Friday, September 14, 2007

Hi-Def TV a Problem for Politicians?

Andrew Sullivan says watching the President speak on Hi-Def TV is very different from watching him on regular TV.
He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted, his facial expression almost bewildered.
He had a good deal more to say about Bush's speech. Not much of it good.
And the way he framed his case was still divorced from the reality we see in front of our nose: that Iraq is not, as he still seems to believe, full of ordinary people longing for democracy and somehow stymied solely by "extremists" or al Qaeda or Iran, but a country full of groups of people who cannot trust one another, who are still living in the wake of unimaginable totalitarian trauma, who have murdered and tortured and butchered each other in pursuit of religious and ethnic pride and honor for centuries. This is what Bush cannot recognize: there is no Iraq. There are no Iraqis.
Of course there are no Iraqis. Anyone that has ever watched "Lawrence of Arabia" can understand why.

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