What Liberal Media?

Seriously. Something funny's afoot in the kind of press Bush is getting these days. There was that bombshell of the secret tapes, in an impressively spinless (or spineless, to the Bush haters) piece in the NYT. Every president could use such a scandal. There's the subtly appreciative tone in the article linked in the title, from the foreign press, which depicts Bush doing his usual thing. I can imagine a very different spin on Bush lecturing Putin, with Bush being portrayed as a clumsy and aggressive cowboy who unwittingly humiliated his Russian counterpart. Oh wait, that is more or less how the BBC sees it , except that now they're saying that's kind of a good thing:

The president is wonderfully un-European - refreshingly so in the view of those of us who have worked in Brussels.

He is unsmooth. He stumbles over his sentences. He uses short, plain, sometimes almost babyish words, while the sophisticated multilingual Euro crowd prefer obfuscatory long ones.

And he gets a clear message across, like it or not. He has no need of spin.

It was interesting that on the White House bus back into town, the journalists did not need to compare notes or discuss the president's words and what they meant.

On the other hand, for Chirac and Schroeder there was a discussion that would have made an old-style Kremlinologist blush.

Much of it was over my head, but my clever colleague Alec Russell from the Telegraph held his own rather well, I am pleased to report, in an argument with a Dutchman about whether a particular message was "implicit" or "explicit" in a text.

Some people think Schroeder said one thing about Nato and some think he actually meant another. Others claim that Chirac really believes Schroeder wanted to say... etc etc.

Welcome to Europe, Mr Bush.

Did these journalists finally get the memo about kowtowing to the bigwigs, or are they perhaps starting to take Bush seriously?

UPDATE: Is Bush really pulling a Hasselhoff? More here. It's an opinion piece in the Telegraph.

...as I listened to George W Bush telling Europeans that his campaign for liberty and democracy arose directly from ideals that had originated with them. You could almost hear the injured bewilderment in his voice: this was all your idea in the first place.

- posted by Anonymous @ Friday, February 25, 2005