President ponders doing something

Headline in yesterday’s New York Times: Bush Ponders Move to Bolster Economy.

Nice photo, there, of Bush pondering. So nice that I’m putting a copy raht cheer. I think that’s the first photo of Spurious George that’s defaced graced these pages.

This sounds important, too. I’d had another post written for today, but it’ll just have to wait. Gotta dig into this one while it’s hot.

So, curious about what his plan might be, what ideas he might have to perk things up, I hit the text. And the first sign that there’s no meat here was in the opening line, where it says, not that he has a plan, not that he’s working on a plan, and, no, not even that he will work on a plan... but that he’s “considering whether to” work on a plan.

And then it says this:

He and his aides “are listening to a lot of good ideas from different people,” he said, adding that “we’ve got our people out there carefully not only monitoring the situation, but listening to ways — possible remedies.”

White House officials would not discuss the options under consideration and said the president was unlikely to make any decision about whether to offer a package, much less what it might entail, until after he returns from a weeklong trip to the Middle East that begins next Tuesday.

Aha. So, in other words, the Cretin in Chief, the Supreme Leader of the Once-Free World, is thinking about doing his job, and he’s asking people how he should do it, but he won’t say anything about it yet. Because, after all, he might not actually decide to do it. He’s considering. Maybe yes, maybe no. He has his best people thinking about it.

And this is effing news? Maybe when he actually does something, it might be news. Of course, the article goes on to speculate about what he might consider, which speculation will no doubt feed back into the plan itself. Crafty, what?

Why on Earth do the media roll over and do tricks for this guy? “No,” I would say, “This isn’t solid enough to get ink, Mr P. You give us your plan, and we’ll run that. But you tell us how you’re going to hang out on the Mediterranean and ponder, well, sorry, that doesn’t make it. I hear that Britney Spears is at it again, and I have to cover that, more important. Have a nice trip. I'm told they have good pretzels in Israel.”