Connecting, W-style

David E. Sanger and Helene Cooper write in today's NY Times, describing another one of Bush's flying visits to a foreign country:

On Saturday, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, conceded that the president had not come into direct contact with ordinary Vietnamese, but said that they connected anyway.

“If you’d been part of the president’s motorcade as we’ve shuttled back and forth,” he said, reporters would have seen that “the president has been doing a lot of waving and getting a lot of waving and smiles.”

Ah, yes - they waved at each other, he in a car driving past them behind barricades watching his car drive past. The sad thing is, for Bush, that may be "connecting".

This is a president who goes through the world in blinders, seeing only what he chooses - or his handlers permit him - to see. I'm reminded of the way they wanted to keep protesting British away from anyplace Bush might see them, and how startled he was to hear disapprovement in Australia. It's the same as his only appearing in this country at carefully chosen Red venues with carefully vetted Red audiences, who cheer madly at his lines (in Singapore, the reporters say, "the response was tepid — the invited audience somehow missed several of built-in applause lines), and all those who disagree are kept a mile away. It's on a par with his famous declaration that he doesn't read newspapers. It's no wonder he's out of touch - no wonder he was surprised at the "thumpin'" his party just got.

Of course, this isolation makes it much easier for him to blindly, stubbornly insist on the correctness - the rightness of his chosen courses of action. It also probably accounts for his insisting over and over that those who disagree with him are traitors - to him and thus to the country. He doesn't see them, the disagreeing ones, even as closely as he saw the Vietnamese.