http://www.britethorn.com
Well, it was as inevitable as Lindsay Lohan failing a sobriety check,but here we are, two years after he left office, and George W. Bush has written a book. Which means that we're all going to be forced to suffer through an interminable cascade of interviews designed not to sell books (although that will be a side effect) or educate the public about his Presidency, but rather to shield George W. Bush from difficult questions or anything else which might interfere with his carefully choreographed effort at rehabilitating his image with the American People.
ARGH!!!
The Dog and Pony Show begins tonight on NBC where the former President will be appearing in a one hour interview he taped with Today Show host, Matt Lauer. Later, MSNBC will air the interview with an additional hour of material where, I would guess, even less will be revealed about Bush and his Presidency that the first hour. In the words of Today Show Producer Jim Bell, Matt Lauer is "an extraordinarily fair interviewer" and NBC NEWS executives felt that President Bush would feel more comfortable speaking to him rather than one of the hard news anchors like Dick Gregory or Brian Williams.
All of which makes me want to laugh. Way to go, NBC! One day you're suspending Keith Olbermann at MSNBC for donating a few dollars to some political campaigns (because making a campaign contribution violates your high journalistic standards) and the next you're going out of your way to ensure that no news will come out of an interview with George W. Bush. Gosh! You sure wouldn't want Bush to be embarrassed with a question he doesn't want to answer!
So what is it, NBC? Are you guys in the News Business or the Entertainment Industry? You're giving Bush a full hour to do nothing but talk about what he wants to talk about -- which will give you decent ratings and probably sell a lot of books to people that are too stupid to realize that there will be even less substance in "Decision Points" than there was in Lauer's interview.
And then its on to a SERIES of interviews on FOXNEWS, where Bush will more likely than not emerge with his own show sandwiched in between Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee -- after which he's off to sit on the couch with Oprah where we'll be more likely to find out that he was molested as a child than what was really going on in the White House on 9/11 or during the lead-up to the Iraqi war.
So if you really need to hear what President Bush thinks, watch the video above. It's done with a fake interviewer and a plastic doll, which is pretty much what NBC will be showing the American People tonight.