Maybe it’s something about the Far East. Last year, Bush was in Japan meeting with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. At a press conference to express his support for Koizumi’s economic policies, Bush said he appreciated the fact that the prime minister had placed equal emphasis on “non-performing loans, the devaluation issue and regulatory reform.”
It turns out that Bush didn’t mean “devaluation,” he meant to say “deflation.” Unfortunately for Bush (and the value of the Japanese yen), there’s a big difference. The fact that the president of the United States suggested there was a “devaluation issue” in Japan led the yen to fall quickly in international trading markets.
Naturally, the White House had to quickly explain that this was just another one of the president’s famous misstatements and that Japan did not actually have a “devaluation issue.” (The value of the yen recovered shortly after Bush’s gaffe, so there wasn’t any long term damage.)
Last week, Bush returned to the Far East. Unfortunately, he also returned to the mistakes that have made him famous.
As the Washington Post reported today, Bush said in an interview on Indonesian television that the U.S. was prepared to “go forward with” a new package of military training programs with Indonesia.
The Post noted that Bush’s comment “caught U.S. officials by surprise,” because what Bush said isn’t true. The administration has not recommended nor proposed any new aid packages to Indonesia for military training.
Bush wasn’t done. In the same interview, Bush said Congress is coming around to supporting his administration’s efforts to expand military training in Indonesia. He said that “for a while the Congress put restrictions on [military training], but now the Congress has changed their attitude.”
This isn’t true either. As the Post noted, “[O]pposition in Congress to military training programs with Indonesia grew stronger this year after the possibility of Indonesian military involvement in the Papua attack [in which two U.S. citizens were killed] was raised in a closed-door hearing in May.” In fact, Congress, instead of “changing their attitude,” as Bush suggested, has voted twice to cut off U.S. funding for Indonesia’s participation in a program called International Military Education and Training.
The poor guy is obviously so much better off when he can just read a script that someone else writes for him. That way, he doesn’t have to think too much.