POTUS word salad

The most powerful man in the world loses the thread in Tip City, Ohio.

Comments

[Eric Jaffa]

Bush sounds to me the same as usual in this video. I don't get why so many liberal blogs are linking to it.

[Jason]

Yeah, I don't get it either. I mean, he sounds like an idiot, but no more so than usual.

[herbert browne]

"Applehood & mother pie" just doesn't go down as well with an ingredient like "millions of lives lost" stirred in... but he was certainly making the case for more similarities than differences in the 2 wars (Iraq & VietNam) by the (merciful) cutoff cue... ^..^

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

This clip is remarkable because it shows the president going off the rails in a canned town hall meeting. It's not a press conference or any other adversarial exchange. It's one of those prefab made-for-TV meetings where every participant is a handpicked Republican and every question is screened in advance. And the POTUS still fucks it up.

[Eric Jaffa]

Lindsay Beyerstein -

What does Bush say which is "going off the rails"?

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

He's totally scattered. If I hadn't memorized the talking points he was trying to hit, I'd have no idea what he was talking about.

He's trailing off sentences and omitting key proper nouns and verbs that might give the uninitiated some sense of what he's getting at.

Then there's that sub-tangent about how we're going to keep the military all volunteer by making sure the troops' families "are happy." WTF?

[davis]

Painful; I have not been able to watch him for any length of time for a while now. He appears demented.

My favorite Bushism: "Nobody likes beheadings."

[B-Money]

I heart the POTUS! The entertainment value is priceless. Now that I do not expect him to actually do anything, the least he can do is remain funny.

Davis: I just spit water all over reading you favorite Bushism! Hilarious!! I am still laughing!!!

[Uncle Kvetch]

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told colleagues yesterday that she was incredulous after President Bush pulled her aside at the end of a meeting Wednesday and told her he did not criticize her recent trip to Syria. After all, Bush and other senior administration officials and top Republicans had slammed the speaker publicly for meeting in Damascus with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But in a private meeting with Democratic lawmakers yesterday, Pelosi said Bush told her in an unsolicited comment that it was actually the State Department that criticized her.

He's drinking again.

[John Lucid]

He does seem to be fucking up a little bit more than normal, but not by much. Word salad is often a symptom of certain mental illnesses. That this might apply to Bush should surprise absolutely fucking no one.

[aeroman]

I think some people are missing the point. It's not that Bush stumbled answering a question. It's that he completely stumbled answering the single most predictable, basic question that could possibly be posed - at a staged "town hall" meeting no less! That's beyond normal verbal incompetence. It's genuinely curious. I don't think Bush being stupid or a poor communicator explains it. NO ONE's that stupid and that poor a communicator.

[blucas!]

He's been doing this sort of thing more and more over the last two years. I think being president is really wearing on him.

[anon.]

The trouble with the internet is: one starts out reading an interesting and smart blog like this and ends up reading someone's detailed analysis of whether Homsar from homestarrunner.com speaks in word salad or not.

[Orenda]

He also says toward the end of whatever he is doing here that "Death is terrible."

Not up there with "nobody likes beheadings," but still...

[Duder]

As horrible as Commander Bunnypants has been as "President," just think how unbelievably gawdawful of a Former Presidient that jackass will be.

[kid oakland]

The first couple minutes are Bush "aw shucksism"

The going off the rails is in the Viet Nam comparison...

None of it makes much sense.

When the President says: "As opposed to breaking into North and South" it's almost like he's thinking to himself..."gee, I just fucked that up...better change topics" and, yeah, he had fucked up.

And so Bush launches into some concilitory similarities between the VietNam war and Iraq...fair-minded rhetorician that he is...

"death is terrible"...of course.

and

"TV brings the war home and messes with our frame of mind...more so with Iraq than Viet Nam"

Viet Nam had more deaths all around.
Millions, however, did not die after we left.
Viet Nam was much more present on our televisions that than the current very edited and censored war in Iraq.

[DefJef]

Bush has always been an empty suit in over his head. The press decided to frame his stupidty as being an average guy you would have a been with... meaning the guys drinking in bars are stupid morons just like the POTUS.

It's more than plain that the guy has serious mental deficits and needs prompting even having someone speak into his ear telling him what to say. And he gets confused with that too.. trying to lister to his handler and speaking and sounding intelligent.

I think the press is so embarrassed that they promoted this idiot as a president that they still sign on the the emperor's clothes meme. It's now about respecting the office... Could someone in the press actually come out and declare that the POTUS has the mental abilities of an 8th grader and the emotional maturity of a toddler. They can't... so they say nothing and the blind make excuses and the rest of us ignore the fool and can't wait for him to disappear. Meanwhile the criminals who remain behind the Oz curtain and do have brains are stealing us blind and destroying our nation.

They'll be gone in a few years... but will have left destruction on a scale rizaling Katrina.

The press will demand the barn door be shut after all the horses have been stolen less the dems do the same thing. Why didn't we do anything .. say anything?

We need a regime change bad and a new press... Our press is poluted with self serving theives who loved the party while it lasted and they are just as criminal as the repukes.

Kristol... Friedman...Miller... the list is endless but you already know.

[Uncle Kvetch]

Bush has always been an empty suit in over his head.

I beg to differ, DefJef. I don't have links handy, but it's fairly easy to dig up video clips of Bush debating and speaking extemporaneously in his TX governor days, and the difference is astounding. While he was never the sharpest knife in the drawer, he was fairly articulate and clearly able to think on his feet in those days, and you'll see none of this butchering of the language or endless strings of "um"'s. There's definitely been a sea change.

(Mind you, he was a smarmy, entitled asshole in those days too--that part hasn't changed at all.)

[The Phantom]

I'm just seeing this now, and my point was to be the same was what Eric Jaffa said it's the same as usual. It is utterly unremarkable. I waited for him to "lost the thread" but it didn't happen.

But...the man is completely inarticulate. He's kinda sorta making his points, but the guy simply cannot speak. George Bush senior had the "gift" of scattered speech, the son if far,far worse.

Compare to President Clinton, whom you could shake awake at 4am and who would be able to speak far more clearly than GWB on his best day.

[swampcracker]

He's decompensating ...

[otherpaul]

Among recent Bush-isms, after an Iraqi bombing he said that the attack 'reminds us that there is an enemy.'

[Jon H]

"While he was never the sharpest knife in the drawer"

Hell, the man's a spoon.

", he was fairly articulate and clearly able to think on his feet in those days, and you'll see none of this butchering of the language or endless strings of "um"'s. There's definitely been a sea change."

He's pretty clearly been an empty suit all his life. The string of business failures. The no-show Air Guard career. I suspect he got some 'help' with his Yale grades, and even then was probably working to his full potential. (As opposed to, say, Kerry, who probably wasn't working to his full potential, and wouldn't have had that kind of family influence.)

I think he was probably well prepped on those debates, and was able to put together a facade of competence. And, perhaps, he actually rose a little to the challenge. In any case, it was probably easier to BS about state government issues when you're 50 than it is to talk at 60, from a position of weakness, about a disastrous war or any number of other screwups.

That said, he has definitely suffered a significant cognitive decline since the 90s.

I wonder if he's really back on the booze now, or maybe even on harder drugs. I'm sure his brother Neal would be able to score some coke. (And Thai prostitutes, for that matter.)

[Uncle Kvetch]

I think he was probably well prepped on those debates, and was able to put together a facade of competence.

Oh, no doubt, Jon H...I wasn't suggesting he was competent in those days, only that he could speak off the cuff, at length, without sounding mentally deficient. Now even the facade has dropped away.

It's amusing to speculate about booze and coke and early onset Alzheimer's and so on...and it's even more amusing to contemplate the fact that another year and a half of this clown show could doom the Republican Party for the next 2 generations...but you do reach a point where that joke isn't funny anymore. However much we may protest to the contrary, this man is, to a large extent, the face that America shows the world. And that's just fucking tragic.

[cfrost]

And Duya fancies himself the American Churchill.

I’m wondering if there isn’t something we’re not being told. R. Reagan’s mental deterioration was, in retrospect, well advanced before he had gone very far into his second term. It must have been obvious, to someone anyway, that we were dealing with more than just absent-mindedness or his vaunted “hands-off management style”. Every year they send the president to Bethesda naval hospital for a check-up. Surely there must be some sort of neurological examination beyond just whacking the Chief Executive’s knees with a little rubber mallet, particularly after Reagan.

Reagan finished office with a moth-eaten cerebral cortex that, I’m willing to bet, someone knew about. As the commander in chief, and the only person authorized to issue launch orders for nuclear weapons, I very seriously doubt that any doubt is left in the White House inner circle (and among the Joint Chiefs of Staff) about the president’s mental fitness. Someday it will be revealed just exactly what the contingency plans were, and what the real chain of command was in the event that the balloon went up in the waning days of the Reagan administration. Of course Cheney and the old Reagan crew now back at 1600 Penn. Ave. would know exactly which drawer those plans were filed away in.

[cfrost]

"...doubt is left in the White House inner circle (and among the Joint Chiefs of Staff) about the president’s mental fitness."

I should say "doubt about the precise nature of the President's mental health." Clearly, Cheney et al. decided right from the start that all they needed was an affable dunce who appealed to the Republican base and who was just smart enough not to carve his initials into the surface of the oval office desk. They must get a little tired however, of having to straighten his collar and wipe the drool off his chin whenever they trot him out before the cameras, particularly as the problem seems to be getting worse. They have learned from the Reagan years though: keep the “media events”, “photo ops”, and the like, very rigidly scripted, tightly structured, keep the press corralled, and never, never, never, let any unvetted “citizens” anywhere near. Remember how Michael Deaver used to have to send in a clean-up crew to scoop up the elephant poop whenever Reagan had unloaded one of his crazy gaffes? Notice now that Bush is hardly ever allowed the opportunity to prattle on before any audience that might lob an embarrassing question at him. Of course when he can’t even manage to handle a question like the one he struggles with in the clip, you really have to wonder what’s going wrong, i.e. how he can go off perfectly laid rails at 5 mph. on an arrow-straight stretch!! WTF?