LA Times Plugged

In an editorial titled Bush Unplugged, the LATimes admits its surprise that the Wead tapes revealed nothing negative about Bush. There's a whispered and not quite heard nature to this editorial, an unspoken "Good thing no one secretly recorded Clinton, Gore or Kerry!" As the nameless editorial writer put his take on the tapes:

The George W. Bush revealed in two years of surreptitiously recorded private conversations with a former friend is more complicated and appealing than the uncompromising, language-mangling leader whom Americans are accustomed to hearing.

Complicated? Appealing? What paper am I reading? Yes, it is the LAT, which they are still delivering to me.

Be that as it may, the secularists at the LAT still don't understand, like or feel comfortable with any shading of religion:

His struggle to fit his morality to his politics is illuminating, if not exactly comforting. ...

The conversations ... display flashes of the sort of personality quirks that endear Bush to his supporters and frighten his critics.

Bush tells Wead, "The Bible is pretty good about keeping your ego in check" and says he stays humble by reading it every day. Yet he casts himself in grandiose terms, boasting that his popularity will "change Texas politics forever" by catapulting coattail Republicans to success when he wins his second term as governor.

It is frightening to the secular left that a positive character can be learned from the Bible, because they think all we're supposed to learn from the Bible is bigotry and hatred. So the LAT cannot let Bush's reliance on the Bible go unchallenged. Later in the brief editorial, they return to this theme:

"I've sinned and I've learned" becomes his campaign mantra. He tells Wead, and now us, "That's part of my shtick, which is, 'Look, we have all made mistakes.' "

Odd that the same man, once in office, would be incapable of admitting them.

Oh, please. If Bush doesn't believe the war in Iraq was a mistake, why should he admit it's a mistake? He's been forthcoming on WMDs; their absence just doesn't change his opinion of the justification of the war, of the cause. But the LAT must attack on this score; otherwise, it would have to acknowledge that we are all, indeed, sinners.

And speaking of sinners, the editorial focuses only on Bush and his surprisingly (to the LAT) good, intelligent and consistent character. In a poor use of the soapbox, it says nothing of the character of Doug Wead.