That Would Be The Leader of the Free World

By Mimikatz

Via Huffpost

President Bush had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day at the Sydney Opera House.

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.

It gets worse from there.  He confuses Australia (his host country) with Austria.  And then, in a reprise of his performance in Bejing, he went out the wrong door.  Too bad there wasn't a tiger behind it.

Comments

[Mimikatz]

And this guy wants to succeed him as the next LOTFW.

[Dave in IL]

Or a pack of dingos.

[emptywheel]

Mimikatz

Can you figure out whether this was before or after he met with Hu?

I really think Hu has a way of deliberately getting under Bush's skin. Which would be funny if Hu wasn't kicking our ass in so many ways. In any case, I always envision Hu telling Bush some scary (rightly scary) fact--such as China is dumping dollars--right before he makes public appearances.

[P J Evans]

Did anyone check the battery in his radio receiver? Or clear the wax from his earpiece (or his ears?) [/snark - deserved, but still snark]

[phred]

Or whether he had a half full hip flask?

[Mimikatz]

EW: I'd say from this dispatch that he met with Hu yesterday and had his bad day today. Both are from Tom Raum.

[Mimikatz]

It sounds from this as though the talks were candid and sincere, but that there was plenty to disagree about.

[BlueStateRedhead]

I remember reading here or at the Lake that he took 700 people with him, including 150 national securtiy advisors. It seems that all the the king's horses (bikes in his case) and all the king's men can not keep Humpty Dumpty from hitting a wall, taking a fall, and going out the wrong door. It's not that they can't put the pieces together again, it's that they never were in any together that we would recognize.

Funny, except his bad days always lead to worse ones for either the constitution or the soldiers and civilians in Iraq.

[emptypockets]

I was thinking of Bush's bubble while reading Gail Collin's most recent column:

[The need to maintain Bush's "reality" re:Iraq] has caused some of the people around Bush to pummel their own brains into order so firmly that, according to Draper, at a White House gathering in early 2006, one presidential aide expressed mystification at how the public could be so cranky when everything was going so well. “Do you think the polls are just wrong?” he asked.

Then, a clip happened to come up on my iPod from Pink Floyd's "The Wall," also about an individual sealed away from the world into his own reality -- and now trapped inside:

I know there was a door here in The Wall... when I came in

which in turn reminded me of Bush's "door in the wall" confusion in Beijing, that he re-enacted today.

[Alyx]

...maybe it was that troupe of comedians that had a UBL imposter that shook him up a bit.... grin

[Elliott]

Alyx
I think you've got it!

[JohnLopresti]

Australia PM Howard has a smidgeon of the Gordon Brown, Zapatero problem; i.e., like UK and Spain, both touted as 'coalition' participants, Australia is about to replace Howard with a poll leading candidate who has a longstanding platform plank to withdraw from Iraq. Howard is polling a little better than Bush in his, respective, home country, but still is double-digits behind challenger Rudd of the labor party. One supposes it is difficult for principals at such summit banquets to make laudatory remarks about the feast deployed when the main course is lame duck. Likely, Bush would have taken any exit, posthaste.