Reply #51: NYT - Maureen Dowd is on the clumsy, scripted Bush teleconference:

[Nothing Without Hope]

The article is about how Bush is making a total fool of himself on so many fronts, perhaps in part because Rove is distracted by his kidney stones and legal issues. The title comes from a statement by Lyndon Johnson that the two things that make politicians behave like total fools are sex and envy. Dowd herself adds "proximity" to explain, for example, Harriet Miers.

http://select.nytimes.com/2005/10/15/opinion/15dowd.html?th&emc=th
Op-Ed Columnist

Sex, Envy Proximity

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 15, 2005

(snip)

On Thursday, again with weird and stilted body language, and an earpiece that kept falling out, W. held a teleconference and tried to use 10 American soldiers from the Army's 42nd Infantry Division in Tikrit and one Iraqi soldier as props to offer a more upbeat assessment of the security preparations for the weekend vote.

The surprise wasn't that it turned out to be rehearsed, although that angered some uniformed officers at the Pentagon who felt the troops were being politicized and used as military wallpaper. If these brave young men and women can be trusted to carry guns and kill insurgents, these officers reasoned, why can't they be trusted to speak into a microphone without stage-managing and a rehearsal from a civilian Pentagon spin doctor?

The surprise was how inept the event was. The White House was always able to pull off these stagey, scripted events during the campaign and when selling the Iraq war.

(snip)

It was hard to tell whom that teleconference was aimed at impressing - unless it was just meant to cheer up the edgy W. Instead, it just made him seem more lost than ever.