Asked at a press briefing yesterday (17th August 2006) for his reaction to John Prescott’s alleged comment in a private meeting on Tuesday, 15th August, that “Bush is crap”, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow replied:

“The President’s been called a lot worse and, I suspect, will be. And there will be piquant names, sort of, hurled his way from time to time, but, you know, that’s part of the burden of leadership.”

What I find interesting about Snow’s response is that it is directed towards the act of name-calling rather than towards the substantive issue of the failed ‘road map’ that prompted the name-calling (John Prescott “was talking in the context of the ‘road map’ in the Middle East … he said the Bush administration had been crap on that”, according to MP Harry Cohen, as reported in The Independent, Thursday, 17th August 2006).

One might be tempted to interpret Snow’s response as simply evasive. It was of course evasive, but there is, it seems to me, nothing ’simple’ about it. In the first place, in targetting the use of the word, as “piquant name”, rather than its referent, the Bush administration’s record on the Middle East ‘road map’, Snow commutes a reflection, however bluntly expressed, on the administration’s performance into nothing more than a personal slur on George Bush himself, now transformed from ineffectual chief executive into slighted party. The dismissive assertion that having names “hurled his way” is “part of the burden of leadership” furthermore diminishes the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to the status of no more than an ad hominem name-caller.

Most interesting, however, is that Snow appears to deem it consistent with his capacity as White House Press Secretary to trivilise the issue in this manner: as presidential spokesman, his was ipso facto an official rather than a personal reaction. It is therefore interesting not in virtue of its evasiveness alone, nor even in virtue of the fact that it is not uncharacteristic of politicians and their press teams to expect the public to accept such evasive answers as though they properly addressed the issues in question, but rather in that it refashions the issue itself as one of name-calling instead of one pertaining to the administration’s effective prosecution of its avowed policy with respect to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian question.

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