Bush called a “surprise” press conference at short notice this morning. For the WaPo’s Bill Branigan the main story was that Bush said,
- … he shares the American public’s dissatisfaction with the situation in Iraq, but he warned against succumbing to “disillusionment” about the U.S. purpose there and expressed confidence in both Iraq’s prime minister and his own defense secretary.
Here’s the official transcript.
(I don’t have time to read the whole thing. I’m about to go to the airport to travel to Amman for a week.)
In addition to having its main newspaper, the WaPo also runs a website called washingtonpost.com that carries most of the deadwood paper’s content and also– slightly confusingly– content from some of the website’s own writers. These latter include the site’s “White House” correspondent Dan Froomkin, who often puts good things up on his pages. Today, for example, he had his own quick account of the Bush press conference and the circumstances in which it was held, along with an excellent compilation of some of the best of the recent political reporting in the big MSM.
And almost immediately after posting that on the site, Froomkin ran a “live online” discussion about current events. He made this really interesting observation there:
- Qun. from White Plains, N.Y.: I believe Mr. Bush was quoted earlier this weeks as having said “I never said ‘stay the course'” Why is the press not addressing this aggressively as a glaring example of the president”s knowing and willful distortion of reality?
Dan Froomkin: Oh but they are! With truly surprising vigor! See my columns today, and yesterday , and Monday.
In fact, a keen observer called me just yesterday to see if I could explain the vigor, given the many other similar opportunities that the corps has passed up. I don’t have a firm answer, but in my October 11 column, I wrote about how Bob Woodward’s book, “State of Denial,” had finally convinced establishment Washington that Bush has a serious credibility problem.
This is mind-boggling. Froomkin is simply assuming that the MSM press corps is part of “establishment Washington”– actually, not an unrealistic assumption, in general– and then saying that “establishment Washington” needs to get some kind of permission from Bob Woodward before it asks the tough questions about Bush’s credibility…
Better late than never I guess.
Incidentally, I’ve been reading this latest Woodward book. It has some interesting things in it, to be sure. But the guy’s narrative skills are not particularly good. Indeed, one of the least satisfying aspects of the book is that he just skips over a whole lot of things that he’d written about in his first two– much more laudatory– books. So it’s not a “complete” story at all. What somebody needs to do some day is to go back and put all of his accounts of this period together, into a single account– and also, crucially, to pull out all the glaring dissonances between the kinds of laudatory things he was publishing three or four years ago and the ways he describes almost exactly the same incidents today.
Oh well, the main story these days is still an intriguing one to follow: President Bush and his senior cabinet members struggling to come to terms– somehow!– with the collapse of their massive and very, very harmful project in Iraq… And to do this in a way that will minimize the damage the GOP suffers at the polls November 7.
No change at all, just mangling in the words, from “Stay The Curse” to “Our Goals in Iraq”, its same lies a new lies.
When people will stop GWB from going on and on with those stray friends and advisors whom wasting the President and Vice president time by jumping in their offices and camps.
Umberto Eco, the novelist and professor of semiotics would call Dubya’s latest semantic gambit, “Ideological Code-Switching.” To work, the subliminal, emotional word-associations must remain stimulated but below the level of consciousness. Should the intended customer (formerly “citizen”) become aware of the process, though, the primitive word magic fails as all magic acts fail once the audience sees the trick behind the illusion. Finally, after years of shameless sycophancy, a few intrepid news outlets have reluctantly begun to wake up to their job: namely, that of exposing the Bush-administration snakeoil sham to the ridicule it has so richly deserved for so long.
At any rate, this latest ham-handed attempt to deny the undeniable debacle in Iraq has lots of poetic potential. Just this morning, I composed a few more Terza Rima sonnets to include in “The Misfortune Teller,” my unfolding epic homage to Dante Allegheri and Percy Shelley who immortalized the form. So, to the “Stay the Curse” segment, I now add:
He swore to “Stay the Course” and so he sailed
Directly at the iceberg straight ahead
This strategy for boating clearly failed
With soldiers in the thousands maimed and dead
And people liberated from their lives
Now free to roam the afterlife instead
To cover up: he swaggers, shucks, and jives
Who’d never serve in Heaven, Hell would rule
He wildly swung and struck some hornet hives
Then, badly stung, he played the bumpkin fool
Unable to decide, he just delayed
And sought to sell paralysis as cool
In fact, he merely feared to look afraid
And so his feckless course he grimly stayed
His spokesmen and apologists turn red
Embarrassed by their leader’s flopping flips
Reporters even gag on what they’re fed
Instead of swallowing the banal quips
Which normally they wouldn’t think to quiz
Too frightened lest a question pass their lips
Which might reveal their ignorance of “is”
And what it does or doesn’t mean when used
Disowning acts most definitely his;
Unthinkingly by those who it abused;
Identifying abstract levels mixed
Adrift, humiliated, and confused
Semantic sailors — mooring lines unfixed —
Tried hard to lie but found themselves deep-sixed
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2006
while in Ammon, are you visiting Faiza?
oh, and Bush is not recognizing anything….
Recognition of the mess surely occurred long ago. But leaders simply do not fall on their knees and admit to wrongs or defeat. The important thing is perceptions and public opinion. Remember the lines of the old K&I song, “Whistle a Happy Tune”: whenever I fool the people I see, I fool myself as well. Were Bush ever to commit the ultimate gaffe, and admit to failure, his powers would slip from modest to zero. Both Left and Right would ridicule him to a pulp. And it would not alleiviate Iraq one iota. People who think that this does not matter, just so long as they can blame Bush or US imperialism, won’t win any elections in Iraq or the US.