TheAgitator.com
Our Bumbling President
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008Is it me, or after seven years of daily speeches, is President Bush actually getting worse at public speaking? He’s fine when he’s reading off a teleprompter. But when he speaks extemporaneously, he’s more cringe-inducing than ever. My point here isn’t to mock the guy. We’re way past that stage. I think we’re actually to the point where you can’t help but wonder if he has some sort of disorder. Watch this video.
I hadn’t heard him speak off the cuff in a while, but yesterday I caught the tail end of a speech he gave at a convention for religious broadcasters. It was really bad. This line in particular nearly made me drive off the road:
The work before our country is hard and it has risks — it’s just hard work. And yet I don’t see that as a reason to avoid it. Our enemies are ruthless, but they’re going to be defeated. (Applause.) They’ve got the capacity to blow people up through suicide — but you notice none of the leaders ever are the suicide bombers, however. (Laughter.) But we got something more powerful: We got determination, we got will, and we got freedom at our disposal.
You know, on second thought, that might be one of the more accurate statements Bush has made in quite awhile.
What does that mean, “Freedom at our disposal”? No one in recent memory has mastered the throw away statement more so than Pres. Bush. Oh wait, Obama’s on TV talking about hope again, gotta go.
Shows like The Daily Show have been lampooning him for years just by showing clips. They don’t even have to comment. Pure comedy gold.
Makes you pine for the Dan Quayles of the past, doesn’t it?
I think he’s just not trying anymore. He’s going through the motions, but nothing he says can change his political fortunes. He’s just waiting out the clock.
I’ll tell you what, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some sort of a condition. Go onto YouTube and see if you can’t find a clip of him in the 1994 gubernatorial debates. He was a competent speaker with an effective use of the language and he partook of an extensive vocabulary quite efficiently. Now he has trouble just talking. It’s pretty disconcerting.
Radley,
Maybe…who cares? He was always an incompetent jackass and as far as I’m concerned his vocabulary has simply caught up with his stupidity. Anyway, this is the only personality disorder I think he possesses that should bother everyone:
http://www.e-thepeople.org/article/124601/view?viewtype=best&skip=20
Following up, however, apparently some doctor back in 2004 writing to Atlantic Monthly suggested that Bush’s speaking degradation was symptomatic of presenile dementia or early onset Alzheimer’s.
http://www.susanohanian.org/show_letter.php?id=383
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presenile_dementia
Which would explain a lot, actually.
Oh wow… it explains a lot. It also explains why Bush and Co have directed the FDA to ignore the real medical professionals in America. “Doctors opinions? We don’t need doctors and their so called opinions, what do they know, so they read a few books, who cares, I’m the decion maker!”
Kit Smith
> I’ll tell you what, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some sort
> of a condition. Go onto YouTube and see if you can’t find a clip
> of him in the 1994 gubernatorial debates. He was a competent
> speaker with an effective use of the language and he partook of
> an extensive vocabulary quite efficiently. Now he has trouble
> just talking. It’s pretty disconcerting.
Agreed. Apart from his disconcerting pronunciation of “nuclear” (in which he is hardly alone), he was a good speaker. Now, he definitely has a serious case of gettin’ too old.
Leshrac
> It also explains why Bush and Co have directed the FDA to ignore
> the real medical professionals in America.
The progressing retardation of Bush is exceeded by the credulity of those who believe that the FDA is behaving any differently than it has over the last forty years as a part of the permanent entrenched bureaucracy.
That said, I observe that ephedra is back on the market.
(And realize that a large part of the reason Bush was elected in the first place was because voters blanched at the prospect of Hillary Clinton puppet Al Gore being in charge of heath-care in general.)
Since when do we elect a President for his public speaking skills? I’m getting a little sick and tired of hearing “Bush this and Bush that”. Like the next clown we elect will be any better.
what collins said.
once upon a time, we had a president who was a *fabulous* speaker. women swooned and the media cried tears of joy as he spoke o so well. his spoken words were the voices of the angels, they told us.
then he cravenly allowed the bay of pigs guys to be captured while he gutlessly sat on his hands and did nothing. then he did it *again* when the russians built the berlin wall under his nose, daring him to intervene. THEN, in a transparent attempt to regain his manhood, he foolishly precipitated a situation which almost resulted in world war 3.
speechmaking is overrated.
Absolutely right, Jim. Who wants a president who can communicate? Of course we don’t elect a president for his speaking skills. We elect him because he’s the kind of guy we’d want to have a beer with. We certainly wouldn’t want to elect anyone based on ideas, competence, or integrity.
Nearly all politicians, bureaubots, policebots, and others with undeserved power similarly rate high on the narcissism scale. When there are plenty of us who explicitly dissent from ever granting you any authority over our lives, you cannot presume to have been given this authority without being a massive, narcissistic asshole. Bush is a rotten bum for a long list of reasons, but he can’t compete with the unabashed chutzpah of Kennedy, Feinstein, Schumer, Clinton, Spitzer, Reno, Allgood, et al. in presuming they know what’s best for you and that they have a God-given right to cram it down your throat good and hard.
The credibility of any such assessment is inversely proportional to the proximity of the pending election. October 2004? Yeah, right. If Bush has such a condition, I’d bet that doctor just made a lucky guess, hoping mostly to sway the election and get some publicity.
I think the don’t-give-a-shit-running-out-the-clock explanation is more credible. The man clearly cannot handle stress very well, and he doesn’t deserve the responsibility of any job more demanding than a ball collector at a driving range.
Steve,
I agree with everything you’ve said…the dementia aside, I just think that Bush’s stubborn arrogance and inability to handle the pressure, combined with what appears to be an inferiority complex on his part, combined with his inexperience in federal government and apparent utter lack of curiousity about the things about government he doesn’t understand make him an exceptionally disastrous president. I will say in Dr. Price’s defense, however, that just because his comments were made during an election year does not automatically make them partisan or inaccurate…although his opinion can hardly be considered an authoritative diagnosis given that Bush was not his patient. But it’s a reasonable enough assertion to make you wonder…and to be curious if we’ll see a similar decline in Bush’s abilities in another ten years or sooner.
Anyway, whether he’s got presenile dementia is beside the point as far as I’m concerned. Ultimately he’s a politician who’s done some pretty horrific things that have resulted in the unjustified deaths of tens of thousands of people (both American and not) in Iraq and the eroding of our freedoms here at home, so I don’t particularly care what the reasons were. He took on the responsibility of the presidency of his own accord and whether he failed because he was a stupid person to start with or because his brain functions got worse while he was in office, he’s still the one responsible…same as we’re all ultimately responsible for our actions. Perhaps that’s an unreasonable standard to hold him to if there is something wrong with him, but then when people go and seek the power to exert control over the lives of others, as he has, I don’t consider it unfair to judge them extremely harshly when they screw up…which Bush has done frequently.
My diagnosis: Senioritis
I have wondered for years how his teacher wife could put up with that without smacking him on the knuckles with a ruler.