Actual Headline

Flash! President Bush Says He Reads Papers—That this is considered newsworthy tells us just about everything we need to know about President Cloistered McBubbleboy, methinks.

President Bush declared in 2003 that he did not read newspapers, but at his final news conference of the year last week, he casually mentioned that he had seen something in the paper that very day.

Asked for his reaction to word that Vice President Cheney would be called to testify in the C.I.A. leak case, the president allowed: “I read it in the newspaper today, and it’s an interesting piece of news.”

Meanwhile, does anyone really believe he needed to read that in the paper in the first place? Wev.

That was a marked contrast with his position in 2003, when he told Brit Hume on Fox News that he glanced at the headlines, but “I rarely read the stories,” because, he said, they mix opinion with fact. He said he preferred to get his news from “objective sources” — like “people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”

I'll give you a moment to stop laughing at that one. An oldie but a goodie.

Last year, in an interview with Brian Williams, he softened his stand. “I see a lot of the news,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Williams. “I — every morning I look at the newspaper. I’m not — I can’t say I’ve read every single article in the newspaper, but I definitely know what’s in the news.”

Oy. I can't decide what's more pathetic, frankly—the most powerful man in the world saying he "definitely know[s] what's in the news" in a manner belying that he does, or the fact that the dubious news-awareness of the most powerful man in the world warrants a timeline recounting just when, precisely, we were given insights into how dangerously ignorant of current events he actually is.

In April, Mr. Bush reinforced the idea that he read the paper but at the same time suggested it had little influence on his thinking. In rejecting calls to fire Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, he said: “I hear the voices and I read the front page and I hear the speculation, but I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best.”

He hears the voices, and then he makes the decidings. Another golden oldie.

Still, despite his statement in 2003 that he did not read the papers, his wife, Laura, said last week that she and her husband had read the morning papers for years. “We’ve done the same thing since we first got married,” she told People magazine. “We wake up in the morning and drink coffee and read the newspapers.”

I'm not sure that catching up with the hilarious exploits of Beetle Bailey and Funky Winkerbean is technically "reading the newspaper."

Tony Snow, the president’s press secretary, said in an interview he was certain Mr. Bush read the papers, though he was not sure which ones.

Although he did confirm they are all printed daily in the White House basement.