At the news conference, Bush turned curt when a French reporter asked him why his policies were "pushing your country and France to divorce," noting that former President John F. Kennedy had suggested that everyone has two countries -- his own and France.
"To paraphrase President Kennedy, there's America and then there's Texas," Bush retorted. He did not elaborate. The purported Kennedy comment was actually originally uttered by President Thomas Jefferson.
Aides later said Bush was just trying to suggest there was another side to matters.
Besides the typically thorough Bushian butchering of a source, there was the just general incomprehensibility of his comment, and the equally incomprehensible later attempt by anonymous aides to clarify the comment. “Another side to matters.” Ah yes, our President: such a master of framing such deeply metaphysical matters in such a gnomic, almost Confucian manner.
But, as with so many Bushian utterances, perhaps there is more hiding subliminally in his comment than one might at first suspect. After all, there's no question: there is America, and then, yes, there is Texas. Specifically, there is the Texas Republican Platform, which, among other possibly more insane planks, includes a specific call to immediately “rescind our membership” in the United Nations. Kevin Drum has all of the scary specifics here. As he points out, if this platform were from anyone else at all it would be dismissed as political extreme fringe looniness, but as it stands, it is the honest-to-God writ-in-stone platform behind the currently most powerful politicians in the land. In other words, people need to pay a lot more attention to what it has to say...
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