Bubble Boy Bush

Here is an interesting essay from a member of the liberal academic elite.

Published on Friday, September 24, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Rip Van Winkle had nothing on the Boy in the Bubble
by Rosa Maria Pegueros


Perhaps the most astonishing pronouncement of the inarticulate President of the United States is that he doesn?t read. George W. Bush says that his advisers tell him what he needs to know. What an amazing thing for the husband of Laura the librarian and the son of Barbara Bush, campaigner for literacy, to say! But more than that, it is deeply disturbing that the president of the dominant global power, the leader of the free world, the most powerful man in the world, would choose to have his perceptions of the world censored and spoon-fed to him by his underlings. It is simply unfathomable.

However, it does help one to understand how Bush could honestly say, as he did in a recent interview with Larry King on CNN, "I don't have a sense that there's a lot of anger [towards me]." *

If Bush reads nothing and his campaign workers screen all the members of the audiences at his campaign stops and require them to sign a loyalty oath promising to vote for him, how could he perceive anger towards him? If his critics are described to him as the usual pot-smoking, hippie malcontents that he expects them to be, can he know that protestors against the war in Iraq cut across age, race, and class lines?

As he makes his proclamations about creating an ownership society, does he have any idea that many working-class people are living without medical insurance, without drug coverage, and the terrifying prospects that catastrophic illness, disability and old age pose to them? Such elaborate lengths to insulate him can only result in a clueless leader who ambles along, convinced that he is universally admired.
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