Back on August 21, George W. Bush held a press conference that…well, let's put it this way. You have your people out there who think the man is a terrible president and that there's something wrong with him in terms of being able to think or communicate. And you have your people who think he's a great leader and that he's fully in command of everything he's saying and doing. Both groups seem to think that this particular press conference inarguably proves their case. If you'd like to watch it, you can decide for yourself.
At the time it occurred, I couldn't link to it because the only place I could find the whole thing was the C-Span website, which seems to receive its tech support from Larry the Cable Guy. But Steve Billnitzer, a loyal reader of this site, figured out how to view it despite Larry's best efforts.
This link should work in most browsers. You'll need to have Real Player installed to view the clip, which runs a bit less than an hour. You'd think, in this era of Google Video and You Tube and ifilm that someone would establish an online source for all the major political speeches and press conferences. Yeah, you'd think that.
By the way: That's an rtsp link, those letters standing for Real Time Streaming Protocol. In theory, your browser is supposed to connect to an rtsp link and allow you to view the clip but not to download it…and in many cases, you don't want to download it to your harddisk because those files can be very large. But if you come across an rtsp link and you want to download it, it's a cinch with Net Transport, a file downloader that can download almost anything and run manage several download links at the same time. You can download a trial version of the program at the Net Transport website. Sometimes what you happen to do is open a media file in Windows Media Player or Real Player's standalone player, look on the Properties or Clip Info page and get the exact web address from which the media file is coming, then paste that address into Net Transport.
See what wonderful stuff you can learn from this site? I'm feeling so helpful today that I think I'm going to put up another ad to encourage tipping. My PayPal account is low and I need to buy some real odd junk this week.
