Bush, Unguarded
Immediately after yesterday’s combative press conference, President Bush retreated to a more comfortable gathering of well known press who lean hard to the right. Here he was much less guarded, and directly contradicted what he and his aides had been saying earlier in the week.
Its election season, and Bush’s constant mantra of “we will stay the course” isn’t playing well. So this week Bush’s handlers instructed him to tone it down, and make it seem like that his preoccupation with “stay the course” had changed somewhat. Its electioneering.
THE Bush administration has finally been caught in its own language trap.
âThat is not a stay-the-course policy,â Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, declared on Monday.
The first rule of using negatives is that negating a frame activates the frame. If you tell someone not to think of an elephant, heâll think of an elephant. When Richard Nixon said, âI am not a crookâ during Watergate, the nation thought of him as a crook.
âListen, weâve never been stay the course, George,â President Bush told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News a day earlier. New York Times, Staying the Course Right Over a Cliff
Yet, in the comfort of his right wing, lets not think too much, fan club, yesterday Bush said:
This stuff about “stay the course” â stay the course means, we’re going to win. Stay the course does not mean that we’re not going to constantly change. George W. Bush, White House transcript
Bush also demonstrated that he’s out of touch with the here and now:
I know it looks grim right now, but it has looked grim before in this war on terror. It looked grim right after September the 11th. It looked grim when we were so-called bogged down in Afghanistan. George W. Bush, White House transcript
One wonders if an aide even bothers tugging on his sleeve, “uh, Mr. President, we’re bogged down and its really grim in Afghanistan right now.”
Probably not. Why confuse the President with reality?