"What Counts Is What a Guy Does When He's Not Talking"

The inimitable Mark Steyn is his usual brilliant in The London Telegraph, Saturday:

.... The Madness of George Dubya is really an example of the madness George Dubya causes in his opponents. Let us take it as read that he is not as verbally fluid as his predecessor, who was positively brimming with fluids. On the other hand, few Democrats are, either. Senator Bob Graham was on television last Sunday, repeatedly referring to Sars as "Scars", but no snooty media types made cracks about it....

The chaps who dismiss Bush as a moron forget that what counts is what a guy does when he's not talking. It's true that he didn't know the name of the leader of Wackistan before he became president. But one advantage of that is that he isn't the prisoner of his past the way, say, Chirac, Schröder and Putin are. Chirac the sleazy deal-maker, Schröder the 1960s anti-American peacenik and Putin the KGB hardman seem incapable of rising above their CVs.

That's the subtext of the Russian president's extraordinary performance with Tony Blair the other day. How would you feel if you were Putin? Your guys kill more people in a single Moscow theatre than Bush's do liberating Baghdad. Bush wraps Iraq up in a month, while you've spent years killing hundreds of thousands and reducing Grozny to rubble and your boys are still coming home in boxes....

Too many commentators — including editorialists and other writers, and actors and comedians — tend to judge George W. Bush (and everybody else, too, I suppose) by how well he does with words, because words are their stock in trade. They seem to forget that life is more than words.

(Thanks, Kathryn.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 05/05/03 09:52:27 AM
Categorized as Political.