As we already know, the whole fuss over Israel is flaring up again, as the cycle goes. Sandwiched between the reports though is something interesting for its mundaneness: “Bush said a bad word!”

To hear the official story, Bush & Blair were speaking at the G8 summit about the latest violence, and didn’t realize that a microphone was picking up their conversation, resulting in Dubya saying “See, the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over.”  Call me crazy, but IMO you can only do that “I didn’t know it was on” bit a couple times before it becomes obvious you intentionally do that, and he used those years ago.

The point of this was two-fold — 1) to seem more stereotypically “regular guy” & 2) as a subliminal wink to the Neo-Imperialists out there, that he’s Mad As Hell over those damn a-rabs.  Predictably, the media is playing up the whole “unguarded moment” thing: CNN’s video page labels their content about it “the sh*t heard round the world”, their worst talking head Kyra Phillips said “we like to hear those raw comments” (why is someone like this working for CNN?  All she does is giggle and stick in editorial comments), & WaPo had the following line in their report on it:

The conversation, while consistent with Bush’s politer public remarks, offered a rare glimpse of the president in a less-guarded moment at a major diplomatic event, capturing his style of interaction with one of his closest allies.

Careful y’all don’t scrape your knees while you’re down there…

When people talk about media bias, they tend to assume that it’s all intentional.  Things like this would show otherwise: there was no way of them being able to tell that by running with this tangent off of the real story they’d be helping Bush, they more than likely thought it would serve to “lighten up” a dark subject — after all, people are bitching that the news is too “depressing”.   Because of that, they’re susceptible to being played.