{"id":6270,"date":"2006-01-06T14:12:23","date_gmt":"2006-01-06T19:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6270"},"modified":"2006-01-06T14:12:23","modified_gmt":"2006-01-06T19:12:23","slug":"between-5-and-10-minutes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/between-5-and-10-minutes\/","title":{"rendered":"Between 5 and 10 minutes"},"content":{"rendered":"

I said<\/a> yesterday that Bush’s meeting<\/a> with 13 former secretaries of state and defense about the war in Iraq was a public relations stunt for Bush to hear advice that he will no doubt ignore. It turns out it wasn’t even that<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But if it was a bipartisan consultation, as advertised by the White House, it was a brief one. Mr. Bush allowed 5 to 10 minutes for interchange with the group – which included three veterans of the Vietnam era: Robert S. McNamara, Melvin R. Laird and James R. Schlesinger – before herding the whole group into the Oval Office for what he called a “family picture.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Funny, Scott McClellan seemed to leave the little detail of “5 to 10 minutes” out of his description<\/a> of the gathering. The press secretary said Bush “wanted to hear from each of these leaders” and mentioned, repeatedly, that the president “valued their advice and ideas.”<\/p>\n

Let’s take a moment to do the math. If Bush said literally nothing, and there were no breaks between former officials, each former secretary would get 46 seconds in a 10 minute gathering, half that in a 5 minute session. And, of course, Bush wasn’t silent; McClellan acknowledged<\/a> that during this brief meeting, the president told the former secretaries about his vision for the future of Iraq and offer them updates on his “plan for victory.”<\/p>\n

Ultimately, we’re looking at maybe<\/em> 20 seconds, at the most, for each former secretary of State and Defense. Bush “valued their advice and ideas”? I don’t think so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I said yesterday that Bush’s meeting with 13 former secretaries of state and defense about the war in Iraq was a public relations stunt for Bush to hear advice that he will no doubt ignore. It turns out it wasn’t even that. But if it was a bipartisan consultation, as advertised by the White House, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}