On Sunday, Washington Post reporter Dan Eggen chronicled the recent soft turn in President Bush’s rhetoric as his presidency wraps up, but you could sense the Post reporter and his editors thought this was a desperate "emotional appeal" that shouldn’t work. Eggen went to the polls to console himself:
Unfortunately for the president, the warm feelings are unrequited at the moment. A recent NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found that 79 percent of Americans will not miss Bush once he is gone, and that nearly half think he will go down as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history. Senators from his own party revolted against him this week, shooting down a government bridge loan the White House had sought for foundering Detroit automakers.
It’s always interesting when media outlets go looking outside their own polls to cherry-pick the worst result. The ABC-Washington Post poll hasn’t asked yet if Bush was the worst president ever?
Eggen's story balances its viewpoints, with Bush defenders and Bush critics. However, as he concludes with Harvard prof Steven Pinker analyzing Bush’s faith, Eggen does not explain to the reader that Pinker is a religion-hater, a man who wrote in Time magazine that a focus on Heaven "devalues life on earth. Just remember the most famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11."
But Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard University and author of "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature," argues that Bush's frequent invocation of love is intended as a "dog whistle" to other Christian believers that obscures his failings...
"Having failed by every secular standard, Bush is trying to convince the remaining people who will listen that he has succeeded by an inscrutable divine one," Pinker said in an e-mail, adding: "These are, no doubt, the emotions he's feeling, but it also can't hurt to frame his presidency in touchy-feely terms rather than a hardnosed accounting of successes and failures."
