There is a famous aphorism attached to the game of poker: “You don’t play the hand, you play the man.” It means that you don’t necessarily try to read the cards, you try and figure out what the person holding them is doing, whether he or she is trying to take the pot with a strong hand or just trying to bluff while holding a lousy pair of pocket threes. The term “poker face” actually means something, as a bad player can give away a good hand by the look on his or her face or fail to conceal a bad hand with a stare or a grimace. In the game of poker, these signs are called “tells.”
Just as there are nonverbal tells, there are verbal ones as well. Your Political Animal remembers well as a child when his parents clued him in to his first “tell” whenever he got into trouble and tried to explain his way out of it. After many a year of failing to fool his parents, his mother made the mistake of noting that every time Your PA was b.s.’ing he prefaced his comments by saying, “I was just . . . .” Needless to say, I wiped that particular phrase from my vocabulary.
Barbara Bush obviously never similarly helped out the young Shrub in his childhood. When you watch the third and final presidential debate tonight, listen carefully to the president or read the text once the debate is over. George W. Bush has a jarring “tell,” and it shows the lousy cards in his hand every time.
Every time the president is on the defensive for a dishonest statement, a mischaracterization, or a lousy policy decision, he adds to the sentence the words “of course.” Look at his use of the phrase in the first debate. The first time: “Of course we’re after Saddam Hussein—I mean bin Laden. He’s isolated. Seventy-five percent of his people have been brought to justice.”
This one almost speaks for itself, to the point of being a Freudian slip. Challenged on the fact that he let Osama bin Laden get away at Tora Bora, only to direct the nation’s military might in a fruitless quest to find Saddam’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, Bush tries to cover it up by dragging out the number of supposed al-Qaida members “brought to justice,” as if it is a club that no longer accepts members. Unfortunately, the war in Iraq has proved to be a recruiting paradise for bin Laden, and for every al-Qaida terrorist killed, dozens spring up to take his place.
Later in the debate, Bush said, “And, of course, Iraq is a central part in the war on terror. That’s why Zarqawi and his people are trying to fight us. Their hope is that we grow weary and we leave.” Suffice to say, before we invaded Iraq, there were no real terrorists capable of threatening the United States in the territory controlled by Saddam. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida terrorist mentioned by Bush, was operating out of the Kurdish-controlled northern end of Iraq. And it has been widely reported that members of the Bush administration turned down an opportunity to kill Zarqawi before the start of the war, because they felt it would hurt their chances of selling an Iraqi invasion to the American people.
Bush also said, “Of course we’re doing everything we can to protect America. I wake up every day thinking about how best to protect America. That’s my job.”
Really? How much of the money that went into the four tax cuts Bush has pushed through could have gone to first responders in New York? Into cargo inspection X-rays at the Mexican border? Into the Coast Guard? Into smallpox vaccine? Into finding the unknown perpetrators of the anthrax attacks that killed two postal workers in Washington, D.C.? If that’s what he wakes up every day thinking, perhaps the president is getting up on the wrong side of the bed.
“That’s totally absurd. Of course the U.N. was invited in.” Yes, and not given the time to do its job before Bush sent in the U.S. Army.
“First of all, of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that.” Which is why Saddam is in a cell and bin Laden is still free.
“Of course, we change tactics when need to, but we never change our beliefs.” The president may be correct here: He changes tactics—but only to ensure that we seem to be making the wrong choices. In this, he is batting fairly close to perfect.
These are just the examples from the first debate—get the text of the second one and play along at home. But it’s times like these when you hope Osama Bin Laden’s game isn’t poker, because judging from the debates it sure isn’t George W. Bush’s.
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