{"id":858,"date":"2004-10-29T14:06:15","date_gmt":"2004-10-29T21:06:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=858"},"modified":"2004-10-29T14:06:15","modified_gmt":"2004-10-29T21:06:15","slug":"pretzels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2004\/10\/29\/pretzels\/","title":{"rendered":"Pretzels"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name=\"002961\"><\/a>I admit that I never laughed at Bush&#8217;s pretzel foible.  Small potatoes.  Although, in the annals of the Bush Presidency, the pretzel incident marks a moment where the first chink was thrown into the post 9\/11 hazed Bush armor.  It was when the late night comedians could subtley turn from safely mocking Osama somewhere in a cave, being prepared for slaughter presumably, an toward something resembling the pre 9\/11 Bush.  (which would morph and change in various ways through the next couple of years.)<\/p>\n<p>The post Gulf War Bush I image unravelled&#8230; I don&#8217;t know, maybe when he vomitted on the prime minister of Japan?  Then again, the SNL sketch (from the Comedy Central reruns) had Bush provide a <i>second<\/i> joint-Congress appearance speech after the Gulf War victory, just because the first one provided him with such laudatory applause.  This suggests, perhaps, that from the very beginning the one-note was turning into a half-note&#8230; &#8220;What else you got?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Schwartzopft (sp?) was People Magazine&#8217;s &#8220;Sexiest Man Alive&#8221;.  And today, Rumsfeld is nowhere to be seen.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re a small handful of days away from burying the endless supply of anti-Bush books&#8230; picking out the small handful that will survive the test of time and supply some cognent analysis of <i>what just happened<\/i>.  And we&#8217;re a small handful of days from the return of Phil Hendrie away from a stupor of &#8220;super-hawk commentary&#8221; to intelligible all-sides get skewered social commentary.<\/p>\n<p>Kerry?  We&#8217;ll have to see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I admit that I never laughed at Bush&#8217;s pretzel foible. Small potatoes. Although, in the annals of the Bush Presidency, the pretzel incident marks a moment where the first chink was thrown into the post 9\/11 hazed Bush armor. It was when the late night comedians could subtley turn from safely mocking Osama somewhere in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}