If His Lips Are Moving, He's Lying. Will this man ever stand by something he says without fishtailing and buck-passing? A real man isn't afraid to say, 'I got it wrong, folks, I'm human.' Bushes have never operated that way though, ever. Even some of the diehard Bush haters would have to take notice and give credit if the man pulled a Truman and said that the Buck Stops Here! The truth is, Bush does not trust the American public he alleges to want to lead, otherwise he wouldn't believe he had to lie to them to get them to do the right thing. Worse yet, he doesn't trust himself. Not only is Bush perhaps the lightest-weight intellect to occupy the oval office in our lifetime, he also owns its most dangerous inferiority complex--which is why he blusters and why he drank and why he needed to give his life (and ours?) over to his higher power (no, not Cheney the Great, but the AA born-again one) in order to function well enough to hold down a real job for the first time in his benighted life.
Yesterday, McClellan acknowledged that White House staffers routinely exercise tight control over the environment of a presidential appearance, especially when it will be televised. "Of course, our advance people work closely with people at event sites when the president is participating in an event," he said.
Indeed, the Bush White House has been particularly careful about attending to the details of a televised presidential appearance, said Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist at Maryland's Towson University who specializes in presidential communication strategy. "All of them [presidential staffs] have worked on it, but these people have been especially rigorous about controlling all parts of the event, including the resulting pictures," she said.
But McClellan said Bush had not meant to imply a complete absence of White House involvement in the banner, only that the idea had come from the crew. And he denied that the use of the banner was intended to convey an impression that the overall U.S. mission in Iraq had been accomplished. As for Bush's words, McClellan said he had proclaimed an end to "major combat operations" but had also warned that "there are difficulties that remain and dangers that continue to exist."
An examination of the text of Bush's carrier speech shows that his cautionary comments were largely limited to two sentences: "We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous." The rest of the lengthy address was a celebration of U.S. military success, with the tone set at the start: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."
As the Iraqi security situation has worsened and U.S. casualties have mounted, critics have ridiculed Bush's carrier appearance. The criticism continued yesterday as Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) called Bush's comments at the news conference his "latest fabrication" about the event.
"I'm sure they would love to extricate themselves from this whole affair," Daschle said. "It's got to be one of the most significant embarrassments of the entire Iraqi experience so far. We've lost more lives since he's declared victory than we lost prior to the time he declared victory."
