{"id":9136,"date":"2006-11-22T09:43:38","date_gmt":"2006-11-22T14:43:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9136.html"},"modified":"2006-11-22T09:43:38","modified_gmt":"2006-11-22T14:43:38","slug":"feeling-warmth-through-the-bubble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/feeling-warmth-through-the-bubble\/","title":{"rendered":"Feeling warmth through the bubble"},"content":{"rendered":"

The president’s trip to Vietnam wrapped up a couple of days ago, but an alert reader sent me a heads-up on this report<\/a>, from the International Herald Tribune, about the “connection” Bush made with the Vietnamese people.<\/p>\n

On Saturday, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, conceded that the president had not come into direct contact with ordinary Vietnamese, but said that they connected anyway.<\/p>\n

“If you’d been part of the president’s motorcade as we’ve shuttled back and forth,” he said, reporters would have seen that “the president has been doing a lot of waving and getting a lot of waving and smiles.”<\/p>\n

He continued: “I think he’s gotten a real sense of the warmth of the Vietnamese people and their willingness to put a very difficult period for both the United States and Vietnam behind them.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hadley is one of the Bush team’s worst spinners and, frankly, I feel a little sorry for him trying to explain this one. I don’t know how he defines “connected,” but exchanging waves from a speeding car is hardly the ideal way to get “a real sense of warmth.”<\/p>\n

I know conservatives hate Bush-Clinton comparisons, but in instances like these, they’re quite telling.
\n<\/p>\n

In 2000, tens of thousands of Hanoi’s residents poured into the streets to witness the visit of the first American head of state since the end of the Vietnam War. Mr. Clinton toured the thousand-year-old Temple of Literature, grabbed lunch at a noodle shop, argued with Communist Party leaders about American imperialism and sifted the earth for the remains of a missing airman.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bush, meanwhile, “connected” with the Vietnamese people by looking at them wave at his speeding car.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it marks a pattern for nearly all of this president’s foreign travel. When Clinton visited India in 2000, he spent a week touring the country, “famously visiting rural villages and wowing Indian politicians during a speech before the Parliament.” When Bush visited India<\/a> this year, he visited no museums, no cultural or historical landmarks, had no meaningful interaction with the Indian people, and skipped the Taj Mahal.<\/p>\n

Similarly, in November 2005, Bush took a week-long trip through East Asia. As he barnstormed<\/a> through Japan, South Korea and China, the president “visited no museums, tried no restaurants, bought no souvenirs and made no effort to meet ordinary local people.”<\/p>\n

And in Vietnam, Bush is content to “connect” with regular people through a moving car’s window. I find it impossible to relate on a personal level, but Bush apparently just doesn’t seem interested — in anything.<\/p>\n

Why this man asked to be a world leader, despite having little to no interest in the world, is something I will never understand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The president’s trip to Vietnam wrapped up a couple of days ago, but an alert reader sent me a heads-up on this report, from the International Herald Tribune, about the “connection” Bush made with the Vietnamese people. On Saturday, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, conceded that the president had not come into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}