While I enjoyed the Anchoress’s birthday wishes for the President this morning, I wasn’t going to link to it until Mark Morford came along in the San Francisco Gate.

It is like some sort of virus. It is like some sort of weird and painful rash on your face that makes you embarrassed to walk out the door and so you sit there day after day, waiting for it to go away, slathering on ointment and Bactine and scotch. And yet still it lingers.

Compare that with the Anchoress:

I was not at all surprised to see President Bush forego the “trembling lip photo-op” moment in which most world-leaders indulged after the Christmas Tsunami of 2004 in order to get real work done, to bring immediate help to that area by co-ordinating our own military (particularly our Naval support) with Australia and Japan. Stupid, stingy American.

I wasn’t surprised when President Bush thought that New Orleans had dodged a bullet after Hurricane Katrina, and therefore let down his guard. After all, we all thought NOLA had done so.… But I was surprised that, when the press “picked and choosed” their stories while launching an unprecedented, emotion-charged, often completely inaccurate (10,000 bodies!) attack on the President—the rising waters were all his fault and he was suddenly “the uncaring racist attempting genocide by indifference”—the President did not fight back against the sea of made-up news and boilerplate, fantastic charges against him.

I was surprised, and what surprised me was the sense I had that Bush’s heart was broken.… that he could not believe that in a time of such terrible need, all some people could think of was, “how do we use this politically, how do we break Bush with this?”

They’re both over the top, but I prefer the Anchoress’s. Partly because it’s nicer, partly because she takes everybody to task, partly because her piece has the better title, but mostly because of that last line.

She was also surprised to see him dance in Georgia. Dancing is in the air today.

While I’m at it, I’m going to pass on a similar mention from New York Times columnist Alessandra Stanley via Outside the Beltway:

Mr. King gave the president a chance to defend his policies without risk of interruption or follow-up.

If you read the transcript, Larry King definitely asked lots of questions and some of them were even follow-ups, though certainly not in depth ones. For whatever reason, King wanted to cover a lot of topics. However, what interests me in this response is the expectation that without a rude interviewer interrupting the interviewee, it isn’t a worthwhile interview.

I need more scotch.