As I watch Bush’s speech this morning given to a veteran’s group, even I am surprised by the underwhelming applause at all of the staged pause points. What’s more entertaining is watching Bush wait for the applause to end well beyond the point that it has effectively tailed off. He seems to be speeding up and pushing through right now, but it is interesting. The pauses are still rather, well, dead. He stands there to bask in the glow of his latest proclamation, and, well… it just isn’t there.
Mr. Bush, is it hard to give your spiel in front of a group of people who’ve actually been to war? Who know what it’s like? Who might be just a little bit less enthused about your policies of aggression knowing that men and women like themselves will die to enforce them, and understanding just what that is like?
Maybe it’s just the acoustics of the feed I’m watching right now – maybe you’re wildly popular and I have cotton in my ears – but you seem to be expecting the kind of responses you got from your hand-picked Rovian audiences in the past. You can’t really expect that when you have real members of the public in front of you.
That you’re talking about Iran the same way you talked about Iraq – “pursing diplomacy while threatening consequences” while all the while your decision on a response was made long before the crisis – is making us all nervous. You will not fool all of the people this time again, methinks. Especially, I suspect, those guys who’ve already offered up their lives for their government and know exactly what that means.
Maybe the lack of applause is a sign of hope for the rest of us. Let us hope it’s not simply bad acoustics.
Professional computer geek and linguist living in Germany, doing infosec stuff and being the freakiest mother ever.
