November 22, 2003
HOW'D "STUPID" GET SO SMART?:
Real Bush 'At Odds with Media Caricature' (Chris Moncrieff, 11/21/03, The Scotsman)
US President George Bush is “totally at odds” with his media image, Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell said today. [...]“He is personally extremely engaging. He has a well-developed sense of humour, is self-deprecating and when he engages in a discussion with you he is warm and concentrates directly on you.
“He looks you straight in the eye and tells you exactly what he thinks.”
Mr Campbell, stressing that the President was “totally at odds” with his media image, went on: “I was not persuaded by what he said, but I was most certainly surprised at the extent to which the caricature of him was inaccurate.”
As opposed to those accurate caricatures. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 22, 2003 3:17 PM
It's got to infuriate the Ted Ralls of the world that the grotesque and febrile products of their imagination fail to find correspondence in the real world.
Nah, he'll get it over it. Probably with some strip depicting Israelis as bloodthirsty, land-gobbling savages.
http://www.ucomics.com/rallcom/2003/10/06/
Posted by: R.W. at November 22, 2003 6:25 PMA continent that relies on Michael Moore, Paul Krugman, Molly Ivins, The Nation and The New York Times to get its image of Bush is going to be a little misguided in their perceptions, and the people living there are going to be surprised when they meet him face to face, just as they were 20 years ago when they allowed some of the same news sources to shape their image of Reagan.
Posted by: John at November 22, 2003 6:55 PMMenzies Campbell states Bush "tells you exactly what he thinks," but does not, as your entry title claims, indicate that his thinking is particuarly "smart."
Posted by: Russ at November 23, 2003 11:23 AMI think he's refering to that continental archipelago whose main islands are centered along the urbanized West Coast and in New York and New England, with various outcroppings at state sponsered university towns in between.
It's really not at all hard for the most powerful man in the world to charm people. One big problem with Bush is that he's too unenergetic to do it very often. On his recent trip to Australia, when he barely got out of his limo, he got outcharmed by the Communist Chinese boss who showed up the next day and did the kind of touristy things that Australians appreciate in foreign leaders. That's pretty bad when you let some ChiCom functionary outcharm you in Australia!
Posted by: Steve Sailer at November 24, 2003 3:09 AMI don't think he's unergetic, Steve, but that he really doesn't care.
Posted by: David Cohen at November 24, 2003 1:28 PM