The Bush speech today was bizarre, as if he had no idea the currents of thought going through America these days. It was anticlimactic to see him parrot old, worn lines as if he thought they would still have an impact on the American people.
ABC and Fox (!?!) have already reported on the canned applause – the only moment of applause was when the White House advance-team members started clapping in the middle of Bush’s speech and the soldiers attending the speech dutifully joined in.
It was like watching a minor-league Single-A baseball coach trying to get his players fired up with a bunch of lines lifted from other player’s speeches. At least none of the troops booed him.
I watched the speech, and I agree that the text seems “OK” which simply isn’t enough when Americans are asking a lot of very hard questions about the progress and rationale for the war. Saying the same-old, same-old isn’t doing it for people. This is the first time that I’ve watched Bush speak and thought he actually looked “old”.
The same thing happened to Lyndon Johnson when the gap between the “light at the end of the tunnel” rhetoric and the reality on the ground in Viet Nam became clear to the American people. He got old almost overnight.
Johnson had to option to walk away though because it was near the end of his term. George Bush has three long years ahead of him and no option but to stand and fight because of the power vacuum he’s created in the Middle East.
He’s going to be a dead man walking before history is through with him. I feel almost sorry for him, especially since his accomplices like Rice, Powell, Tenet, Wolfowitz and Feith have walked away when the going got tough, leaving him holding the ground almost single-handedly.
The weight of the presidency is famous for making people look very old within relatively short periods of time. Seeing pictures of Carter at the outset of his presidency, he almost looks like a young guy. At the end, he had more wrinkles and creases than Mr. Peanut.
There are unconfirmed reports President Bush was seen on a balcony of the White House after his speech defiantly firing rounds from a hip-held M-16 into the air.
[quote=“spook”]There are unconfirmed reports President Bush was seen on a balcony of the White House after his speech defiantly firing rounds from a hip-held M-16 into the air.[/quote]Well to be a bit more accurate, it was one of these….
Just teaching those pesky Demo’s some new dance steps.
I have to say that I am not a fan of his speachmaking style. You can tell when he thinks he is coming to a major point and is expecting some sort of applause as his head seems to tilt up a little, and then he starts to break into a smile/smirk as he delivers the punch line. Now this is all well and good when telling jokes about John Kerry, but when he is talking about the fuck up in Iraq it really seems out of place.
Apart from that, it was about as informative as any other major political speach by anybody - ie in absolutely no way whatsoever. Just a load of platitudinous crap. Not sure what he meant to say anyway.
By Robert Parry
June 28, 2005
[i]
It is hard to even imagine what George W. Bush
would have to say if he were serious about “leveling
with the American people” over the Iraq War. Here is
a draft that would surely not get past the White
House speechwriters:
“My fellow Americans, let me explain to you what really
went wrong with the Iraq policy and why so many
young Americans have died in what looks like a futile
war without end.
“First, you must know that I have long obsessed
about getting rid of Saddam Hussein, taking care of
some unfinished business from my dad’s presidency.
There’s also a lot of oil there and my neoconservative
advisers wanted to project American power into the
Middle East.[/i]
Intial reactions coming in, and it does not look good. I noticed the 9-11 references as well and cringed a bit, but with all the efforts Bush & Co. have made to fudge the origins of the Iraq war I didn’t bother mentioning it earlier.
[quote]“The president’s frequent references to the terrorist attacks of September 11 show the weakness of his arguments,” House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said. “He is willing to exploit the sacred ground of 9/11, knowing that there is no connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq.”
Bush first mentioned the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center at the beginning of his speech, delivered at an Army base that has 9,300 troops in Iraq. He acknowledged that Americans are disturbed by frequent deaths of U.S. troops at the hands of insurgents, but tried to persuade an increasingly skeptical public to stick with the mission.
“The war reached our shores on September the 11th, 2001,” Bush told a national television audience and 750 soldiers and airmen in dress uniform who mostly listened quietly as they had been asked to do.
Iraq is the latest battlefield in this war," he continued. "Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania. There is only one course of action against them
.