[Satire]

Crony Jobs and the Independent Press

A service for the man who has everything, plus a connection to the President: a crony job. From the Whitehouse.org folks.

Speaking of cronies, it looks like the Bushies have become so insulted they now take offense when the press does its job. Via the Divine Invasion, this is an account of an Irish journalist who was graced with the opportunity to interview the Great Leader. It's actually a little difficult to grasp the scope of her critique without reading her entire account--and it's pretty wordy. I will, nevertheless, paste one revealing section in below. This is an exchange between the Bush handlers and the Irish reporter after the interview.

My phone rang. It was [a Bush staffer], and her voice was cold.

“We just want to say how disappointed we are in the way you conducted the interview,” she said.

“How is that?” I asked.

“You talked over the president, not letting him finish his answers.”

“Oh, I was just moving him on,” I said, explaining that I wanted some new insight from him, not two-year-old answers.

“He did give you plenty of new stuff.”

“You were given an opportunity to interview the leader of the free world and you blew it,” she began.

I was beginning to feel as if I might be dreaming. I had naively believed the American president was referred to as the “leader of the free world” only in an unofficial tongue-in-cheek sort of way by outsiders, and not among his closest staff.

“You were more vicious than any of the White House press corps or even some of them up on Capitol Hill . . .The president leads the interview,” she said.

It says a lot about not only the President, but the US press corps and the state of our independent media. She did her job, Bush was offended, and it literally became an international incident. You be the judge of whether his pique was warranted.