagan’s “The bombing begins in five minutes” remark in front of a hot mic? It’s my contention that more attention gets paid to Bush’s gaffes because they get reported more, for the simple reason that the press has already decided he’s stupid, so every gaffe is considered newsworthy.
Otherwise, what Neurotik said.
There was another incident, early in Clinton’s Presidency, when he swore into an open mike.
The setup: as I remember it, there was some sort of minor photo-op ceremony in the Rose Garden with a bunch of kids, the Mayor of DC, and a congressman. Clinton’s handlers come and pull him away from his important work to attend it. When he gets there there he finds a lot of milling around and basically everything is a “cluster”. He’s pissed, and grabs an aide, with the live podium humming nearby.
(again, as I remember it) “C’mere - c’mere! - listen goddammit. You can’t do this to me … You can’t bring me out here with the mayor, and the congressman, and all, and nothing’s ready to go.”
The soundbite received a good bit of airplay at the time, and was held up by certain people in the conservative media as a representation that behind closed doors, Clinton was a rageaholic tyrant.
Anyway. As far as W’s alleged “Do you have blacks there?”, I’d be somewhat more inclined to believe it if he had then followed up with “I have two of them in my cabinet.”
And count me in as one who thinks W acted very immature and non-presidential when he snapped at Mr. Gregory for speaking French. Especially since he is so quick to trot out his “Mi nombre es Peggy Hill” routine every time he sees a Latino voter.
The Gaffe that Won the Election for JFK:
Ike’s Yogiism of the Week:
Eisenhower was infamous for mangling of English. He repeatedly suffered from an inability to remember on command words and phrases. This is known as … well, even Cecil isn’t quite sure what it’s called.
Sua
Y’know, even the church now distinguishes the serial sins from the singular. Maybe y’all should too?
Pldennison, yes, any president is capable of a few malaprops, but from Bush it’s a lot more than a few. Again, it’s a track record. The press didn’t have to “decide” that Bush is a stumbling bufoon, it smacked them about the face like trout to a hibernating bear – they finally woke up and jumped on it.
Since we’re still doing slideshows – if anyone has a president saying something comparable to “Major League Asshole,” in a live event, I’d like to hear it.
That Bush is a victim of some liberal media bias is laughable. Clinton had every word parsed for evidence of murder, serial rape, his wife’s lesbianism, whatever else, for years – you think there were gaffes there that Rush and the rest of the Frothies said “Oh, we’ll give him a free pass on this?!” Right, please forward your complaints on press mendacity to A. Gore, TN.
Again, the man has a track record. But don’t take my word for it – watch a random hour of tape from Bush and, well, any other president. Clinton could hold a room without notes for hours. Bush barely holds press conferences, and when he does, he can hardly go through a sentence without mispronouncing something. Especially the single syllables… what’s up with that?
Aside to Neurotik… well, I agree with you that the Guardian is irreplacable, and that we’d all be better off with public reporting on CAFE standards, ANWR, etc. But I’m not sure that pushing the press to gloss over the verbal flaps would give us that. Perhaps they’re so lowest common denominator that a press that doesn’t investigate funny gaffes investigates nothing!
I’m probably just as entertained by this silly stuff as anyone else. Hell, that’s probably why I watch CROSSfi-er…
For the record…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61118-2002Jun4.html
…the evidence is mounting. My doubt is waning. I’m starting to think he did say it. The Der Spiegel article is apparently convoluted, but I think the above link provides more solid facts.
For the record…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61118-2002Jun4.html
…the evidence is mounting. My doubt is waning. I’m starting to think he did say it. The Der Spiegel article is apparently convoluted, but I think the above link provides more solid facts.