{"id":9449,"date":"2006-12-27T11:10:16","date_gmt":"2006-12-27T16:10:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9449.html"},"modified":"2006-12-27T11:10:16","modified_gmt":"2006-12-27T16:10:16","slug":"it-depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-weary-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/it-depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-weary-is\/","title":{"rendered":"It depends on what the meaning of ‘weary’ is"},"content":{"rendered":"

After noticing that Atrios had named David Ignatius today’s “Wanker of the Day<\/a>” because of his column in the Washington Post, I checked out the piece<\/a> to see what all the fuss is about. Lo and behold, it’s pretty bad.<\/p>\n

Ignatius believes that the burdens of leadership during the crisis in Iraq have taken their toll on President Bush, and that the “stress of the job — so well hidden for much of the past six years — has begun to show on Bush’s face.”<\/p>\n

Bush and his officials are strong characters; they work hard not to let you see them sweat. But the anguish and exhaustion are there.<\/p>\n

Bush is not a man for introspection. That’s part of his flinty personality — the tight, clipped answers and the forced jocularity of the nicknames he gives to reporters and White House aides. That’s why this version of reality TV is so poignant: This very private man has begun to talk out loud about the emotional turmoil inside. He is letting it bleed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ignatius seems to be suggesting that the president is somehow a sympathetic figure in this fiasco. He launched a disastrous war for reasons that turned out to be wrong; he mismanaged practically every possible angle to the conflict; and he’s left with critically-important questions for which he has no answers. <\/p>\n

Ignatius considers this and notes that Bush seemed “stressed.” Forgive me, but isn’t that what’s supposed to happen<\/i> to a president in the midst of a disastrous war of his own making? It gets back to a point from yesterday<\/a> — it’s the soft bigotry of low expectations. We’ve become so accustomed to the president appearing detached and separated from reality that if he appears vaguely concerned during a press conference about thousands of people dying, we’re supposed to be impressed. “See,” Ignatius seems to be arguing, “he’s aware of reality after all.”<\/p>\n

Nearly four years after the initial invasion, that’s setting the bar rather low, isn’t it?<\/p>\n

What’s more, Ignatius is, by all indications, wrong about the president’s state of mind.
\n<\/p>\n

Bush opened the emotional curtain at a news conference last week. A reporter noted that Lyndon Johnson hadn’t been able to sleep well during the Vietnam War and asked Bush if this was a “painful time” for him. He gave an unexpectedly personal answer: “Most painful aspect of my presidency has been knowing that good men and women have died in combat. I read about it every night. And my heart breaks for a mother or father or husband or wife or son and daughter. It just does. And so when you ask about pain, that’s pain.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, that’s a personal answer, and I don’t doubt that Bush grieves for the fallen, but Ignatius left out an important facet of this discussion. LBJ couldn’t sleep during Vietnam, but when asked about his own sleeping habits, Bush had a very different response<\/a> during a recent interview with People magazine: “I must tell you, I’m sleeping a lot better than people would assume.”<\/p>\n

Ignatius perceives “emotional turmoil inside” the president. I’m left wondering whether he’s watching a different president than the rest of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After noticing that Atrios had named David Ignatius today’s “Wanker of the Day” because of his column in the Washington Post, I checked out the piece to see what all the fuss is about. Lo and behold, it’s pretty bad. Ignatius believes that the burdens of leadership during the crisis in Iraq have taken their […]<\/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-9449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9449","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=9449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}