I'm the Understander

I'm sure someone else has already used that oh-so-clever line as the title of a blog post, but the ol' War Room has outdone itself with this post-- which rather nicely sums up Bush's shameful, mortifying trip to Louisiana. After all, the Bush administration has managed to jump a row of twenty sharks. On a tricycle.

One thing Bush likes to do in the Gulf Coast is hand out American flags to families rebuilding their houses. Long before he shows up, Bush’s advance team scouts the non-hostile property owners in a neighborhood, and later, the president drops by and gives the family a flag. The White House thinks this makes for good pictures — and maybe it did, a month after the storm. But a year and half later, with the region still a mess and so many people displaced, it seems a little tone-deaf to be handing out flags — politically, it does invite comparisons to what Bush isn’t doing in the region.

Anyway, here's the piece from Salon. Most of it, anyway.

At Lil Dizzy's Café in New Orleans Thursday, George W. Bush said: "I fully understand that there are frustrations and I want to know the frustrations. And to the extent we can help, we'll help."

It sounded a little familiar to us, and now we know why: Say what you will about the president's intellectual capabilities, the man fully understands an awful lot of things.

Among them:

Education: "I fully understand that if you read your newspaper articles -- which I do sometimes -- and listen carefully, you'll hear voices in both parties saying they don't like No Child Left Behind: It's too much testing, or, we don't want to be held to account, or whatever they say. The bill is working. It makes a lot of sense."

How Iraq would turn out: "I fully understand the consequences of what we're doing. We're changing the world. And the world will be better off and America will be more secure as a result of the actions we're taking."

How Iraq will turn out: "I told the American people I fully understand there are differences of opinion. But one of the things I have discovered is, in Washington, D.C., most people understand the consequences of failure."

Oh yes, there's more. Maybe I should've ended the blogging day with the Gore piece instead of a reminder that, well... you know.