I’ve seen this “one of the guys” act before. The governor of Brasilia uses the same ruse. The poor and simpletons love him for it. He makes a few portuguese mistakes… uses some regional expressions and makes the whole “I’m one of the people act”. He isn’t. He is dirty rich and apparently speaks good portuguese… not perfect… but he puts on the show in public.
With reasonable certainty, a President facing reelection will try to put his best foot forward.
The issue on Iraq is “progress”. What have we accomplished, what is left to be done, and the general steps we will take to end it.
There were hardly any specifics but platitudes concerning these matters. Either Bush and his advisors are tone deaf to the public, or there was nothing concrete to report.
Whichever the case may be, the conclusion is clear. The US is in a mess.
Islamic culture isnt the problem. Just like the German culture wasnt the problem, the Nazis were. The problem is that they were so embedded in the German society that it was very hard to extract them. The same could be said about the Islamic extremist.
Would you have been against the toppling of the Nazi regime?,-knowing now what had to be done to accomplich the task?
The Cherokee Trail of Tears. Most of the expansionistic policies of the Roman Empire.
Yes, there was resistance. Yes, there was terrorism. Yes, there were massacres. And ultimately, sheer ruthlessness, combined with the military machine of the Americans and Romans, and the steady flow of resources to the front, crushed each and every resisting organization or regime.
The problem here is that we don’t wanna do that. I believe Bush was telling the truth about not wanting to conquer Iraq. I think what he’d really like is a nice safe democratic government that is willing to be chummy with us and undercut OPEC on oil sales. Hell, he’d probably even settle for a friendly dictatorship at this point. By the time the next dictator gets up to dickens, Bush’ll be out of office, and it’ll be someone else’s problem.
We don’t want to become Roman Emperors. Are we prepared to take the kind of measures they did? Because every day we don’t sends a signal to the bad guys: The Americans Lack Resolve.
In short, Bush has painted himself into a corner, as previously mentioned. And the rotten bastard has painted you and me and Uncle Fred in there with him.
I don’t think Bush is evil. I think he’s stubborn to the point where either the government is going to run his way, or it will not run at all. He wants what he wants, and the blazes with everything else. What worries me is that I have begun to think he may well have begun to think he’s right even in the face of plain evidence to the contrary.
Is he nuts? I doubt it… but he wouldn’t be the first sane man to be undone by his own denial of the obvious.
Yeah, well, perhaps. More than once since last night, I’ve found myself imagining an argument between Bush and his handlers:
“Look, boys, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I am the President, and I can address the American people. Just get on the line, and feed me answers over the earphone when I stamp my foot.”
“Sir, I really don’t think this is a good idea. There are too many questions that could undo your whole image. I really think we should just cancel this press conference, and issue a statement to the press. We could claim reports of an assassin among the reporters; that’d play well right now…”
“I appreciate your views, Condi, but I am the President, and I am going to address the people. They have served me well for four years, but soon they’re going to have to vote me back into office, and I should give them some reason to do that. This Iraq thing should do the trick.”
“Sir, are you nuts? They’re going to tear you apart out there! At *least * let us set up the teleprompters!”
“I’m the President, Colin, and I can handle these news jockeys. The American people know that I know what’s best. They’ll believe what I tell them.”
“Look, dummy, with all due respect, if you screw up out there, it’ll be the election from hell!”
“They’ve always believed me before, Dick. They’ll believe in me again. How could they not? I’m the President, and I have made up my mind. Now cue the cameras. I’m goin’ out there.”
While it took the wind out of the rebellion’s sails for a while, it still had enough momentum to affect Mideast politics to this very day. And is even Pres Bush willing to use tactics as heavyhanded as the Romans? THOSE guys knew how to put down a rebellion! :eek:
There was a thread that ran through a number of Bush’s answers to questions, that of his proper role being to wait around on others - Abiziad, the 9/11 Commission, Brahimi of the U.N., the FBI - before it was his place to act.
I thought that merited a discussion of its own, hence the thread GWB’s Strangely Passive Presidency.
I agree that he is prepped very little. I think he is wrapped in the idea that people trust him and all he has to do is get out there and talk straight to the people. I think he decides what he’s going to focus on and that’s that. As much as I dislike Bush - I think that he is making a critical error in not using his staff’s experience to make this go better.
It would be very simple for him to get re-elected if he made the following statements (which he almost got to last night):
re Mistakes: I made the best decisions I could with the information I had available at the time. As we all are learning, some of the information I’ve been given has not been 100% correct. For instance, in the August 6th PDB, there was the statement that there were 70 field operations being conducted about the terrorist threat. Today we learned that that number was not in fact correct. I am the President and I expect that when I am given information critical to making decisions, that that information is accurate. I apologize to the american people and to the world community for us having been mislead in anyway, and I intend to do everything in my power to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RTFirefly
Yes, the rest of the world, somehow this man became our President. If you don’t mind my doing a Richard Clarke, I apologize to you all. We did everything we could in our power to keep this from happening in 2000, but we were unable to prevent it. We failed. We are sorry.
I hope you don’t presume to apologize for all Americans. I don’t recall giving you a power of attorney authorizing you to apologize on my behalf. I voted for Bush because he was a better choice than Gore. Given another Bush/Gore election today, I’d vote Bush again. No is apology coming from me.
If you want to apologize for your Democrats not offering a better candidate in 2000, I’ll accept that.
I’m as yet undecided about this November because:
- Bush hasn’t been all that great.
- Kerry’s turn under the microscope hasn’t come yet.
It’s gonna’ be a fun six months.
AGREED!! So why the HELL do you attack the one SECULAR state in the whole region?! Immediate disclaimer, as required by the Internet Convention to Avoid Ad Hominem Attacks by Idiot Right Wingers: Saddam Hussein ate a whole baby for breakfast every morning. I’m glad he’s in jail.
But who or what do you suppose is going to take his place? A streamlined, 21st-century democracy? Not bloody likely! Maybe the worst thing about having a bunch of jokers who don’t believe in evolution running this country is they thought they could graft an eagle’s wings onto a frog’s ass and make it fly by divine edict of the Imperial Presidency.
Saddam was a monster, but apparently he was at least somewhat amenable to sanctions, as the absence of WMD would indicate. And he had the crazies under control! Why not recruit the UN to pressure, punish and, yes, engage him and try to squeeze a little lemonade out of Baghdad’s Big Lemon? It would’ve been far, far preferable to the horrible, bloody quagmire dubya’s pushed us into.
And the problem with having a bunch of pro-choice jokers running the country is that no-one would care if Saddam ate a baby every day for breakfast.
huh?
Most likely.
I just wanted to add a sample of a president admitting a mistake:
How truly astonishing to have someone take responsibility as the leader of a nation. Kennedy had his faults, no one can deny it, but this is an example of doing it right.
*Q Mr. President, before the war, you and members of your administration made several claims about Iraq that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators with sweets and flowers, that Iraqi oil revenue would pay for most of the reconstruction; and that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said, we know where they are. How do you explain to Americans how you got that so wrong? And how do you answer your opponents, who say that you took this nation to war on the basis of what have turned out to be a series a false premises?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, let me step back and review my thinking prior to going into Iraq. First, the lesson of September the 11th is, when this nation sees a threat, a gathering threat, we’ve got to deal with it. We can no longer hope that oceans protect us from harm. Every threat we must take seriously.
Saddam Hussein was a threat. He was a threat because he had used weapons of mass destruction on his own people. He was a threat because he coddled terrorists. He was a threat because he funded suiciders. He was a threat to the region. He was a threat to the United States. That’s the assessment that I made from the intelligence, the assessment that Congress made from the intelligence; that’s the exact same assessment that the United Nations Security Council made with the intelligence.
I went to the U.N., as you might recall, and said, either you take care of him, or we will. Any time an American President says, if you don’t, we will, we better be prepared to. And I was prepared to. I thought it was important for the United Nations Security Council that when it says something, it means something, for the sake of security in the world. See, the war on terror had changed the calculations. We needed to work with people. People needed to come together to work. And, therefore, empty words would embolden the actions of those who are willing to kill indiscriminately.
The United Nations passed a Security Council resolution unanimously that said, disarm or face serious consequences. And he refused to disarm. *
Saddam had used WMDs on his own people back in the 1980s; damned if I can figure out why that suddenly made him a threat in 2003. (Compare, for instance, with Iran next door, which was known in 2002 to be just about ready to join the nuclear ‘club’.) Whatever it means to ‘coddle’ terrorists, he had little working relationship with them. (Compare with Iran again, which was behind a number of terrorist attacks on us in the 1980s and 1990s. Since Libya got out of the game a number of years back, Iran has been the clear leader in terms of state-sponsored terrorism.) Saddam didn’t fund suiciders, although he was a benefactor to their survivors. While hardly a repudiation of suicide bombing, that’s not the same as making it happen. And if the UN Security Council concluded that Iraq was a threat to the US, I sure missed it.
And of course, Bush conveniently forgets that when the UNSC said “disarm or face serious consequences,” they specifically avoided language saying “disarm or be invaded.” They wanted us to come back and get another resolution before they’d back the invasion.
“See, the war on terror had changed the calculations.” Yeah, sure. Before 9/11, plan Iraq invasion and occupation. After 9/11, plan Iraq invasion and occupation. And take advantage of Saddam-bin-Ladening to get US behind the invasion.
Well, the oil revenues are – they’re bigger than we thought they would be at this point in time. I mean, one year after the liberation of Iraq, the revenues of the oil stream is pretty darn significant. One of the things I was concerned about prior to going into Iraq was that the oil fields would be destroyed. But they weren’t, they’re now up and running. And that money is – it will benefit the Iraqi people. It’s their oil, and they’ll use it to reconstruct the country.
OK, so if there’s more oil revenue than we expected, and we expected the oil revenues to fund the reconstruction, why isn’t the oil revenue funding the reconstruction?
Geez, now I wish I hadn’t skipped the darn thing. Though I’ll admit watching Sam Stone bob and weave in his attempts to defend Dubya is almost as amusing.
As for the suggestion that most Americans will only get a distilled, President-safe version of the conference, I think the easy way to counter that would be to simply replay portions of the video. Let his (stammering, evasive) words speak for themselves, as it were.
Nah, it just means his handlers tell him to avoid the ten-dollar words in order to fool people like yourself into thinking he’s “jus’ plain folks”.
Either that, or Bush simply avoids all those com-pli-ca-ted words that he can’t pronounce… 
As the author of the OP, I take umbrage: there were five minutes left in the damned thing when I hopped to my iMac; the remainder played out while I was at my keyboard two feet away. How much horseshit do you have to shovel before you realize there probably aren’t going to be any diamonds at the bottom of the pile?
And nowhere do I admit that I “formed an opinion long before the thing had played out”. Of course I’ve formed an opinion (and how!) of Bush over the last four years; everything I’ve ever seen him do or say led me to believe he wasn’t likely to cover himself with oratorical glory, but hey – miracles happen! I was willing to have him convince me otherwise… even if I was secretly hoping he’d pull an LBJ and announce he was going to spare us another four years of misery.
Let me close with this from Tom Tomorrow, who, as usual, nails the whole issue with enviable pith:
Oh god, he’s so awful. He just flounders around until he can dredge up a marginally appropriate sound bite–and when the question doesn’t allow for that, he’s just utterly lost.
Or perhaps in step with all the people who voted so that Bush came in second in the popular vote in 2000. Bush is a minority president – don’t pretend that he is the will of the people.
Damned spineless liberal.
And, to give the devil his due, don’t I recall the words, “Mistakes were made” issuing forth from the august pie-hole of one Ronald Reagan in the days of Iran/Contra?
This is a good bit of insider information that most people probably don’t know (mock press conferences). As a Navy Journalist I commonly stage mock press conferences with our four-star Admiral. We get 8-10 stand-ins and draft up the tough questions to see how he fields them. I always choose to be the Inquirer ^_~
Anyway, the things the President says are much more important than the puny in comparison Admiral, so I imagine the mock conferences are pretty hard core.
Why, yes, yes, he did. He apologized. He apologized not for what he did, but for what happened on his watch, because he took responsibility for what happened on his watch.
**“First, let me say I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I’m still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior. And as personally distasteful as I find secret bank accounts and diverted funds - well, as the Navy would say, this happened on my watch.” **