Todd Pearson at Reasonable Prudence sums up Douglas Wead: "What a putz."
Even a rabid detractor of the president's like Daily Kos, while exulting that Wead's secret tapes of then Texas governor George W. Bush "don't appear to reflect too good on the president", admits that "releasing these tapes is a betrayal" and that "[t]his guy Doug Wead is an ass." It's really slimy (not to mention illegal, in many states; not in Texas, I guess) to secretly tape a friend who trusts you as a confidant, then release the tapes at the right moment to chum up publicity for your new book. It's being a mole rat and an audio-papparazzo, putting yourself in the class of those servants of celebrities who sell their dirty laundry, literally or figuratively, to the National Enquirer. It would be nice if Wead didn't get rewarded with wealth and fame for this little trick. In a culture that gave Jayson Blair a six-figure book advance for faking New York Times stories, that's probably too much to ask.
- amba
UPDATE: Why these tapes are a non-event. Here's what they "reveal":
1) Behind his just-folks persona, George W. Bush is a politician, who shrewdly calculates the political effect of his every act, statement, and meeting. DUH.
2) He has the right kind of personality for a successful politician: confident, competitive, with a relish for the bruising contest and a killer instinct for anyone who threatens him (e.g. Steve Forbes, and later, as we saw in the SC primary, John McCain). Jesus may keep his ego in check, but it doesn't go so far as turning the other cheek. No surprise here.
3) The kind of balancing act Bush's political instincts require him to do between the evangelical Christian right and the center actually matches his real inclinations and convictions pretty well. What you see is what you get. If anything, this should be reassuring to moderates.
4) Bush sort of acknowledges that he tried marijuana. DOUBLE DUH. Trying to find a baby boomer who didn't is like looking for a virgin in a whorehouse. (NOTE: While some baby boomers were destroyed by drugs, most of our generational drug use was fairly trivial. The problem was that it threw open the floodgates to so much worse. We were brought up in an officially strait-laced culture of mostly two-parent families that equipped us with a lot of internal inhibitions and controls, which most of us were just trying to loosen a little. Our toking was limited -- and made more exciting -- by law, guilt, daring, and the need to be surreptitious. At least older, "first-wave" baby boomers, like George, Bill C. and me, were already legal and physiological adults when we got started. The marjiuana was wild, and 25 to 50 times weaker than today's super-bred and cultivated varieties. There is just no comparison to an underparented 14-year-old, who grew up in a no-limits, peer-heavy pop culture, daily smoking concentrated stuff one toke of which would knock their parents across the room. And there is no question that the one led directly to the other.)
Back to Wead (ironic name, huh?): the irony is that his tapes will if anything serve his declared noble motives, which nobody believes for a minute. They don't contradict what we already knew about Dubya. They just fill it in a little. He actually comes off as less of a hypocrite than a lot of politicians.
UPDATE II: Ann Althouse thinks the tapes are so good for Bush that they were probably made with his connivance, and the Times has been had.
UPDATE III:She's changed her mind.
Doesn't change the fact that he is the worst thing to happen to America since Reagan however.
Posted by: Adnan Khan | March 21, 2005 at 03:48 AM