The president who clearly hates press conferences finally hosted one yesterday, speaking with the White House press corps for almost an hour before heading off to Texas for a month-long vacation. (Apparently, pointing fingers and avoiding blame for one’s mistakes can really exhaust a guy.)
Bush has set such a low standard for holding press conferences that it’s actually something of a treat to have him stand before the cameras. As the Washington Post mentioned the other day, Bush has held only nine solo news conferences since taking office, including yesterday’s. Clinton, at the same point in his first term, had held 33, and Bush’s father had held 61.
Yesterday’s press conference was not a total disaster for Bush; he didn’t offer any outrageously dumb comments and his grammar wasn’t any worse than usual. The reporters asking questions, meanwhile, were slightly more aggressive than Bush’s last Q&A on March 6, when the press was so docile it was hard to tell if they were awake.
There were a few newsworthy exchanges, including Bush’s apparent endorsement of a ban on gay marriage, but there were two other things that caught my attention.
First, Bush’s references to the “threat” posed by Saddam Hussein were constant. By my count, Bush mentioned the word “threat” in relation to Hussein nine times at the press conference. “Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States security,” he said. “Saddam Hussein was a threat; the United Nations viewed him as a threat,” he added. And so on.
After all these months and all the evidence, it seems Bush remains convinced that we had to invade Iraq to protect Americans’ lives.
Why does Bush continue to believe that Hussein was such an imminent threat to the United States? It can’t be the vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, because they don’t appear to exist. It can’t be Hussein’s reconstituted nuclear weapons, because they’re absent too. It also can’t be Niger’s uranium, the 45-minute strike capability, or the ties to al Queda, because none of these things are true.
So, remind me Mr. President, why was there such a threat? Yesterday’s press conference never seemed to get around to that.
Second, Bush offered one really interesting comment on Iraq and WMD.
“[I]n order to placate the critics and the cynics about intentions of the United States, we need to produce evidence,” Bush said. “And I fully understand that. And I’m confident that our search will yield that which I strongly believe, that Saddam had a weapons program.”
Both of these sentences are interesting in different ways. Bush argued that we need to produce evidence of the Iraqi threat to “placate the critics and the cynics.” That’s why we need to produce evidence? This is outrageous, even for Bush. Silly ol’ me, I thought we needed to produce evidence to justify a costly and bloody war to the nation and the world. I believed producing evidence to bolster our claims about Iraq might improve our international credibility and lend a moral weight to our rush for war. Now Bush is explaining that we’re really only going to try to offer evidence to “placate the critics and the cynics.”
Bush also expressed confidence in discovering Hussein’s “weapons program.” There’s that word again: program.
Like a con man carefully hoping you won’t be able to follow the pea under the shell, Bush has — slowly but surely — made an effort to change the focus of our attention. Before the war, Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that threatened world peace. After the war, Bush hopes to find Hussein’s “weapons program.”
Obviously, there’s a substantive difference between these two claims. Way back in January, in the now-infamous State of the Union address, Bush wasn’t talking about “programs.” He offered specific details about Iraq’s arsenal — 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, and several mobile biological weapons labs. Now, however, he’ll only refer vaguely to “programs.”
Bush tried the same stunt in June, telling reporters before a cabinet meeting, “Iraq had a weapons program. Intelligence throughout the decade showed they had a weapons program. I am absolutely convinced with time we’ll find out that they did have a weapons program.” [emphasis added]
Someday we’ll find some evidence of Iraq’s capacity for a WMD program, without any actual weapons, and Bush will say, “See, I told you they had a weapons program. I was right all along!” The sad part is, most of his sycophants will find this perfectly reasonable.