Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Lizzy Bum

I suppose most of us have just tuned it out, accepting that the New York Times has decided that valuable use of its real estate is to provide unfettered access to White House spinners, a decision they'll no doubt reverse if ever a Democrat hits the White House again. But the latest edition of Bumiller's love letter to the White House is a a marvel of the stenographic arts.

Bumiller says that Bush "first met Mexican immigrants at public school in Midland, Tex.," then employed some as field workers for the small oil company he owned. But never, it seems, did the president love his friends from south of the border as much as he did when some worked for him as ballplayers.

"When he was the managing partner of the Texas Rangers," Bumiller says, Bush "reveled in going into the dugout and joking with the players, many of them Hispanic, in fractured Spanglish."

Funny, that's not how Jose Canseco remembers it. In his New York Times bestseller, "Juiced," Canseco – who played for Bush's Rangers – said he "never had any sort of conversation" with the future president. "I shook his hand and met him once, but that was about it," Canseco writes. "Bush did gravitate toward Nolan Ryan a bit, probably because he was a legend, and also closer to his age. He didn't talk to us Latinos much."



Let me add that Bumiller's precious "south of the border" construction with respect to Latino baseball players is also rather annoying. Lots of Latino baseball players are Puerto Rican, and lots of Puerto Ricans were playing for the Texas Rangers during that period.


...oy, my fault, quotation mark wasn't where I thought it was. That was Grieve's paraphrase, not something Bumiller actually wrote.