White House Correspondence Assoc.’s Dinner…
May 13th, 2006
It is already old news apparently, but I’ve only just now seen the videos from the White House Correspondence Association dinner.
While seeing the first video, I felt at first a very strong cognitive dissonance as a fellow commenter on SE described it.
The dissonance arose because usually it takes intelligence and self-awareness for a person to be able to laugh at himself. As I don’t consider George W. Bush to be intelligent or self-aware, seeing him take part in his own roast gave me a start.
At first, seeing Bush make fun of himself seemed to say:
“I am not detached from reality– obviously I know what people are saying and can even laugh at it — But I am doing what I think is right and never mind my popularity”.
Holy Gristles Batman! It almost made me like the guy, but only for a few seconds, because–
Next I watched Stephen Colbert really fire up that roast and it was while watching the amazing testes that Colbert demonstrated, noting that each and every one of his jokes were about the real substance and not superficial back-slapping slapstick, that it finally clicked:
Bush’s PR guy is a fucking genius.
In G.W’s ‘roast’ by Steve Bridges the jokes were related to his occasional mispronunciation or his ‘cowboy’-ish nature. To rephrase: the jokes involved every trait of the president (and not the presidency) that the media focused-on that have nothing to do with his policy.
So it boils down to being just another type of spin, albeit an ingenious one that is designed to make it seem like the reason Bush is disapproved by two thirds of the American public is because he stumbles in his speech and not because his administration is the worst, most corrupt and least democratic administration since Nixon’s.
The message that Bush’s PR guy tried to convey is that this president’s low approval ratings are a temporary popularity glitch that will blow over while Colbert’s message was that the low approval ratings represent a dissatisfaction with a presidency riddled with corruption and incompetence. Colbert didn’t spare the correspondents themselves and skewered the media for allowing Bush to spin it all his way.
Colbert made it obvious to me that without him for balance the correspondents would have returned to stuffing their smug faces without flinching, right after Bush used them to further spin his agenda.
