Yesterday I saw a few segments of the Brian Williams interview with Bush, and what struck me most about the few minutes that I saw was Bush’s face. He wore a pasted-on smile and he answered questions as if he was playing a part in a bad B-movie. He did not seem very passionate about any of his answers to Williams’s questions. He seemed as though he was answering them because he was obliged to offer himself to the corporate media and they were in turn obliged to respectfully listen to him babble and then broadcast the whole boring event to the people.
I’m not kidding when I say “babble.” I did not actually see the following segment of the interview on TV. I wasn’t even going to bother reading the transcript until I read a quote from it in Maureen Dowd’s column today. I have bolded the quote that made me go to Google and look up the transcript.
Williams: Do you believe this war was an elective on your part? Or did this have to come out of 9/11?
President Bush: Hmm, interesting question. Well, first of all, troops don’t move unless I give the order. So, from that sense it was elective. I mean, I could have said, “No, we’ll try to, you know, hope for the best with Saddam Hussein.”
Remember at the time we didn’t know the facts on the ground. We - everybody thought the guy had weapons of mass destruction. Everybody knew that he’d used weapons of mass destruction and had provided safe haven for terrorists. I mean, those were facts. Whether or not it had to happen is - it didn’t have to happen since a human being made the decision. Whether or not it needed to happen, I’m still convinced it needed to happen.
Williams: You said again today if you had to do it all over again you’d do…
President Bush: I would. Remember what Dolpher found, the inspectors that went in there. They came back and said, “No, we didn’t find the weapons that we all thought would be there. But we did know that he had the capacity to reconstitute a weapons program.” And that he was a dangerous man. It would be even more dangerous had he survived, you know, yet another U.N. resolution.
That’s our leader contradicting himself in the same sentence, and then sputtering on about Hussein’s capacity for developing weapons that didn’t exist.
If you’d like to read the whole interview, go here. (This site gives your cursor a tail of colorful beads to amuse you while you read the transcript.)
As long as Congress is busy trying to amend the constitution to stop flag burnings, abortions, and whatever else is bugging them, maybe they ought to amend it to require the President to take annual IQ tests. I think this president’s score would be below any reasonable minimum standard for holding office.
With that in mind, we need a new bumper sticker to replace “Impeach Bush.” Maybe something like his expressionless face and the words “Too Dumb to Lead.”
Got a better idea? Please share it by posting a comment.
I love the annual IQ test idea. You’d think after 5 years in this job, he’d start to sound a bit less incoherent.
Nice job B.