Times sneers at Bush’s boffo debate performance

Further proof that Bush won the debate: Alessandra Stanley in the ever-more-alienated-from-reality New York Times paints Bush as hyperaggressive in the debate, as on the verge of losing control, as trying desperately and repeatedly failing to connect in faux-folksy ways with his audience, while Kerry, accordingly to Stanley’s account, remained masterfully cool and in charge. “The arena was round, but Mr. Bush acted as though he were cornered,” Stanley disdainfully writes. In fact, Bush was the dominant figure throughout the evening. Apparently any successful assertiveness on the part of a conservative, particularly a conservative man, freaks liberals out and drives them to portray a confident, energetic, skilled performance as a desperate, overly aggressive, failed performance.

Stanley gives the lie away at the end of her story when she concedes, based on one poll, that the debate was a tie. But if Bush was so flagrantly bad, as she would have us believe, how then could he have tied with the masterful, cool, in-command Kerry?

The Times’ attempt to deride Bush’s excellent conduct of himself in the debate reminds me of the way they covered his father’s acceptance speech at the 1988 GOP convention. It was, as anyone who saw it would attest, a magnificent address, well delivered, by far the best performance by the elder Bush in his public career, in which he virtually re-made his image as a nerdy elitist and presented himself to the country as a plausible candidate for president. Yet the Times in its lead story the next day gave the speech a mere pro-forma mention lasting about one-half a sentence, and then moved on to their real story, which was to say the GOP was in trouble over the selection of Dan Quayle. The lead sentence went something like this: “George Bush gave his acceptance speech last night as questions continued to swirl around his incompetent and jejeune choice for vice president.” As I read the story, I realized that someone who had not watched the convention on tv and was dependent on the Times for his information about the world would have had no idea that Bush had given an exceptionally fine and winning speech. It was a revelation to me of the extent to which the liberal media conceals or trashes any reality that doesn’t suit their agenda.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 09, 2004 02:17 PM | Send