A Piece of Work

June 29th, 2005 at 17:07 Björn Hallberg

As capitalized on by the Daily Show, George W Bush last week, during a press conference at the European Union Summit went on to say the following. The trouble starts, of course, the moment W is forced to answer unscripted questions. The first thing he does is cheer for John Bolton and then comes a hard question about relations …

Q: [...] that the partnership has even become again a friendship between Europe and United States, and how you see the role of the Luxembourg presidency in that issue?

PRESIDENT BUSH: [...] In terms of your Prime Minister, he’s an interesting guy. (Laughter.) He’s a lot of fun to be around. He promotes serious business in a way that endears himself to people. And so I think his presidency has been an important presidency for the EU during difficult times, and he’s handled it well. And I was going to say he’s a piece of work, but that might not translate too well. Is that all right, if I call you a “piece of work”? (Laughter.)

PRESIDENT JUNCKER: Okay.

Calling the president of Luxembourg a “piece of work” is hardly a compliment in english either. Such ignorance and patronizing on top of that. Then comes a question about Iraq and W continues laughing in the face of the person asking the question.

Q Mr. President, we were told that you planned to sharpen your focus on Iraq. Why did this become necessary? And given the recent surge in violence, do you agree with Vice President Dick Cheney’s assessment that the insurgency is in its last throes?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Adam, I think about Iraq every day — every single day — because I understand we have troops in harm’s way, and I understand how dangerous it is there [...] And so, you know, I think about this every day, every single day, and will continue thinking about it, because I understand we’ve got kids in harm’s way.

Repetition is good from a rhetoric standpoint. But is “thinking about it” enough?

And dang those Europeans for having such tricky names btw. George W Bush also goes on and on about what “we talked about” and as Jon Stewart, notes, given the 2h lunch meeting, the average topic time (13 topics mentioned) must have been pretty short.

Rude Pundit goes on to express, in a somewhat vulgar way, what this boils down to in a piece aptly named “Our Little Thinkin’ President.” Rude Pundit points out the concession of sorts in that W said that “many of those folks being detained [...] are dangerous people.” And also that in the cases where the US can prove that released detainees did go “on to the battlefield again”, those may very well have done so just because of the treatment they received at the hands of the US.

Also reported by Dvorak.

Entry 6 filed under: North America. This entry was posted 3 years, 6 months ago. RSS feed for comments on this post.