09-08-2004, 12:48 AM
|
|
|
Confirmed User
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: hmmm.....
Posts: 1,633
|
This isn't true...
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/bushwave.htm
Quote:
Origins: This
story appeared in the pages of The Washington Post in early March 2002. Because it was such a juicy tidbit ("The Prez is such a dolt, he waves at blind folks!"), it was subsequently picked up by numerous talk radio hosts who gleefully fed it to their listeners and reached an even larger audience through the medium of television via Late Night with Conan O'Brien and Saturday Night Live.
Was it true? Well, not really. Although Stevie Wonder did perform at the 3 March 2002 Presidential Gala held at the Ford Theatre in Washington where President Bush was in attendance, the "wave" was both far less than initially made out to be and appears to have been directed at someone else.
After running the item as true and being challenged upon it by the Ford's Theatre Artistic Director, who was seated by the President that night and didn't at all recall this incident, Washington Post writer Lloyd Grove delved further into the story. Editors working on turning film of that event into a television special (which is scheduled to air April 12) went frame by frame through the video captured by the "presidential isocam" (as the camera trained on Bush is called). At the point where Wonder was getting settled behind his keyboard, Bush briefly raised his palm and smiled. The gesture was not the excited, enthused wave it is now comically portrayed to be; it was a small motion of the sort one routinely makes to an acquaintance across a crowded room. Moreover, the motion appears to have been directed at Kelsey Grammer, the emcee of the evening.
|
Not that waving at Grammer is any better.... |
|
|