CNN’s Rick Sanchez has a truly amazing video catch: video of President George Bush at the G20 weekend summit being treated in a greeting line as if he is the politically “Dead Man Walking” or Mr. Cellophane.
In this You Tube segment now featured on several websites (Greatscat, Tennessee Guerilla Women, Daily Kos and Poligazette) Sanchez shows a piece of captured-on-video history that is likely to be run in every video bio dealing with Bush’s last days. It is undeniable: he is there but makes others uneasy. Most other leaders avoid eye contact. They’re not warmly shaking his hand. Bush isn’t going out of his way to interact with them, either…
Sanchez likens it to the kid others avoid at high school. But actually, it’s more akin to what happens in a corporation when someone is either out favor, on probation, demoted or clearly on the verge of firing. It’s being shunned, but is also coupled with a feeling of “We had to be nice to you before but now we can show you how we really feel.”
Footnote: Sanchez mentions the huge number of Google hits to the words “Bush bully.” A quick link search of “Bush bully” finds there are 330 on Google News and approximately 6,040,000 on Google Web. And Sanchez may indeed have a point: remember how bullies who were beat up were treated afterwords by students who used to be afraid of them?
Watch the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6Y_ncOVlDw
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.