Bush’s Press Conference: Ow
Yesterday I predicted that Bush’s press conference would be dull. But it wasn’t - it was painful. My heart actually went out to him - as he struggled and stammered his way through the Q&A, it was clear that he’s really just not up to these appearances. At one point he actually said, “I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. ” And later: “…you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I’m not as quick on my feet as I should be…”
Mr Bush: you are the President of the United States - it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a reporter will put you on the spot.
All this despite the fact this press conference was as planned out as possible. Like last time, Bush let slip that the selection of reporters to ask questions was pre-planned: at one point when several reporters were jockeying to be next, he said “I’ve got some ‘must calls,’ I’m sorry.”
Beyond the stammering, his tendency to meander is breathtaking. In his answer to a question about reorganizing the FBI, he started talking about feeding hungry people in North Korea and fighting AIDS in Africa.
There were a couple statements he made that really got my attention. One was his response to the inevitable “Iraq / Vietnam quagmire comparison” question. He did of course reply to the question, but he didn’t come close to actually answering it. He said the analogy is false, implied that it was dangerous to even ask the question (it “sends the wrong message to the enemy”), that we “must stay the course,” and that “freedom is not easy to achieve.” He didn’t say the slightest thing about what actually might prevent it from devolving into a “Vietnam quagmire” scenario. Although responding to a question with vague generalities is hardly unusual for a politician, given the number of soldiers dying and being wounded every day, it’s a question that is in desperate need of a substantive answer (while the number of dead soliders is dutifully reported by the major media outlets, the staggering number of wounded and the extent of their suffering are glossed over).
The other statement that got my attention: “Even knowing what I know today about the stockpiles of weapons, I still would have called upon the world to deal with Saddam Hussein.” What? Prior to the invasion, we were hit over the head repeatedly with the Bush administration’s bedrock justification: the incontrovertible assertion that Saddam possessed WMD. There’s been a lot of evidence accumulating that this wasn’t the real motivation, but the Bush administration has stuck to the position that it was simply led astray by bad intelligence. The foregoing quotation is from the part of the press conference where he was really struggling the most for words, so I think it slipped out unintentionally. I’d call it another drop in the bucket of evidence that he was indeed obsessed with getting Saddam. He did quickly recover by going on to say that he thinks evidence for WMD will ultimately be found. But given David Kay’s exhaustive investigation and his conclusion that the weapons weren’t there and never were, Bush is just daydreaming.
