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The Fayettenam Observer reports that the soldiers were "in formation for a brief by their highest officer, hence did not applaud." They were seated, but "formation" means a prescribed arrangement of soldiers, not necessarily soldiers standing in nice neat lines.
I noticed, though, that there were points in the speech where Bush stopped for the tumultuous applause he gets at most of his canned appearances, and no tumultuous applause came. Bush's crew started clapping frantically at one point and the soldiers joined in; when Bush's people stopped, the soldiers stopped.
Forget the speech and look at the video of the soldiers shaking hands with Bush after the speech was over. These people were NOT happy to be in the same state as Bush.
Also remember the comment I posted about the woman soldier who told me, the day after the speech, that she had "something more important to do" than to sit in an auditorium and listen to a speech by Dear Leader: buying a new lipstick.
It's times like these that I think back to a Clinton speech I attended at Fort Drum. It was the dead of winter. Clinton was in the Northeast for some reason and just decided, on the spur of the moment, that he wanted to go over to Fort Drum and thank the troops for their service in Somalia and on Hurricane Andrew relief. (And by "spur of the moment" that's exactly what I mean--Clinton's advance team called the Fort Drum public affairs officer and told him, "the commander-in-chief is going to be on your installation tomorrow morning. He will leave tomorrow afternoon. He will give a speech. Find a gymnasium, cover up the floor and alert the troops.") Wheeler-Sack Army Airfield isn't big enough to land a 747, so the Big Dog came up in a DC-9. The man did two things: spent all morning sitting in a staff sergeant's on-post quarters talking about the stresses of military life with four randomly-selected military families, and spent about an hour and a half talking to as much of the division as they could pack into the biggest gym on post. Lead time on this one was so short, the press contingent included the local television, radio and newspaper. The TV station brought one camera. They didn't even have Syracuse press there, and he couldn't have gotten live national television because the speech started at 3:30pm. Bush wouldn't have given a speech like this. He would have walked to the podium at 8pm and there would have been forty television cameras from every network in the world there to shoot him from every angle imaginable. At Clinton's speech you had applause and even laughter. (He made a comment about the fifty feet of snow on the ground and all of the soldiers from the South. "I don't know how they got y'all to come back here!" Now...in Bush's case...I sell lumber that isn't as wooden as Bush is.)
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