Struggling to explain Bubble Boy

June 14, 2005

A Minnesota reader emailed me recently to note that the president will soon be in his area for one of Bush’s carefully-scripted events.

The White House confirmed on Friday that President Bush will visit Maple Grove next week to talk about senior health and Medicare.

Bush will travel next Friday to the Maple Grove Community Center, where he will take part in a round-table discussion with eight to 12 seniors and then talk to 400 to 500 people.

Of course, as is always the case, each of the seniors will be hand-picked and the event will be invitation-only. Like every Bush event of the last five years, taxpayers will pay for the president and his staff to host a scripted infomercial, but only those who already agree with everything Bush says will be eligible for a ticket.

What amuses me, however, is the complete inability of anyone, anywhere, to offer a rational explanation for the policy. We’ve all seen it for years, shaken our heads in disgust, and marveled at the lengths the Bush gang will go to in order to maintain ideological purity at these gatherings, but I’ve never once heard a coherent justification for it from Bush or his cohorts.

Indeed, it’s painful to hear them try.

The story from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune is representative of thousands of others in advance of identical events. Consider some of the rationalizing the public is told.

Attendance will be by invitation only, according to Maple Grove City Administrator Al Madsen. “This is all geared toward seniors,” he said.

That’s great, except the only seniors who’ll get invitations are those who promise allegiance to Bush and the GOP. It may be “geared toward seniors,” but if the Bush advance team sees a senior with the wrong bumper sticker, he or she will be ejected.

Michael Brodkorb, spokesman for the Minnesota Republican Party, said the invitation-only format is not unusual.

That’s true, but only because Bush has revolutionized the invitation-only format since 2001. There’s never been a president who refuses to be in the company of anyone who is not a loyal sycophant. Saying that this format is not unusual is like having a bully take some kid’s lunch money every day for a year and then telling the victim, “I don’t know why you’re complaining; this is all very routine.” It’s not unusual only because Bush has created a new, lower standard for national leaders.

“It’s an event geared toward a specific subject matter, and obviously he wants to bring in opinion leaders and individuals who are most affected by those decisions,” [Brodkorb] said.

Again, these guys can’t think of an explanation, so they come up with this nonsense. The White House can have an event on Medicare with seniors, health care officials, and local community leaders and still have some diversity of thought. The Bush White House chooses not to.

The GOP machine is filled with experienced, well-paid, expert communicators who can spin literally anything, even sending a nation to war under false pretenses and then lying about it. It wouldn’t really change anything, but just once I want some right-wing spin doctor come up with a lucid explanation for why the Bubble Boy policy is necessary and strictly enforced.

I don’t expect them to admit that Bush is afraid of dissent or fearful that someone might ask a question that he can’t answer, but I do expect some kind of explanation for why most Americans aren’t allowed to see their president in person. Is that too much to ask?

Explanation? What I wonder is how they can even get away with this even as they let us the taxpayers pay the bill’s. To say this is WRONG is an understatement.
In actuality you’d think the president would be EMBARRASSED from this 2nd 60 day tour of talking to himself in a mirror. Why doesn’t he save us all the money and just use his white house bathroom.
You can have no detractor’s talking to yourself!

  • There is no explanation. Bush wants “yes men” to marvel in his greatness. A free thinking person, who hasn’t made up his mind, is an enemy to be avoided, according to Bush. But since he can’t say that, we get nothing.

  • He does it because it works. He gets X number of dollars of positive coverage in the local and sometimes national market. Unless something highly unusual happens, there won’t be any adverse coverage.

    Look at how his supporters view him. It is just the way he is sold. A Christian man of deep conviction and honesty doing the hard work to protect our country and run the government. If you don’t know any folks like that, you can meet my family.

  • I’ve often thought this was the Face in the Crowd presidency.

    Fairly recently I discovered that Nixon staged very similar “town hall” infomercials with handpicked “citizens” and scripted questions. Bush is clearly taking this to yet another level, but he’s not without precedent.

  • These are all valid reasons: Bush does it because it works, he gets fawning press coverage, he likes sycophants, Nixon started it, etc. But, knowing what we know about Bush’s psychological make-up, I’ve had the feeling for some time that (ideology aside) he CAN’T HANDLE dissenting opinions. It’s not just that he likes yes-men; his handlers know (and are terrified) that he can very easily go “off-script” unexpectedly, saying nonsensical sentences, grimacing, swearing, getting pissed off, joking inappropriately, etc., if someone disagrees with him or if something unexpected happens. Those rare moments when the TV cameras have caught Bush unscripted have shown a moody, testy, extremely inarticulate man who has odd facial tics and mannerisms. With a script in front of him, Bush goes from simple-minded to single-minded. This is why every single second of Bush’s public time has to be scripted, controlled and rehearsed: the Social Security appearances, the campaign whistle stops, the grand speeches, the Soviet-style press conferences, even the ruthless and petty harassment of “dissenters” in the audience. It’s why Bush “doesn’t read” newspapers and gets all his news spoon-fed to him by Condi and Dick. Ideology and love of control play their parts, but “staying on message” in this fashion is the only way Bubble Boy can handle interacting with strangers, or any kind of surprise or disappointment –i.e., act minimally Presidential. Remember, this is someone who is said to have used firecrackers to blow up frogs when he was a kid.

  • An uncrystallized notion in my mind is that somehow this is prewriting what will appear in the history books. Lots of pictures of dear leader and his smiling subjects.

    And JohnnyB, my thoughts run along the same lines as yours. It seems like I remember reading that one of the audience directives for that infamous Dutch press conference – the one that the press had to leave the room – was that the audience members were instructed not to look the president in the eye. I don’t know what to make of that exactly.

  • I often had a problem grasping the importance and significance of the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union – that in order to take part in anything one had to be a member of the Party. it just didn’t make sense to me that it was so un-American. Here it didn’t matter what one’s personal views were – at the end of the day we were all Americans and that’s what counted. Now, after 5 years of this regime, I finally understand what Communist Party membership in the Soviet Union was all about.

  • JohnnyB, you are dead on. I’d add that Bush shows every classic symptom of what’s called a “dry drunk”. The single-message, simple-minded, stay-on-focus effort is necessary or else he’ll fly off the handle. The spontaneous, off-the-point semi-giggles serve him as forms of tension release. He must have his way, everything must go smoothly and (most important) predictably. Hence the highly controlled bubble.

    His religious conversion may have helped him kick the booze and drugs, but it’s just a substitute, which is why many religious people see nothing particularly religious in him – it’s just a crutch, not a guide to Christ-like action. “By their actions ye shall know them”, and I’d guess that Gore or Edwards, for example, might once in a while genuinely ask WWJD. Bush? hardly. Again, by his actions, it seems he knows nothing other than What Would Rove (Cheney, Laura) [tell me to] Do?

    I’m not making a moral judgement here (“Judge not, lest ye be judged”), just trying to suggest a personality trait behind what we see on the surface. I can’t look into his eyes and see into his soul, as he was able to do with Putie-poot Putin. For all I know he may be St. Francis re-incarnate. To me, he’s a “dry drunk” and scary enough on that account.

  • just pete writes: If you don’t know any folks like that, you can meet my family.

    Likewise, Pete, and my family is from Minnesota. They are deeply in the Christobushian cult, it is all so pathetic. Anything derogatory is just dismissed as liberal lies, please pass the Kool Aid. They’ve bought the myth of homosexual recruitment (Won’t someone please think of the children?) and have even discarded decades of respect for science in favor of believing in creationism. And some of these folks are college educated!

    If you’d have told me that this sort of anti-intellectualism and primitivism would become the dominant force in the USA in the 21st century I’d have told you you were out of your mind. Bush is exactly the president these people deserve. But what’s bothering me is that the rest of us deserve a whole lot better.

    Now why can’t some antiBush senior infiltrate this farce and pipe up with some tough questions? They must start with the GOP registered voter lists and not take anybody not on them already. Otherwise you’d think it would’ve happened by now. If you saw that Daily Show thing a few weeks back showing Bush’s “town hall meetings” contrasted with Tony Blair getting verbally dismembered by the citizenry, you’d have surely wished to see the maroon-in-chief of the USA in such a position. But it ain’t gonna happen. It’s a thick bubble.

  • It’s very hard work for bush to hear a view that disagrees with his own. It jars the brain and is most unsettling. It’s hard work to try to comprehend a viewpoint that isn’t pre-chewed by Karl. Things that require hard work also require a lot of time and effort to adjust to that hard work. The next two and half years must stretch out there for george like a long West Texas highway. Driving a road like that is hard work. Changing Social Security is like driving a long highway. Damn, it’s hard work. Really hard.

    Karl, can we go home now?

  • It’s possibly worse than you think. I just came from a DFL (the MN democratic party) meet-up tonight. There were plans in motion to hold a protest while Bush is in the area, but apparently the time of his appearance is not being released, ostensibly to thwart attempts to organize any kind of protest.

  • JohnnyB, well said. Further evidence: the first presidential debate. Wired or not, every bizarre behavior in his arsenal on full display for all to see.

  • I can always remember a sportswriters description of Sonny Liston on his way to the title, before he met Ali, and was the terror of the Western World. The writer opined that if someone cut off Sonny’s head, he would still get up and turn on the television set. Sound like someone we know?

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