BUSH ON THE COUCH

Odd statement from Bush in a (rather fawning) C-SPAN interview conducted yesterday:

THE PRESIDENT: ...The Iranian people are good, decent, honorable people. And they've got a government that is belligerent, loud, noisy, threatening, a government which is in defiance of the rest of the world and says, we want a nuclear weapon....

"Loud"? "Noisy"? Is that part of the reason we're rattling sabers at Iran -- because the regime is loud?

Shortly after that, Bush returns to the same imagery, this time in reference to rumors of war with Iran, and Steve Scully, the interviewer, asks him about it:

THE PRESIDENT: ... I guess my reaction to all the noise about, you know, "He wants to go to war" is, first of all, I don't understand the tactics, and I guess I would say it's political....

Q You use that word, "noise," a lot. How do you define that?

THE PRESIDENT: There's just a lot of chatter here in Washington. I mean, it's hard for some of your viewers to get it, I guess, unless they pay attention to the daily grind of news and comments and press releases. I guess I would just say that there's endless chatter, a lot of people on TV expressing their opinion -- which is fine, don't get me wrong, it's just part of the process -- after all, I'm on TV expressing my opinion with you. (Laughter.) But it's just a lot of chatter in Washington, a lot of people expressing themselves on a regular basis.

That's what "noise" is -- "a lot of people expressing themselves on a regular basis." (I thought that was free speech in a democracy, but hey, that's just me.)

But why this particular image? What's going on in Bush's brain? Is this Mom's voice shouting "Stop all that noise!" from when he was a kid? Or is it Little Boy Bush demanding that everyone go silent and pay attention to him?