Saturday, January 22, 2005

No shame
The Washington Post has an article on the Bush administration's spin regarding the inaguration speech. I'll have a post on the spin later today. In the meantime, a nice little footnote jumped out of the article and caught my attention. You'll enjoy this.
Bush's grand ambitions excited his neoconservative supporters, who see his call to put the United States in the forefront of the battle to spread democracy as noble and necessary. "It was a rare inaugural speech that will go down as a historic speech, I believe," said William Kristol, editor and publisher of the Weekly Standard and a leading neoconservative thinker. He predicted the speech will drive policy for the rest of Bush's presidency.

[...]

The planning of Bush's second inaugural address began a few days after the Nov. 2 election with the president telling advisers he wanted a speech about "freedom" and "liberty." That led to the broadly ambitious speech that has ignited a vigorous debate. The process included consultation with a number of outside experts, Kristol among them.

Twelve paragraphs pass between these two points, so I'm not sure how obvious the connection will be to most Post readers. The speech that Kristol reviewed as "a rare ... historic speech" is, in fact, a speech he helped write. He probably didn't take part in the actual composition, the White House entrusts that to better writers than Kristol, but he contributed to the message and the theme.

What's that word that so many bloggers use when talking about writers in the mainstream press? It rhymes with "door" and starts with a "w."

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