WAKE ME UP AND LET ME KNOW WHEN BUSH IS READING DAILY KOS AND FIREDOGLAKE

When I stepped onto the American Airlines jet at the Buenos Aires international airport it felt like home-- although not as much as like home as when I when I had to go through the borderline psychotic Bush security checks at a layover in Dallas/Ft Worth. The feeling of home on the plane went beyond all the English-as-a-first-language flight attendants. For me though it was when the stewardess offered me a New York Times, the first I'd seen in 5 weeks. I put down the book on Argentine history I was reading and grasped the Times reverently... well quasi-reverently. I was so excited. Then I was disappointed. Maybe the Christmas Eve edition is the worst one of the year but I had finished it before we took off and was back to the far more engrossing Felipe Pigna before we were out of Buenos Aires airspace.

But apparently, my disappointment with newspapers isn't shared by our feckless president. Today's Times informs us that Bush can read and that he reads newspapers. "Is there hope for newspapers after all?" asks Katherine Seelye. "Readers may be abandoning the printed versions, but over the last couple of years, at least one person seems to have started reading them, at least sometimes. He lives in the White House. President Bush declared in 2003 that he did not read newspapers, but at his final news conference of the year last week, he casually mentioned that he had seen something in the paper that very day."

What makes this in any way remarkable is that earlier in his term Bush had told Fox "News" that although he glances at headlines sometimes, "'I rarely read the stories,' because, he said, they mix opinion with fact. He said he preferred to get his news from 'objective sources'-- like 'people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world.'" The genesis of the tragedy of his regime? Nah, just another little piece of the ghastly puzzle.

Was he out of touch with average Americans? What a joke! He started back-peddling on the "I don't read the stinkin' newspapers" claim over the last few years but stood by his claim that they have no impact on his thinking. "I'm the decider and I decide what's best," he blurted out one day when Rove was preoccupied with his own legal problems. Meanwhile Seelye points out that both Laura Bush and Tony Snow both claim Bush reads newspapers, although neither will say which ones. But if he wants to be in touch with the average American and know what real people are thinking, are the newspapers the place to go? A big iPod fan-- even going so far as to illegally download Beatles songs (no wonder the Chinese don't take his regime's demands about protecting intellectual property seriously!)-- Bush should just skip the silly and elitist newspapers and get right down into the blogosphere. If he wants to know what people really think the communities around Crooks and Liars, MyDD, Firedoglake and, of course, Daily Kos will give him a dose of reality that neither the Washington Times nor the Washington Post will never approach.