-Caveat Lector-
I still think the poor guy's handlers just got carried
away in a routine torture session... forgot the cardinal
rule, leave no visible marks... now THEIR handlers are
probably getting THEIR jollies in a few tough love
sessions...
molli
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World Tries to Get Pretzel Tale Straight
Marjorie Miller Los Angeles Times Service
Thursday, January 17, 2002
LONDON Was it a Qaida plot? An Enron end run? Or
was it, as
President George W. Bush said, just a wayward
pretzel that
briefly felled the leader of the free world?
With two dogs as the only witnesses to the
presidential fainting
spell, the international press has been left to
speculate about what
happened - and whether Mr. Bush can watch
television and chew
pretzels at the same time.
"George Bush attempted to taste the biscuit with
his attention
focused on a football game - a combination of
actions that, it
appears, proved difficult," said the Greek daily To
Vima.
The media responded to the pretzel pratfall with
jokes, queries
about Mr. Bush's mental and physical health, and
detailed
explanations of the knotted American-style pretzel.
"Though not to everyone's taste, they are not
considered a health
hazard," The Independent of London informed readers
dryly. True
to form, the Germans consulted pretzel experts, the
French
contemplated Americans' "complicated relationship
with food" and
the Italians looked to the religious roots of the
pretzel.
The Saudis worried that the scare would prevent Mr.
Bush from
focusing attention on what they called Israel's
oppression of the
Palestinians, while Britain offered the president a
few backhanded
compliments.
The incident proved that Mr. Bush is "a man of the
people,"
Britain's Daily Telegraph said in an editorial.
"This is exactly the
sort of accident that befalls Homer Simpson, night
after night."
The paper also was cheered by the fact that the
leader of the
international war on terrorism still has time for
Sunday football.
"He has shown himself, once again, to be completely
in tune with
the tastes and instincts of the people he leads,"
the editorial said.
Of course, most Americans did not end up prone with
facial
bruises at the end of the game - at least not from
pretzels. The
Independent labeled the official story "Hard to
Swallow."
"Was he poisoned perhaps?" the British paper asked.
"Has the
stress of fighting the war on terrorism while
fending off inquiries
about the collapse of his friend Ken Lay's Enron
overwhelmed
him? Was there maybe some family tiff?" It
concluded that the
"vanquisher of al Qaida may have met his match."
Germany's mass-circulation Bild, the daily of
choice for blue-collar
Germans, also asked if there wasn't more to the
story: "Has the
president's alcohol problem been taken up again?"
Saudi Arabia's English-language Arab News said that
while no
one believed there was anything seriously wrong
with Mr. Bush,
his pretzel mishap had led to speculation about the
impact of an
ailing president on the world. "These are
particularly dangerous
times internationally," the paper said in an
editorial, adding, "In
order to bring together a coalition of support
within the Arab
world, the White House had to focus its attention
more
constructively on Israel's oppression of the
Palestinians."
If Mr. Bush's unusual collapse was "a symptom of
more serious
medical problems," the paper said, "we can be
absolutely sure
that, lacking any clear direction from a troubled
White House,
Washington's foreign policy will click back on its
traditional Zionist
track."
"Palestinians will continue to choke on Israeli
aggression while the
U.S. president may again choke on a typical Yiddish
pretzel," it
said. No, no, said the Italian press. The
American-style pretzel
was invented by a 16th-century German monk as a
reward for
children who memorized their prayers, La Repubblica
newspaper
said. The word derives from the Latin prex, or
prize, it claimed.
Leave it to the British tabloids to challenge the
Italians on Latin.
The Daily Mail declared that the word "pretzel"
came from
pretiola - Latin for little reward. The dough is
folded to look like a
child's arms in prayer, and the three holes
represent the Holy
Trinity of the Christian Church. And it was German
and Dutch
immigrants who took the pretzel across the Atlantic
when they
settled in Pennsylvania in 1710, the paper said.
Russian newspapers, perhaps reflecting the more
somber tone of
the Vladimir Putin era, restrained themselves. The
daily
Komsomolskaya Pravda ran a detailed diagram of Mr.
Bush's
anatomy, with the location of the pretzel blockage
marked with a
star.
"Bush's organism, although weakened and
unconscious, managed
to cope with the indisposition," the daily Gazeta
said. "The
organism first rejected the pretzel but later
swallowed it and
digested without mercy."
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