Don't You Believe It

Nedra Pickler writes for ABC News that President Bush is making a change in his speeches, now he'll be taking unscripted questions from the audience. From ABCNews.com:

Move over, Oprah. President Bush is making himself into television's newest talk show host by making audience participation a feature of his appearances.

Bush has been taking questions from audience members in recent speeches, and the White House says none has been prescreened. It's a throwback to the folksy style on the campaign trail that helped him win re-election and a departure from the heavily scripted speeches that were the norm last year.

Umm, Nedra and I certainly have different memories of the 2004 campaign. The Super Bowl half time show isn't as choreographed as that campaign was, where things like this happened in Colorado:

The Secret Service revealed that we were "ID'ed" when local Republican staffers saw a bumper sticker on the car we drove which said "No More Blood For Oil." Evidently, the free speech expressed on one bumper sticker is cause enough to eject three citizens from a presidential event. (Similarly, someone was ejected from Bush's Social Security privatization event in Arizona the same day simply for wearing a Democratic t-shirt.)

You don't have to script the questions when you only admit lap dogs.