Time & Perspective Quote by George H. W. Bush

Bush is doing something presidents rarely do on camera: admitting, in real time, that he’s managing the clock like a lawyer in a deposition. The line is half scold, half wink. “Please don’t ask me” sounds polite, but it’s a hard stop dressed in manners, the patrician version of “we’re not doing this.” The real bite is procedural: you’re “burning up time,” “the meter is running,” and suddenly the exchange isn’t about the substance of the question at all. It’s about scarcity, control, and leverage.

The phrasing turns an interview into a transaction. “Meter” suggests a taxi, a utility bill, a paid slot where every second has a cost. “Through the sand” splices that modern metaphor with an hourglass image, making the deadline feel both bureaucratic and inevitable. Bush’s subtext is blunt: I’m not going to give you what you want, and I’m going to make you complicit in why you can’t get it. If you keep pressing, you’re the one wasting the dwindling resource.

Then he drops “filibustering,” a term from legislative obstruction, and it lands as self-aware aggression. He’s not just evading; he’s naming the evasion, normalizing it as a tactic. The candor is strategic: by confessing to the maneuver, he reframes it as savvy time management rather than dishonesty. It’s the executive branch borrowing the Senate’s oldest trick, with a raised eyebrow that says: you know the game, and so do I.