Last week, Bush delivered one of his more unusual whoppers by saying, “[W]e gave [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power….”
The whopper, of course, is the fact that Hussein did let U.N. weapons inspectors in, but we had them removed after they didn’t find anything so we could begin an invasion.
Eric Alterman caught the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank appearing on CNN over the weekend discussing this quote, among other things. Milbank’s thoughts were illuminating.
CNN’s Howard Kurtz asked Milbank, “‘Saddam wouldn’t let the inspectors in.’ Now, this is a statement that basically bears no relation to reality. Why has that not been more made of by the press?”
Milbank, easily my favorite of the White House correspondents, replied, “It was on the front page of The Washington Post, but I think what people basically decided was this is just the president being the president. Occasionally he plays the wrong track and something comes out quite wrong. He is under a great deal of pressure.”
This was a remarkable comment to me. Every White House reporter covering the president heard Bush say that Hussein refused to let inspectors in, and every one of them had to know that what Bush was saying was wrong. Milbank wrote a great story about Bush’s general defense of Niger-gate and included the obvious misstatement, but he was the only one.
Milbank believes, and I suspect he’s right, that reporters ignored this because this was “just the president being the president” and Bush is “under a great deal of pressure.”
One, what does this say about the press? The president says things that are demonstrably false but the reporters just shrug it off because they’re used to Bush saying false things. They certainly never gave these kinds of passes to Clinton, and worse, they ravaged Al Gore if a single syllable was off during the 2000 campaign.
And two, what does this say about Bush? The president starts saying things that don’t make sense when the heat is on? As Alterman put it, “Oh great. A president is ‘under a great deal of pressure’ and he starts spouting nonsensical reasons for taking the nation to war under false pretenses and ‘people basically decide’ that it’s no big deal.”