It's all about where you're standing (updated)

Americans who are shocked and dismayed that Cheney gunshot victim Harry Whittington has become the butt of humor from Team Bush itself must not have been paying close attention.

Bush and those he surrounds himself with have a long history of finding amusement in suffering--so long as someone else is doing the suffering.


1999: Tucker Carlson asked Governor Bush about a Larry King interview with Texas death row inmate Karla Faye Tucker.

King, Bush said, asked Tucker difficult questions, such as "What would you say to Governor Bush?"

What did Tucker answer? Carlson asked.

"Please," Bush whimpered, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "please, don't kill me."

2000: When candidate Bush was interviewed by David Letterman who'd just returned from heart surgery), Dave asked Bush about what it meant to be "a uniter, not a divider" (the latter's long-abandoned campaign theme)? Bush's answer:

"It means when it comes time to sew up your chest cavity, we use stitches as opposed to opening it up."

Letterman looked politely uncomfortable, and some of the studio audience actually booed.


2004: At the annual dinner Radio and Television Correspondents' Association where, by tradition, the president is expected to deliver a few self-deprecatory bits of staff-written humor from the podium, Bush amused the audience of political and media insiders with a slide show depicting himself looking around the Oval Office for the elusive WMDs that had been his administration's ragged excuse for invading Iraq the year before.

One pictured Mr Bush looking under a piece of furniture in the Oval Office, at which the president remarked: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere."

After another one, showing him scouring the corner of a room, Mr Bush said: "No, no weapons over there," he said.

And as a third picture, this time showing him leaning over, appeared on the screen the president was heard to say: "Maybe under here?"

2005: After some delay in responding to the devastation Hurricane Katrina caused the Gulf Coast, Bush gave a press conference following a briefing by then FEMA director Michael Brown, and told the audience:

The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch.

(And don't even get me started on his "dictator" jokes.)

Compared to Junior's idea of funny, which seems never to have risen far above his adolescent fondness for blowing up frogs, his dad's testy line "Read my hips!" now seems like the soul of gentle, Keillor-esque humor.

Ah, twenty-twenty hindsight. It's a killer, ain't it?


Postscript: I didn't mention this point because I figured it was self-evident, but Joe at AMERICAblog is probably right to assume that it should be made clear:

I expect Jon Stewart and Jay Leno to make jokes about this incident. That's their job. But, for Scott McClellan and Jeb Bush to make fun of the whole thing is just creepy and incredibly unseemly.