The Bush interview

Let's hear what y'all thought of today's interview. I found it predictably embarrassing.

[Jason Bivins]

I didn't hear it, but I just read the transcript on the NYT website.

One of the most telling exchanges seemed to occur when Russert asked Bush why he was perceived as such a divisive figure. Bush's response: "Gosh, I don't know, maybe it's because I'm working so hard to unite the country."

Maybe he's trying to pull the ol' Jedi Mind Trick: "These aren't the droids you're looking for."

[Uli]

I started reading the transcript and got as far as him calling Saddam a gathering threat. I just have no clue what the president is talking about. He has repeatedly used that terminology.

What's a gathering threat, Gordon?

[Mingus]

I continue to be amazed at how slooooowly the man's mind works. Hell, I can think quicker on my feet while binge drinking under the influence of percoset. Instead of constantly reiterating the same idiotic "he was an imminent threat" response that just isn't working, you'd think he'd be savy enough to consider another (any other) tact.

Saddam was a destabilizing force. Funded terrorist activity. Performed genocide on his own people. Anything.

You'd think a yahoo like him would know when his WMD jive-dog just won't hunt!

Don't get me going...

-Mingus

Interesting how much he stammered when he didn't have an answer. There was one non-response that became particularly embarrassing as he fumbled for something to say. BTW He never answered the first question and I wonder why Russert didn't hold him to it.

It will be interesting to see how our resident Bush admirers turn this sow's ear of an interview into a silk purse.

[crawjo]

I saw the last 30 minutes of the interview. I thought Bush came across as too defensive and impatient.

But when it comes to November, we'll get to choose between him or Kerry, whose record is completely all-over-the-place and contradictory at times.

Sigh. Another "lesser of two evils" election. The more I look at Kerry's record, however, the more convinced I become that he's going to lose.

[Mingus]

Originally posted by crawjo
The more I look at Kerry's record, however, the more convinced I become that he's going to lose.

Now there's a depressing thought. Hopefully, the proletariat won't look at the issues and simply (blindly?) oust the fool!

We can only hope...

[BFrank]

Well, if "record" is what these guys are being judged upon, then looks like a hands-down Kerry landslide to me.

• This was generally a disaster for Bush, IMO. The transcript does not catch his smirks and discomfort, but if you missed the interview, here it is.

[Mingus]

Bush is a complete embarrassment.

but I repeat myself...

[BFrank]

Asked by Mr. Russert, "Are you prepared to lose?" he replied, "No, I'm not going to lose."

"I know exactly where I want to lead the country," Bush said. "I have shown the American people I can lead."

Say WHAT?

[crawjo]

Originally posted by BFrank
Say WHAT?

Well, I think that regardless of how you view Bush's policies, it's pretty clear that he's a *strong* leader. Whether a good or a bad one is another story. But the guy definitely likes to make decisions, even if they are unpopular, and follow through on them. I mean, he did lead the country into a preemptive war halfway around the world, and did it with a majority of Americans' approval. Whatever you think of it, that's leadership.

And I actually think that, when he's contrasted against Kerry, this will be Bush's greatest strength with the general electorate. Kerry votes one way and then speaks another, and has been doing it his entire career. The Bush reelection team can pretty easily paint him as a waffler who can't be trusted to make *command decisions*, even if they are unpopular. I'm not saying that everyone needs to agree with this assessment, but I do think that it will be Bush's strength in a matchup against Kerry.

He has not shown me that he can lead, but he is a master of misleading. That's why we are in this mess now. He has, if anything, made it absolutely essential that we find a real leader, one who can take us back to where we were when Bush was appointed--and move us forward from there.

[chuckyd4]

"You gave the clear sense that this was an immediate threat that must be dealt with.

President Bush: I think, if I might remind you that in my language I called it a grave and gathering threat, but I don't want to get into word contests."


Okay, I don't either really... but am I completely insane, or didn't Bush refer to Saddam exactly as an "immediate" threat? No I don't have a specific example in front of me, but I seem to remember this as the term floating around right before the war...

[chuckyd4]

Oh and I love how he says "in my language".... at least he's (ahem) honest.

[jeff54]

Bush said he would of been prepared to go to Vietnam had his Air National Guard unit been called up. Does anyone know if in fact any were? Was there really a likely chance?

[Mike Schwartz]

Chris;

In the opener you use the words " predictably embarrassing"

Is that you or the Prez your referring to?;-)

[crawjo]

Originally posted by jeff54
Bush said he would of been prepared to go to Vietnam had his Air National Guard unit been called up. Does anyone know if in fact any were? Was there really a likely chance?

I don't know if any were, but I do know that Bush volunteered for a short tour of duty in Vietnam, but his request was rejected.

[crawjo]

I should clarify: after joining the Texas Guard, Bush volunteered under a special program that had Guardsmen serve in Vietnam for a few months, if I recall correctly. That was the request that was denied.

[jazzfiend]

The White House moron was indeed an embarrassment throughout the interview.

Kerry should clean his clock in November.

[john williams]

Originally posted by Jason Bivins
Maybe he's trying to pull the ol' Jedi Mind Trick: "These aren't the droids you're looking for."

lol

Originally posted by Mike Schwartz
Chris;

In the opener you use the words " predictably embarrassing"

Is that you or the Prez your referring to?;-)

Bush was embarrassing...I predicted it.

February 9, 2004

• Bush Offers Defense on Iraq and Economy in Interview
  By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
  
  WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 — President Bush on Sunday offered a preview of how he would defend his presidency, justifying the war in Iraq even though no banned weapons had been found there, saying he has acted aggressively to help the economy and presenting himself as a steady leader in perilous times.
  
  In a rare broadcast interview that he agreed to do as his poll numbers were falling and Democrats were increasingly hopeful of ousting him in November, Mr. Bush said on "Meet the Press" that he was far from alone in judging Saddam Hussein to be a threat. He rebutted accusations that he did not complete all of his duties while in the National Guard in 1972. He portrayed job growth as strengthening and did not rule out the possibility of more tax cuts.
  
  The president's appearance came on a day when the White House also said Mr. Bush believed that existing contract law could ensure many of the rights gay partners are seeking in civil unions or marriage, suggesting that the administration was preparing to step fully into an issue of great importance to his conservative base.
  
  Questioned at length about the war for the first time since the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq said last month that Mr. Hussein did not have stockpiles of unconventional weapons, Mr. Bush acknowledged that he might have been wrong in asserting repeatedly before the invasion that Iraq possessed such weapons. But he suggested that the threat was no less urgent because Mr. Hussein was capable of producing banned chemical and biological agents — and might one day have a nuclear bomb — and could pass them along to terrorists intent on striking the United States.
  
  "We thought he had weapons," Mr. Bush said in the one-hour interview, which was taped on Saturday. "The international community thought he had weapons. But he had the capacity to make a weapon and then let that weapon fall into the hands of a shadowy terrorist network." [Excerpts, Page A19.]
  
  Mr. Bush agreed to the interview after he and his aides concluded that he needed to respond to months of Democratic attacks, Republican officials said. They said he also had to deal with the statements by the former chief weapons inspector, David A. Kay, that the White House had been wrong before the war in asserting that Iraq had unconventional weapons. Some Republicans said Mr. Bush had been too much on the defensive in the past few weeks, and they had urged the White House to accelerate its schedule for going into full-scale campaign mode.
  
  Mr. Bush's job approval ratings have been dropping, and Democrats are increasingly rallying around their front-runner, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who has led or run even with Mr. Bush in hypothetical matchups in some recent polls. Those developments have made it increasingly difficult for the president to stick to his strategy of presenting himself as focused on dealing with the nation's problems rather than on his re-election.
  
  But if Mr. Bush went on the Sunday morning news show as a candidate, he was a tentative one not yet ready to give up the advantages of incumbency — including the Oval Office setting for the interview — for a more freewheeling but less presidential campaign. He said he did not know Mr. Kerry when they overlapped for two years at Yale, and dismissed Democratic attacks on him as "politics."
  
  Democrats and liberal groups responded to the interview with further attacks on Mr. Bush's credibility, suggesting that the president exaggerated the degree of cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda and disputing many of the particulars about his economic record. Mr. Kerry issued a statement saying Mr. Bush should level with people about why he had gone to war.
  
  "Americans need to be able to trust their president, and they deserve the truth," Mr. Kerry said.
  
  Mr. Bush was most assertive in trying to rebut what some strategists in both parties said could be a potent line of attack against him, the charge that he skipped out on some of his National Guard duties not long after Mr. Kerry served heroically in Vietnam.
  
  "They're just wrong," Mr. Bush said of reports that there was no record of him reporting to his unit in Alabama in 1972, while he was working on a Republican Senate race. "There may be no evidence, but I did report. Otherwise I wouldn't have been honorably discharged."
  
  Mr. Bush said he was "absolutely" willing to have all his service records made public. But he acknowledged that so far no one has been able to find records from the relevant period of his service.
  
  At a news conference in Richmond, Va., Mr. Kerry said he did not know whether Mr. Bush had completed all his Guard duties, but he added that "just because you get an honorable discharge does not in fact answer that question."
  
  Asked why he should get a second term given that the economy has lost 2.2 million jobs since he took office, Mr. Bush said his presidency has coincided with "a time of tremendous stress on our economy" and that he had acted aggressively, mainly through tax cuts, to turn things around.
  
  The economy generated 112,000 new jobs last month, a respectable performance in the view of economists but a level well below what would normally be expected at this point in a recovery. In calling for repeated rounds of tax cuts since Mr. Bush took office, the White House implied, sometimes with detailed projections, that the reductions would lead directly to substantial job growth. Democrats say the main effect of the tax cuts has been to help plunge the government into deficit and leave the nation unable to afford other needs.
  
  Much of the interview covered Iraq and, implicitly, whether Mr. Bush had lost credibility by having asserted that Iraq had weapons that it now appears not to have.
  
  When the interviewer, Tim Russert, said it "apparently is not the case" that Iraq had the weapons Mr. Bush had said it had before the war, the president responded, "Correct." Mr. Bush later mentioned the possibility that the weapons might have been hidden or moved to another country.
  
  Mr. Bush said the intelligence about Iraq's weapons was the best available, matched what foreign governments were saying and was the basis for similar judgments about Iraq made by President Bill Clinton and Congress, although some Democrats have said the intelligence they received was stripped of the caveats that the intelligence agencies had attached to it.
  
  The president said he went to war only after the United Nations had issued an ultimatum and only "because we had run the diplomatic string in Iraq," an assertion that many other nations and opponents of the war in the United States have disputed.
  
  The defense he laid out in the interview did not include the sense of immediate urgency he and his administration had attached to Iraq before the war. Mr. Bush told "Meet the Press" that Mr. Hussein "could have developed a nuclear weapon over time — I'm not saying immediately, but over time — which would then have put us in what position?"
  
  In 2002, as the administration was building its case against Mr. Hussein, Vice President Dick Cheney said, "On the nuclear question, many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire such weapons fairly soon." Dr. Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month that Iraq did not have a "reconstituted, full-blown nuclear program."
  
  But, in keeping both with his conception of his job after the Sept. 11 attacks and his political strategy of presenting himself as an experienced, steady commander in chief, Mr. Bush emphasized that he is leading the nation through great danger.
  
  "I'm a war president," he said at one point. At another, he said, "I have shown the American people I can sit here in the Oval Office when times are tough and be steady and make good decisions, and I look forward to articulating what I want to do the next four years if I'm fortunate enough to be their president."

[Brian Olewnick]

re: Imminent. Since the issue has come up over the last couple of weeks, the administration has been saying that the word was never used in any pre-war speeches. Since the dems have yet, AFAIK, come up with any counter-examples, I'm guessing they're correct. Safire had a column about this in the Sunday NYT Magazine where he posits that Bush was well-coached and advised not to use the term because of legal and UN ramifications. I believe he said something on the order of "acting before the threat becomes imminent". Rumsfeld also had a Q&A session where he ruminated over how and when one defines a threat as "imminent".

Not to justify any particular actions, just wanting the record as straight as possible, because I've heard countless anti-Bush folk claim that he'd been calling the WMDs and Hussein an imminent threat and I'm afraid that, technically, it wasn't so. One can say that the language used was certainly geared toward creating that impression, but words is words.

[crawjo]

Andrew Sullivan linked to an interesting article in the American Thinker, where the author notes that Bush is the first President in U.S. history to hold an MBA, and that in college he was renowned as a great poker player. The author goes on to say:

"By reputation, the President was a very avid and skillful poker player when he was an MBA student. One of the secrets of a successful poker player is to encourage your opponent to bet a lot of chips on a losing hand. This is a pattern of behavior one sees repeatedly in George W. Bush’s political career. He is not one to loudly proclaim his strengths at the beginning of a campaign. Instead, he bides his time, does not respond forcefully, a least at first, to critiques from his enemies, no matter how loud and annoying they get. If anything, this apparent passivity only goads them into making their case more emphatically.

"Only time will tell, whether Saddam ever had any WMDs. Their non-existence has not been proven. Only time will tell whether or not Osama bin Laden (or his corpse) will be taken into custody by American Troops. Only time will tell whether or not Iraq will continue to make progress toward a transition toward a peaceful democratic government. George W. Bush knows much more information about these topics than his domestic political opponents do. At the moment, they are betting a lot of their chips on one side of these questions.

"We will see by November who has the winning hand."

About Bush's Harvard MBA, the author also says the following:

"The comparatively small amount of attention paid by the political press to the President’s Harvard MBA partially reflects a generalized ignorance of, and hostility toward, the degree itself. More importantly, acknowledging that he learned any valuable intellectual perspectives would contradict the storyline that young W was a party animal, who coasted through his elite education, scarcely cracking a book. In other words, as the left never tires of claiming, he is too “stupid” to have picked up any tricks across the Charles River from Harvard Square.

"This is patently incorrect. Having attended Harvard Business School at the same time as the President, graduating from the two-year program a year after he did, and then serving on its faculty after a year’s interval spent writing a PhD thesis, I am intimately familiar with the rigors of the program at the time, and the miniscule degree of slack cut for even the most well-connected students, when their performance did not make the grade.

"There is simply no way on earth that the son of the then-Ambassador to China, or anyone else, could have coasted through Harvard Business School with a “gentleman’s C.” I never, ever heard of a case of an incompetent student being allowed to graduate, simply because a certain family was prominent. On the contrary, I did hear stories of well-born students having to leave prior to graduation. The academic standards were a point of considerable pride."

For what it's worth...

[BFrank]

(February 09, 2004 -- 01:17 AM EDT // link // print)
I seldom write posts that don't make their way, in one form or another, onto the site. But occasionally I'll write a lengthy one, edit it, wrestle with it, then decide that something about it just doesn't work and discard it entirely. That happened last night in a long post I wrote trying to make sense of just why the President Bush's approval numbers dipped so suddenly with no clear trigger.

Part of the reason I ended up not liking the post was that in the course of writing a post describing how there was no clear single explanation I happened upon something that seemed like a clear and at least relatively simple explanation.

This AP article notes that President Bush's fall in the polls coincides very closely with David Kay's initial comments stating that there almost certainly were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Here are the key grafs ...

Bush's job approval rating dropped 10 points from Jan. 25 through Jan. 31, according to the National Annenberg Election Survey. The tracking poll takes a nightly sample and rolls together two or three nights' findings at a time to produce periodic reports.

Support for the war in Iraq also dipped in that period, from a majority saying the situation in Iraq was worth going to war over, 53 percent, to 46 percent during the last few days of January saying it was worth going to war and 49 percent saying it was not.

The Annenberg study found Bush's approval dipped from 64 percent right after Bush's Jan. 20 State of the Union address to 54 percent in the late-January period. An AP-Ipsos poll found Bush's approval dipped 9 points during January to the high 40s, the same finding as several other polls released at about that time.

Falling ten points in a week is a precipitous drop -- and it seems to have been picked up in a number of polls, even if the rest of the surveys weren't able to pinpoint when it started quite as precisely as Annenberg.

To those who've been closely following the on-going weapons search and what's been happening on the ground in Iraq, Kay's announcement was only news at the level of theatrics -- the historical value of the official statement of what's been obvious for many months.

I don't think most people following this story figured it would have nearly so dramatic an effect as the Annenberg study indicates. I certainly didn't. Indeed, I focused on the parts of Kay's comments and testimony which struck me as attempting to exonerate the administration.

But this may be a case in which close attention to the news helped create a real blind spot. As we've noted here many times the White House has gone to great lengths to avoid publicly acknowledging the reality that we were totally wrong about the weapons.

The plan was always to say that the search continued and to dangle hints that anyone who doubted that Saddam had weapons might end up looking very foolish indeed when the weapons turned up. Even now high White House officials tell reporters off the record that they will continue to say that the search is still on-going so as to avoid putting these uncomfortable words in the president's mouth.

This is not only amazingly cynical (a free willingness to continue deceiving the public just as they did during the run-up to the war). It is, or was, it seems extremely effective.

By not coming clean and resting on the public's desire to trust the president, the White House was able to stave off the political impact of the collapse of the central argument for going to war. In that context, Kay's statements were a very big deal indeed, and the public reaction makes all the sense in the world.

For some time now, it's been conventional wisdom that most voters weren't overly troubled by the failure to find any weapons in the country, especially so long as other aspects of the war were going at least tolerably well. That assumption may have been very wrong.

-- Josh Marshall

Crawjo, Bush did not go AWOL, he says, but there is oddly enough no evidence either confirm or refute that. The records, it seems, vaporized.

As for his MBA--in fact, his very admittance to Yale and Harvard, he has managed to speak in public more times than anyone can count, yet neither the thoughts he expresses nor the words with which he expresses them give any indication that this man's education went beyond the early years of high school.

In short--given his family connections and his penchant for stretching the truth--there is little or no reason to believe any of his claims. This man has no credibility whatsoever.

[RBS]

I agree with you, Chris.

What astonishes me is that will people will look at him when he's saying one thing, doing another, and then justify his behavior.

And have you ever noticed that his lackeys are the ones who talk about how "he's really in command in meetings, he's really a take charge, ask lots of questions kind of guy?"

It's amazing that he shows these qualities only behind closed doors where other people can see them. This is the most cynical, fear-inducing administration since Nixon. And I never thought I'd say this, but Nixon, in comparison, did a lot more good than this clown.

[GoodSpeak]

A war of necessity.


Yeah.


Just like Haliburton is the Iraq oil rig company "of necessity."

And de-forestation is the United States Forest Service logging "of necessity."

And SUV tax breaks are the transportation "of necessity."

And reduced air pollution standards are the breathing "of necessity."

And TWO tax breaks for the rich are the GeeDubya campaign contributors "of necessity."

And the multi-TRILLION dollar deficit is the spending tax dollars "of necessity."

And the ENRON cover-up is the crime "of necessity."

And the presidential vote scam is the election "of necessity."


Oh HELL yeah.


I am just all over this one.

[Dennis Gonzalez]

What is really funny to me is that Bush looked and sounded stupid, which he really is. Then you listen to the conservative talking heads commenting on his performance and they have the nerve to say that he did really well...!? Daddy Bush bought Sonny Bush his MBA. Daddy Bush made it possible for Sonny Bush to "volunteer" for Vietnam, with Sonny knowing full well that Daddy had already bought his Freedom from having to go. Daddy cashed in all his favors and bought the Supreme Court who supported the Bush coup d'etat when Sonny illegally assumed the Presidency.

Quote of the day: "The recession started on my arrival." -George W. Bush to Tim Russert during Sunday's interview.

I love it when he tells the truth and doesn't even realize he has done so...