Texas Trades AROD to Yankees
The current book on George W. Bush (as suggested by… the current book on Bush is that he is a smart man with keen political insights and gut-level instincts, whose intellectual curiosity just happens to be relatively limited.
Some comments he made last September about not reading the newspaper, and considering his cabinet “objective”, caused a minor stir. A google search for the quotations turns up a fair amount of left-wing carping about how insular this tight group causes a “Bubble-effect”, and a fair amount of right-wing carping on how Bush is well-advised to avoid the “Elitist Liberal Media”.
Bush’s September interview on the RNC News Network.
BUSH: I get briefed by Andy Card and Condi in the morning. They come in and tell me. In all due respect, you’ve got a beautiful face and everything.
I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what’s moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves. But like Condoleezza, in her case, the national security adviser is getting her news directly from the participants on the world stage.
BUSH: I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.
On the other hand, as George Carlin once said, the media acts like a bulletin board for the people in charge anyway, sooo…
The newspaper-reading habits of males under the age of, say, 18 looks to be the Comics and the Sports section. I was a little different. When I read the papers in the middle school library, I would read the Comics section and the USA Today Life Section. This was due to the fact that I had less than zero interest in sports at the time… I think it might be difficult to find a boy less interested or less knowledgable of the world of professional sports than I was at the age of 13. On the other hand, I did find the “Late Night Wars” between Jay Leno and (tight-lipped) David Letterman an oddly fascinating storyline.
Gradually, the world opens to the newspaper reader, and they realize that they should really follow the going ons of world players, since they have a tendency to affect people’s lives.
Getting back to Bush: he doesn’t read the newspaper…
Except for the Sports Section. He reads the Sports Section.
“I was just as surprised as the Yankees fans and Red Sox fans when I opened up my paper today,” President Bush told NBC television in an interview at the Daytona 500. “It, obviously, is a big deal. A-Rod’s a great player and the Yankees are going to wind up with a heck of a team with him in the infield.”
It’s good to see that the president is helping us out with Pro- Sports Analysis.