{"id":8479,"date":"2006-09-15T13:40:31","date_gmt":"2006-09-15T17:40:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/8479.html"},"modified":"2006-09-15T13:40:31","modified_gmt":"2006-09-15T17:40:31","slug":"bush-gets-animated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/bush-gets-animated\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush gets animated"},"content":{"rendered":"

The president’s Rose Garden press conference today featured a different Bush than we’re used to seeing. As Ezra noted<\/a>, “Whereas Bush is generally petulant and unhappy at these events, he’s now snapping at reporters, straightforwardly insulting them, yelling from the podium, losing control, and generally evincing a combativeness and barely suppressed rage that I’ve never seen from him before.”<\/p>\n

I wholeheartedly agree. Bush looked as if he wanted to punch someone, particularly David Gregory, who dared to ask the president how he’d react if a foreign government captured an American, tortured him, and tried and convicted him with evidence he wasn’t allowed to see. As Salon’s Tim Grieve noted<\/a>, “Bush didn’t — Bush couldn’t — answer the question.”<\/p>\n

“My reaction is that, if the nations such as those you named adopted the standards within the [White House’s] Detainee Detention Act, the world would be better,” he said.<\/p>\n

Gregory pressed on what he called the “important point,” the same point Colin Powell made this week in his letter opposing Bush’s plan. “I know you think it’s an important point,” Bush snapped back. But he said “the most important point” was the rather unlikely one he was making — that U.S. intelligence officers will have to stop interrogating detainees entirely if they don’t have more clarity on the outer limits of the coercive techniques they can use.<\/p>\n

Gregory pressed one more time, at which point Bush cut him off and said “next man.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bush even took a not-so-subtle jab at Colin Powell.
\n
\nTP has the transcript and video<\/a>:<\/p>\n

QUESTION: Mr. President, former Secretary of State Colin Powell says, The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. If a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former secretary of state feels this way, don’t you think that Americans and the rest of the world are beginning to wonder whether you’re following a flawed strategy?<\/p>\n

BUSH: If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic. It’s just — I simply can’t accept that. It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s a rather routine rhetorical trick for the president. Colin Powell spoke out against Bush’s proposal, saying, “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. To redefine Common Article 3 would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk.” From there, Bush extrapolated that Powell was comparing the U.S. to terrorists, which necessarily makes Powell’s concerns “unacceptable.”<\/p>\n

At least this morning, Powell probably knows how John Kerry felt in 2004, when the Bush campaign smeared the Dem nominee with the same kind of rhetorical flourishes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The president’s Rose Garden press conference today featured a different Bush than we’re used to seeing. As Ezra noted, “Whereas Bush is generally petulant and unhappy at these events, he’s now snapping at reporters, straightforwardly insulting them, yelling from the podium, losing control, and generally evincing a combativeness and barely suppressed rage that I’ve never […]<\/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-8479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8479","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=8479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}