The mystery ventriloquist has struck again: Yesterday Bush said that he gave Saddam Hussein "a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in."
Douglas McArthur would have given Bush his famous epithet "NUTS"
thenation.com
Check out the president's body language at Monday's briefing with journalists. Click here for the official White House transcript, then click on the "view" option. Scroll to the very end, where Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank asks the president about Iraq -- specifically, about the line in his State of the Union address that relied upon forged and discredited "intelligence" to assert Saddam Hussein was uranium-shopping in Niger -- and watch the president reply by saying, "When I gave the speech, uh, the line was, uh, rel-, rel- ... RELEVANT!" -- and then watch him wave his arms at Milbank and make his "DUH! WHICH PART DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?" face. The whole performance says: "Why is everyone still bothering me with all of these irrelevant questions?
And indeed, they are irrelevant. Such questions assume an objective reality, when for this president, there are no hard facts -- only the diamond-clarity of his moral vision. Bush goes on to tell Milbank that America attacked Iraq only after he, the president, gave Saddam Hussein "a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in." Whoa! Yellow flags all over the field! That's just uncalled for. On March 17, the US and Britain had to advise weapons inspectors to evacuate Iraq. Saddam had let them in, but Bush and Tony Blair were impatient that they hadn't found any weapons of mass destruction yet. (That sounds depressingly familiar.) Two days later, of course, we began bombing. "The president's assertion that the war began because Iraq did not admit inspectors appeared to contradict the events leading up to war this spring," The Post reports. "Hussein had, in fact, admitted the inspectors and Bush had opposed extending their work because he did not believe them effective."
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