President Bush: Not Funny, Not Covered
September 7, 2007Did you know President Bush spoke to a key economic summit at the Australian Opera House in Sydney yesterday? Did you know he launched a few of his ?
: “He’d only reached the third sentence of Friday’s speech to business leaders, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, when he committed his first gaffe.
“Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit,” Bush said to Australian Prime Minister John Howard.
Oops. That would be APEC, the annual meeting of leaders from 21 Pacific Rim nations, not OPEC, the cartel of 12 major oil producers.
Bush quickly corrected himself. “APEC summit,” he said forcefully, joking that Howard had invited him to the OPEC summit next year (for the record, an impossibility, since neither Australia nor the U.S. are OPEC members).
The president’s next goof went uncorrected — by him anyway. Talking about Howard’s visit to Iraq last year to thank his country’s soldiers serving there, Bush called them “Austrian troops.”
You wouldn’t have learned this from CNN.COM, FOXNEWS.COM, or MSNBC.COM, who are mostly concerned with the mother of a British 3-year old questioned in the girl’s disappearance, an upcoming ’happy anniversary of September 11′ message from a newly-dyed (and undead) Osama Bin Ladin (hat tip to Andrew Sullivan), and nude pictures of someone named Vanessa Hudgins from High School Musical appearing on the Web. (To their credit, ABCNEWS did run something on Bush’s confrontation with a Korean leader.)
Bush fatigue is palpable–but our media is doing a pathetic job of covering the President of the United States.