A Rare Chance to Watch George Bush

It's rare that we get a glimpse of the President when he doesn't expect it. We will probably never meet the man in person, and so it is hard to imagine knowing the man. I think this video is a nice way to get a look at him that we are rarely afforded. The video is at the bottom of this post, but if you're not familiar with the event last Saturday you should read on for some context.

This is a clip of a dinner last Saturday for the White House Press Corps and various other dignitaries. Stephen Colbert was the keynote speaker, and he gave a performance that was amazingly good and took huge testicles. You see Stephen Colbert, for those of you who are not familiar with his work, is a satirist. He has a show where he plays a pundit like the kind you might see on Fox News, MSNBC, or a similar 24-hour news network, only taken to the extreme. You won't see a whole lot of smiles or laughing if you see any footage of the event, and some reporters have tried to attribute this to his not being funny. Nothing could be further from the truth. The problem wasn't his lines. The problem was that every person in the room was the butt of the joke, and it cut way too close to the bone for the reporters and politicians in the audience.

Two subjects stood out: Scandals and alleged mishandling of the government by the Bush administration, and the hypocrisy of reporters who were cheerleaders for this government until public opinion turned against them. Neither is considered polite conversation by this particular crowd. There is a decent quality video of the last part of his speech here, courtesy of C&L, and a transcript of the whole speech here.

I'll just give you a quick synopsis of what's going on in the video that President Bush is watching. Stephen Colbert is showing him his "audition tape" of what it would have been like if he had been hired as Press Secretary (if you recall, Scott McLellan is being replaced by Tony Snow). After he flees the press conference he is followed by the 85-year old Helen Thomas, who has been a White House reporter for decades, and became famous/infamous (depending on who you ask) for grilling the President recently at a press conference.

You can tell that the President is trying hard to keep his composure, but his feelings leak through. You can see him visibly grimace when the on-screen Colbert is asked about possible criminal proceedings against Karl Rove, but you can tell that he also has a good-natured laugh about the way Stephen Colbert "handles" some of the journalists. I won't say more; you can draw your own conclusions, but it strikes me that this is one of the most human moments I've ever seen of George W. Bush.


UPDATE: Unfortunately C-SPAN asked YouTube to remove the video. Here's the link to the whole speech from Google video, but it doesn't have the camera that stayed on Bush's face while the audition tape was playing.