Bush at 30 Kilofeet

Betty the Crow reads Slate's John Dickerson on the Bush video. She's not impressed. By anybody concerned. (Via Brad Delong)
Slate’s John Dickerson is alarmed by Bush’s Katrina catalepsy

As he weighed in yesterday on the now-infamous video of Silent George Bush attending a pre-Katrina video conference, John Dickerson unleashed a burst of inadvertent clarity that perfectly encapsulates what’s wrong with Bush, the administration and the reporters who cover both.

Dickerson, the former Time Magazine Washington correspondent who now holds down the Ruminant desk at Slate, is shocked and alarmed by the president’s lack of engagement with the briefing from National Hurricane Center officials and then-FEMA chief Michael Brown (who is, terrifyingly, beginning to look like the most competent administration official involved in the response to Katrina). “I don’t know what question the president should have asked,” Dickerson plaintively writes toward the end of his column, “but shouldn’t he have asked something?”

Hmmm, yes; probably so. “What in the hell am I doing here” would be a good place to start. But that little cri de coeur pales next to something Dickerson wrote earlier in the piece.


Based on what I’d been told by White House aides over the years, I expected to see the president asking piercing questions that punctured the fog of the moment and inspired bold action. Bush’s question-asking talents are a central tenet of the president’s hagiography. He may not be much for details, say aides, but he can zero in on a weak spot in a briefing and ask out-of-the-box questions. I have been repeatedly told over the years that he once interrupted a briefing on national defense to pose a 30,000-foot stumper: What is the function of the Department of Defense?

I don’t know what’s most distressing about those 163 words: that Dickerson believed what Bush allies told him about the president, that the president would interrupt a defense briefing to ask what the Pentagon is for, that the best and brightest of the 21st century were stumped by the question, that Bush aides thought the anecdote was so flattering to Bush that they told it repeatedly or that a veteran reporter can reference “the view from 30,000 feet” without the slightest hint of embarrassment or irony.


Hepatocerebral degeneration or is he just drunk again?

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