Bush meets the press.

I thought if he said "I don't want to sound like a broken record" one more time I was going to put my foot through the screen. He had, as he should, prepared well for the questions and he stuck to his message the whole way through. The fact that the message is at once based on false premises and a mis-guided view of the world was to me striking. He still continues to believe that Saddam was some kind of threat that had to be dealt with with alacrity, now saying that just having the capability of creating weapons was the threat not the actual possessing them though as Russert pointed out several times, prior to the war it was the expressed opinion of the American government that such stockpiles existed AND, in the case, of Don Rumsfeld, that we knew where those stockpiles were.
The President, I think, because he repeated it on that interview, still is holding out hope that we will stumble into these massive chemical dumps somewhere in the desert. It's a view held onto like that of any other person with an obsession.

On the economy, it's a little of the same. Bush really believes that continuing to cut taxes is the solution to any economy including this wartime one. Any glimmer is enough for him to say his plan is working.
Faced with the most recent GAO summary that basically says this can't work, he muttered he didn't know what the motives of the GAO were. Huh?

His National Guard service gaps was brought up. He did not look like a happy camper about it but answered the stock answer, "I served blah, blah, " and tried to turn it into some kind of 'knock the Guard' issue which it is not. Other people in the Guard show up for duty. The question is, and one that Tim did not ask, was where were you for a year and a half? (See Corn in The Nation questions or I will link it here.) Now he says go find the records, but I think he knows those records are long gone. The question to ask is may we see your diary for those months??


All in all, I hope millions of Democrats and Independent voters watched and listened. His comments on their opinions was strictly
rock-ribbed "I'm not going to change." I hope they get fired up and stay fired up until this guy and his cadre of liars are sent on a long vacation of duck hunting in the Texas Hill Country.

Joe Nation

Um...could we send him someplace a little further away from me? Please? Antarctica, perhaps?

He also on several occasions muttered he would like to debate an issue. I assume he meant with the democratic standard bearer during the upcoming election season. George Bush in an honest debate is something I would love to see but I doubt that I will. His handlers could not be that foolish. To think he is the product of a well funded education.

Transcript ofthe interview can be found at:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4179618/

I didn't watch the interview for the same reason I didn't watch his state of union, I get too aggravated. But I just read the transcript, what I could manage to get through without yawning, I thought he said nothing that was worth an interview and I doubt that it helps his ratings any.

Same old crap!

Presidential?
He had a week to learn the subject matter and still came off like a bumblin' fool. Oh wait, he is a bumbling fool so he came off as he actually is. I'd watch a real live interview of him with an interviewer that was a real interviewer instead of a shill in an Infomercial.

Mr. Bush's Version


Published: February 9, 2004
When Americans choose a president, their most profound consideration is whether a candidate can make the wisest possible decisions when it comes to war. In the case of George W. Bush, they will not only judge whether the invasion of Iraq was the right decision, but what our president has brought away from that experience. If there were misjudgments about the nature of Iraq's weapons programs or in the ways the administration presented that intelligence to the public, we need to know whether he recognizes them and has learned from them. Yesterday, in an interview with NBC's Tim Russert, after a week in which it became obvious to most Americans that the justifications for the war were based on flawed intelligence, Mr. Bush offered his reflections, and they were far from reassuring. The only clarity in the president's vision appears to be his own perfect sense of self-justification.
Right now, the questions average Americans are asking about Iraq seem much clearer than the ones Mr. Bush is willing to confront. People want to know why American intelligence was so wrong about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Mr. Bush didn't have a consistent position on this pivotal issue. At some points during his Oval Office interview, he seemed to be admitting that he had been completely wrong when he told the public just before the war started that the intelligence left "no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." At other moments he suggested the weapons might still be hidden somewhere, or that they may have been transported to another country. At times he depicted himself as having been misled by intelligence reports. But he insisted that George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, was doing a good job and deserved to keep his job.
Average Americans are also asking themselves whether invading Iraq would have seemed like the right decision if we knew then what we know now. Mr. Bush doesn't seem willing to even take on this critical question. He repeatedly referred to Saddam Hussein as a dangerous madman, without defining the threat that even a madman, without any weapons of mass destruction, posed to the United States. At one point, his reasoning seemed to be that even if the dictator did not have the feared weapons, he could have started manufacturing them on a moment's notice. To bolster his position, he cited David Kay, the American weapons inspector, as reporting that "Saddam Hussein was dangerous with the ability to make weapons." In fact, Mr. Kay said that Iraq's weapons program seemed to have ground to a halt under the pressure of the United Nations inspections and sanctions that Mr. Bush and his staff disdained last year. Mr. Kay said Saddam Hussein retained only the basic ability to restart weapons programs if that pressure were removed.
At other times, the president seemed to argue that the invasion was necessary simply to demonstrate that Americans did not back down from a fight. "In my judgment, when the United States says there will be serious consequences, and if there isn't serious consequences, it creates adverse consequences," he said. Although Mr. Bush tried to portray himself as a man who exhausted every peaceful solution, the "serious consequences" were threatened in a United Nations resolution in late 2002 that Mr. Bush was forced to seek to mollify nervous allies after the decision to have a war was essentially made.
Mr. Bush's explanation of how he reconciled the current activities in Iraq with his 2000 campaign rejection of "nation building" was simply silly. (American troops are building a nation in Iraq, he said, but they are also "fighting a war so that they can build a nation.") And it's very hard to take seriously Mr. Bush's contention that he was not surprised by the intensity of the resistance in Iraq.
The president was doing far more yesterday than rolling out the administration's spin for the next campaign. He was demonstrating how he is likely to think if confronted with a similar crisis in the future. The fuzziness and inconsistency of his comments suggest he is still relying on his own moral absolutism, that in a dangerous world the critical thing is to act decisively, and worry about connecting the dots later. Mr. Bush said repeatedly that he went to the United Nations seeking a diplomatic alternative to war. In fact, the United States rejected all diplomatic alternatives at the time, severely damaging relations with some of its most important and loyal allies. "I believe it is essential that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent," he said. "It's too late if they become imminent."
Another question average Americans will be asking themselves this election year is whether the Bush administration, which wanted to invade Iraq even before Sept. 11, manipulated the intelligence reports to frighten Congress and the public into supporting the idea. The president's claim yesterday that Congress had access to exactly the same intelligence he had was inaccurate, and his comments about the new commission he has appointed to look into intelligence gathering made it clear that he has no intention of having his administration's actions included in the probe.
Some of Mr. Bush's comments yesterday raise questions even more disturbing than the idea that senior administration members might have misled the nation about the intelligence on Iraq. The nation obviously needs a leader who is always alert to the threat of terrorism from abroad. But it cannot afford to have one who responds to the trauma of 9/11 by overreacting to the possibility of danger. In the coming campaign, Mr. Bush, who described himself as a "war president," is going to have to show the country that he is capable of distinguishing real threats from false alarms, and has the courage to tell the nation the truth about something as profound as war. Nothing in the interview offered much hope in that direction.

A rumor
I didn't watch this ChatShow. There's a rumor that The Dunce had an earpiece so answers could be fed to him. Anyone have any evidence that this was the case?

If that is so the person prompting him is as big a dunce as he is. The problem is the dunces in the electorate buy that crapola.

Strike two for Bush

Thursday, February 12, 2004 Posted: 4:20 PM EST (2120 GMT)


WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate) -- All week long in the capital, worried Republicans buzzed about George W. Bush's Sunday interview on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Supporters of the president were surprised that he would ask to be questioned by Tim Russert. What flabbergasted them was the absence of any plan to use this event to stop being the target as the 2004 campaign began.
This failure was Strike Two for President Bush. Strike One was his humdrum State of the Union address. Fortunately for the president, this is not baseball where three strikes are out.
During more than eight months before Election Day, Bush will have many opportunities for recuperation. For now, however, the president is in political retreat, with Democrats unimpeded in challenging his competency and credibility.
The "Meet the Press" performance raised disturbing questions for Republicans. How could Bush be put out to confront the most feared questioner in Washington without a careful scenario? How could he face Russert without precise answers on the decision to go to war in Iraq and on his National Guard service? The suspicion is that his 2004 campaign organization, a fund-raising juggernaut, is otherwise inadequate.
The Bush White House is cloistered, where even Bush aides seem restrained from debating strategy even behind closed doors. The belief in Republican circles is that Bush, tired of battering by Democrats and alarmed by his descent in the polls, asked for an hour on television.
This questions how it could be possible for a president who claims to neither read newspapers nor watch television. In any event, no aide dissuaded Bush from embarking on this course or devised a plan to make the most of it.
Democratic operatives, including Sen. John Kerry's advisers, groused that Russert permitted Bush to escape -- reflecting presidential bloodlust by Democrats in the sight of Bush's wounds. Actually, no president ever before had been subjected to such tough questioning in the Oval Office.
The private Republican complaint is not with Russert but with Bush. It was thought the president would have sat down with carefully structured language to defend himself or even produce news.
Yet, the newsiest tidbit contained in excerpts of the taped interview distributed last Saturday was the unsurprising declaration he would not fire CIA Director George Tenet.
While gay marriage embarrasses Democrats because of their homosexual constituency, Bush did not try to capitalize on this Sunday. He was informed in advance that Russert had no plans to bring it up but that the president, of course, could raise this important social issue. He did not.
Most disturbing to the president's supporters was his reaction to whether young Lt. Bush skipped Alabama National Guard duty in 1972.
This chestnut from the 2000 campaign dropped when leftist agitator Michael Moore called Bush a military "deserter" and Democratic National Chairman Terry McAuliffe labeled him AWOL. Kerry linked Bush's National Guard service with "going to Canada, going to jail, being a conscientious objector" as forms of draft avoidance he would not criticize.
"The political season's here," Bush told Russert, launching a tepid defense of his service record. The president did not lash back by exposing Kerry's unsavory record in the antiwar movement's extreme wing following his heroic service in Vietnam. That reluctance might have been prudent, but it maintained the protective shell around Bush's probable challenger.
The president would not deign to even touch the senator. Nearly a year ago in March, Vogue magazine reported Kerry as denigrating Bush's "lack of knowledge," adding: "He was two years behind me at Yale, and I knew him, and he's still the same guy."
I reported the president telling aides he did not know Kerry at Yale. On Sunday, Russert cited the Vogue quotations and asked: "Did you know him at Yale?" "No," Bush replied. "How do you respond to that?" Russert persisted. The president answered with one word: "Politics."
That's not nearly an adequate retort to John Kerry. Republican heavy thinkers regard him as second only to Howard Dean as a vulnerable nominee.
But Kerry, merciless in slashing at the president, remains untouched. It seems difficult for an incumbent president to lose amid economic recovery, but George W. Bush is showing it might be possible.