Sunday, March 07, 2004
Spontaneous Inexactitude
The Bush campaign's predictable shamelessness in using images from 9/11 in TV ads has caused predictable reactions: those with a sense of outrage are outraged, those with a sense of cynicism are cynical, and those with Bush stickers on their bumpers pretend it's completely appropriate for the president to do it.
Most of the discussion (if you can call the endless circular repeating of talking points a discussion) accepts that 9/11 was "the defining moment" of Bush's presidency. It "changed" him, the story goes; before that day he was slipping into single-term irrelevance, and after it he became our shining wartime president.
On this all agree: the only question in debate is whether using images from that awful day in campaign ads is in good taste.
But as usual, most of the discussions left us wondering about something else. Leaving aside that the prophets now casually noting the mediocrity of George Bush's pre-9/11 presidency are the very same ones who ignored the mediocrity of his whole career before his election. We're stuck on another, more mundane point:
What, exactly, did George Bush do on 9/11 that was so great?
What did he do, before, during, or after, that was so great?
Seriously -- what?
Most of the discussion (if you can call the endless circular repeating of talking points a discussion) accepts that 9/11 was "the defining moment" of Bush's presidency. It "changed" him, the story goes; before that day he was slipping into single-term irrelevance, and after it he became our shining wartime president.
On this all agree: the only question in debate is whether using images from that awful day in campaign ads is in good taste.
But as usual, most of the discussions left us wondering about something else. Leaving aside that the prophets now casually noting the mediocrity of George Bush's pre-9/11 presidency are the very same ones who ignored the mediocrity of his whole career before his election. We're stuck on another, more mundane point:
What, exactly, did George Bush do on 9/11 that was so great?
What did he do, before, during, or after, that was so great?
Seriously -- what?
