That’s it; I’m going back to calling him Bush the Unready. The name suits him to a tee, being based on the epithet given to the King of England around the year 1000 AD. (I found out about him during the Y2K runup, when Cecil published a column about what to call the current decade.)
The below describes why Aethelred, the aforementioned king, was given this sobriquet:
Just FTR, Mr Bush:
2002 November - UN weapons inspectors return to Iraq backed by a UN resolution which threatens serious consequences if Iraq is in “material breach” of its terms.
2003 March - Chief weapons inspector Hans Blix reports that Iraq has **accelerated its cooperation **but says inspectors need more time to verify Iraq’s compliance.
2003 17 March - UK’s ambassador to the UN says the diplomatic process on Iraq has ended; **arms inspectors evacuate; **US President George W Bush gives Saddam Hussein and his sons 48 hours to leave Iraq or face war.
The man is stunned. For months, it didn’t matter what he said, what he did, or how apparent his hypocrisy, his ratings stayed sky-high, it looked as though he could brazen it out, no matter what it was.
But there is some kind of threshold, some almost psychic barrier that once crossed leads to a kind of chain reaction of shit.
I think it happened in the places Presidents don’t see. The ordinary places, the beauty shops, the work places. The places the wives and parents of servicemen overseas worry about thier loved ones. Where they vent thier frustration that they aren’t home yet. I’d be willing to bet that every poster here knows or is related to someone like that.
It isn’t the nature of the bullshit that has changed, nor the nature of the bullshitter.
It is the mood of the bullshitees that has changed.
What I don’t get is: why not just admit he misspoke? Intelligent people misspeak all the time, and they correct themselves, and look more intelligent and principled for it.
But through a litany of false statements, this administration has been stalwart in refusing to correct things as mistatements, instead either putting out explainations that are simply absurd violations of the English language and logic, or staying silent and letting pundits work out something laughable and implausible for them (at which point we are graced by some truly original thinkers that duitifully post these party lines). If exactly the same thing hadn’t been going on during the Clinton administration on the other side I might even be surprised.
Apos, don’t mean to pick on you, but when was the last time a politician, less a President or similarly-high ranking cabinet official, admitted that he misspoke in a press conference/interview unless it was something utterly trivial like his golf score?
Apos, I did read your post in full. My point to you is when was the last time it happened, not “Well CLINTON never did it”, which would of course be ignoring your post. I truthfully cannot remember, other than “Indeed my relationship with Ms. Lewinsky was sexual in nature”, the last time a politician admitted a mistake even as small as knowingly and improperly taking a mulligan in a round of golf:) This would be why I qualified my post with “I don’t mean to pick on you”. No harm was meant:)
Chain reaction of shit? You can do better than that.
Bush’s stock will rise or fall based on a number of very concrete issues:
[ul]The state of the economy (growth, jobs, stock market)
Future terrorist atacks (or lack thereof)
The situation in Iraq (whether servicemen continue to be lost or not, whether the country gets some kind of functioning gov’t or decends into chaos)
Progress toward peace in the Holy Land (or not)[/ul]
The semantic intricacies of his comments will not be something people will worry about outside a message board like this one.
I’m all for a thorough post mortem on the events and decisions that led up to the Iraq War. Whether that can actually been accomplished without ending up just a partisan piece of garbage is, IMHO, highly unlikely.
Apos, I was furthering your statement and making the comment that it has been going on for a while. Which, amusingly enough, segues masterfully into this:
Quite clearly demonstrated by the fact that nobody remembers or cares about the sort of things Clinton said in office that were factually inaccurate/misleading/evasive/incorrect, nor the statements Bush I made, nor Reagan made, nor Carter, Ford, Nixon…
Do we sense a trend here?
Yes, because one must be wholly partisan to mistake George W. Bush, who is clearly a man of utmost repute, for anything less.
Do you believe in the credibility of what you post, or are you alternately attempting to see if anyone else does?
How many times have you heard the fact that “…Saddam threw the first lot of inspectors out of Iraq”
This is a LIE
We pulled the inspectors out because they weren’t getting co-operation and were being blocked making them ineffectual, that is not the same as throwing them out, but that phrase is repeated so often it is now seen as fact.
To many people, spanna, that seems like one and the same, and really the same net result … the inspectors were unable to properly do their jobs. It makes the regime look bad, true, but to emphasize the difference between “they were thrown out” and “they were unable to to their jobs because of lack of cooperation from Saddam’s regime” is a bit more cautious and careful of a difference than I think you are trying to show.
I would like to point out that I raised this in the larger context of information indicating the Uranium claims had been debunked much earlier than previously reported.
Although Bush’s mistatement is clownish as I called it there, it probably in the end is a mistatement. It no doubt does reflect some degree of wish fulfilment as I would hazard the opinion that Bush has a somewhat tenuous relationship with facts versus what he wants to be so.
I continue to find it truly astonishing not only that the US media is so subservient, but that Bush acknowledges that subservience - and even celebrates it - by knowingly making statements such as this.
I guess, however, it’s just a natural progression from blurring the lines between Saddam and a-Q that Bush began around the SotUA, 2002. The majority of the electorate still believe that presidential lie, don’t they ?
And what of that other traditional seeker of truth, the opposition, the Democrats in this case, fighting for an angle on every issue . . . ?
Hounding down the elected perpetrators of this kind of falsehood is a core damn function of the media/’Fourth Estate’ in any credible democracy, and of the opposing political Party. To not do so undermines the very essence of that democracy.
Further, that Bush knows what he’s doing clearly tells us he doesn’t care about undermining democracy, IMHO.
And it also means he’s always got one eye on 2004.
