9:41am
As hatchet jobs go, this piece about Bush's forner speechwriter, Mike Gerson, by a former colleague, is Premiership quality:
...This tendency to rearrange and romanticize events could be observed in the scores of media profiles and other articles that Mike sat for over the years. When he resigned in June 2006, USA Today remembered “the man whose words helped steady the nation” after 9/11—meaning Mike, not President Bush.
...My favorite example came in a piece by Bob Woodward and two other Washington Post reporters. The writer’s writer and the reporter’s reporter spent a lot of time together, and whatever Bob got out of the deal you could always find Mike’s reward in print. There had been a September 13, 2001, Oval Office meeting attended by adviser Karen Hughes and three speechwriters—Mike, John McConnell, and me. Early in the meeting President Bush said to us, “We’re at war”—an exact quote, and not the sort of moment easily forgotten. In The Washington Post account, however, the rest of us have vanished, and the president declares, “Mike, we’re at war.”
...Woodward’s trilogy about the Bush years is a tale of speechwriting glory that Mike himself could hardly improve upon. Remember those powerful and moving addresses the president gave after September 11? According to Woodward’s State of Denial, Mike wrote all of those speeches by himself—and if there were other speechwriters, well, they must not have made it back from the evacuation:
...How do I break the news to Bob Woodward that his high-placed source wrote not a single one of the lines quoted above, at best a third of any of the speeches he mentions, and that the National Cathedral address was half-written before Mike even entered the room?
Without fear of contradiction—because it’s all in the presidential records—I can report here that Michael Gerson never wrote a single speech by himself for President Bush. From beginning to end, every notable speech, and a huge proportion of the rest, was written by a team of speechwriters, working in the same office and on the same computer. Few lines of note were written by Mike, and none at all that come to mind from the post-9/11 addresses—not even “axis of evil.”
…He allowed false assumptions, and also encouraged them. Among chummy reporters, he created a fictionalized, “Mike, we’re at war” version of presidential speechwriting, casting himself in a grand and solitary role. The narrative that Mike Gerson presented to the world is a story of extravagant falsehood. He has been held up for us in six years’ worth of coddling profiles as the great, inspiring, and idealistic exception of the Bush White House.
In reality, Mike’s conduct is just the most familiar and depressing of
Washington stories—a history of self- seeking and media manipulation that is only more distasteful for being cast in such lofty terms.
On and on it goes…
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10:29am
Corporate songs; doncha luv 'em?
I'm not sure what's the most surreal thing about this: the soft-rock screaming song, or the Spielberg-like video about...Frankfurt Airport.
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7:20pm
It's time for another dose of the insomnia cure. I'll be on Anita Anand's programme on Five Live tonight from 11pm to 1am.
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4:47pm
I'm so sorry that the comments system is totally screwed. I've had many today emailed in about the banks post, but none are up - if you're one of the commenters, I'm really sorry, and I am trying to get this fixed.
And yes, I know it's also the case that people have found it impossible to get the comments section up on their screen. Again, apologies.
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4:26pm
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the campaign to repay our debt to those Iraqis who have been helping the forces of democracy.
Here's an update from Dan Hardie, who has been coordinating the campaign. He asks that you post any reply you might have had from your MP in the comments section of his post.
There's a Downing Street petition here:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to offer asylum in the UK to the Iraqis who have been working as translators and in other capacities for the UK armed forces. More details
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7:40am
I have a piece in today's Times on the bank charges rumpus. Here's an extract:
Let’s say you’re round for dinner one night and you mention that you’re short of cash. There’s a hundred quid on my desk and I'm happy to lend it to you for a couple of weeks. When you nip upstairs to my study, you see that there’s actually two hundred there, so you borrow the lot. You don’t ask me first. You don’t tell me afterwards. You just leave, and spend it.
When I find out, you don’t apologise. You don’t think I have any right to complain. Indeed, you start attacking me – you argue that when I say you can borrow a hundred quid, that means that you can borrow as much as you can find.
Am I the only person who doesn’t even begin to understand the case against the high street bank penalty charges? People who have been given an overdraft limit with an agreed set of terms have simply ignored the limit and carried on spending with money from the bank that they haven’t been given permission to borrow. They have then been charged extra for spending the bank’s money without its agreement. But in the minds of those who are now complaining, it is not they who are at fault but their bank for having the cheek to charge them.
...We would all be so much better off if they showed some backbone, because the banks’ capitulation to their financially profligate customers is going to have a direct and damaging effect on the rest of us. According to comments from the British Bankers’ Association, the next step will be an end to free banking to recoup the money lost from the end of penalty charges on the financially reckless.
So most of us will have to pay a lot more because a few irresponsible customers think they should pay less. What, please, is the point of teaching children to be financially responsible?
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7:18pm
A pretty good line from Mitt Romney about Barack Obama:
In one week he went from saying he's going to sit down for tea with our enemies to he's going to bomb our allies. He went from Jane Fonda to Dr Strangelove in one week.
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6:35pm
Chippy? Moi?
I bow to Pooter Geek on this one.
And I'm happy to be proved wrong about Boris (although I suspect I shouldn't hold my breath). I certainly was about Ken.
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