The Two Faces of the Mainstream Press

Aaron Kinney at Salon brings up a good point about Newsweek and how it has really changed its tune about Bush. Kinney writes:

Time and Newsweek slammed the president this week in articles by Mike Allen ("Living Too Much in the Bubble?") and Evan Thomas ("How Bush Blew It"), respectively. Both accounts describe an incurious president who is cut off from reality.

But until recently, the nation's leading newsweeklies were painting a far different picture. Newsweek, in particular, has been especially deferential to George W. Bush. Witness its cover story by Richard Wolffe from Jan. 24, 2005, timed to coincide with the president's second inaugural, the subhead of which read: "He's hands-on, detail-oriented and hates 'yes' men. The George Bush you don't know has big dreams -- and is racing the clock to realize them."

Wolffe described the president as a man whose "leadership style belies his caricature as a disengaged president who is blindly loyal, dislikes dissent and covets his own downtime" -- a caricature that looks like a dead ringer after the vacationing president's reaction to Katrina.

Wolffe: Bush is "a restless man who masters details and reads avidly" and "digs deep into his briefing books." When he's not "poring over white papers," he also enjoys the occasional novel.

As I read about Wolffe's description of Bush as a "hands-on--hates yes-men" type of guy, I started wondering who it was exactly who fed Wolffe that line of bull. Maybe it was the same person who told CNN's Suzanne Malveaux to say this about Bush last night in the run-up to his Jackson Square speech:

"Even White House aides will concede this is not really the best forum for the president when it comes to communicating. He does much better when it comes to group settings, live audiences, spontaneous events, but this is the type of thing they know he has to focus -- they know its very serious, and they know that he has to deliver that message."

Excuse me? Spontaneous events? When was the last time Bush had a spontaneous event? Everything this guy does is choreographed to the smallest detail. Were those "town hall" appearances that Bush made on his epic "Let's Screw Social Security" Tour -- you know, the ones with the hand-picked crowds full of folks who'd love Bush no matter what he did -- were those the "spontaneous" speaking events to which Malveaux refers?

How about that time in Denver earlier in the year when a local GOP official impersonated a Secret Service agent and forcibly removed the "Denver Three" from one of these taxpayer-funded Social Security events simply because one of them had a "No More Blood for Oil" bumper sticker on his car. Did this happen at one of Bush's spontaneous events, Suzanne?