Bush crackup watch:

9 September - Digby

... if you'd like to see [Bush] get really testy and aggressive at the suggestion that the GOP might lose this fall, watch this footage of him and Charles Gibson. [...]

Watch the whole thing as he has his hissy fit and then slouches all over the back seat of the limo until by the time the tape is finished he looks like some sort of Roman Emperor waiting for Gibson to peel him a grape. Very creepy.

11 September - TAPPED (Charles Pierce)

Matt Lauer of The Today Show got an interview in the Oval Office with George W. Bush. [...] To Lauer's enormous credit, and given the strange circumstances, he pushed as hard as was possible on the subject of the president's right to torture people. The way you knew he'd pushed hard was that the president began talking in smaller and smaller circles. He needs to be able to do this to keep people safe. He kept repeating that he needed these powers "within the law," and that "we don't torture." Lauer started to describe "water-boarding." The president refused to talk about "techniques that we use on people." He began to sputter, "Let me finish." Once again, he climbed on his little one-man railroad that traveled from "protecting the nation" to "we don't torture" to "within the law." You half-expected little springs to start bouncing out of his ears.

15 September - TAPPED (Ezra Klein)

BUSH'S PRESS CONFERENCE. This is by far the pissiest press conference Bush has given. He's furious. I assume his feet are manacled behind the microphone. Otherwise, he'd be stalking across the stage, tearing apart the podium, and occasionally leaping into the crowd to rip out David Gregory's heart. The content is no finer than the normal Bush fare ... but the attitude is entirely different. Where Bush is generally petulant and unhappy at these events, he's now snapping at reporters, straightforwardly insulting them, yelling from the podium, losing control, and generally evincing a combativeness and barely suppressed rage that I've never seen from him before.

posted by Quiddity at 9/15/2006 04:10:00 PM