Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 03/11/06 11:56 am:
the scarey thing to me about bush is he thinks he is right, so right in fact that he tends to skip over the part about letting everyone else know why he thinks he is right.

is that really true ?

I think Elliot hit on something on his 2nd point worth expanding on . Helen Thomas wrote a column yesterday in The Nation called :Lap Dogs of the Press . She amazingly accuses the press of being too soft on Bush . She claims the tough questions were not asked by the press in the run up to the war in Iraq. Of course the transcripts of press conferences during the time tell a different tale.

Well ole Hellen's answer is for the press to get MORE HOSTILE with the President :

It is past time for reporters to forget the party line, ask the tough questions and let the chips fall where they may.

Pehaps she has been nodding off in some of the more recent press conferences .

What Elliot said is that Bush tunes out all the negativity and to a degree he is correct .But I also think that he has come to realize that when he tries to get his message out ,the MSM is not an honest broker of the news . The Washington Compost reported two weeks ago that one reason the adminstration bungled its response to the Dubai ports deal is that its communications office was still dealing with the media's non-stop coverage of Dick Cheney's hunting accident.

At the same time, White House officials well know that potentially explosive issues are regularly churning through the federal bureaucracy. An effective operation seeks to identify and respond to such matters before they become political problems. That plainly did not happen here, as even White House officials acknowledge.

The political breakdown was partly a matter of timing. The controversy started to build when Bush's top aides were consumed with the fallout of Vice President Cheney's recent hunting accident.

Before they had a chance to frame the debate Chucky Shumer was going on Michael Savage's show and doing his chicken little act.

But look at how the press reported it . They dutifully reported Shumer's and Hillary's claims that the deal weakens national security . Then when Bush caved ;they are now reporting how by not letting the deal go through we are weakend and they have suddenly discovered that foreign companies run port operations all ove the U.S.

The question then becomes ;why should he be open to the press when they do not report his message honestly ;especially when there are other means to get his message out ?

Here is a subtle example of the press in action . From Reuter's editorial policy :

Reuters news operations are based on the company's Trust Principles which stipulate that the integrity, independence and freedom from bias of Reuters must be upheld at all times.
Reuters has strict policies in place to ensure adherence to these principles. We are committed to accurate and balanced reporting...

...We do not take sides and attempt to reflect in our stories, pictures and video the views of all sides. We are not in the business of glorifying one side or another or of disseminating propaganda. Reuters journalists do not offer their own opinions or views.

So they of course would have a problem if one of their editors decided to post this picture of Cheney taken at the U.S. Labor Department's 2006 National Summit on Retirement Savings by one of their photographers:




Wouldn't they ?????

Clarification/Follow-up by BeelzeBUSH on 03/11/06 2:24 pm:
Tom, I can imagine the photo opportunities if he was key speaker at an NRA convention after his quayle hunting hobby went awry. George :)