Denial City

After President Bush’s strange interview on Meet the Press yesterday morning, does the D.C. that follows Washington now stand for Denial City?

Then comes the New York Times to weigh in on Bush's performance:

“Yesterday, in an interview with NBC's Tim Russert, after a week in which it became obvious to most Americans that the justifications for the war were based on flawed intelligence, Mr. Bush offered his reflections, and they were far from reassuring. The only clarity in the president's vision appears to be his own perfect sense of self-justification.”

“Mr. Bush’s explanation of how he reconciled the current activities in Iraq with his 2000 campaign rejection of ‘nation building’ was simply silly. (American troops are building a nation in Iraq, he said, but they are also ‘fighting a war so that they can build a nation.’) And it’s very hard to take seriously Mr. Bush's contention that he was not surprised by the intensity of the resistance in Iraq.”

The one thing that I noticed most about Bush’s performance from the Oval office -- his obvious discomfort -- the Times neglected to mention. The usual presidential smirk had faded into an odd expression that made him look as if he was sick to his stomach. Perhaps he's had to eat so much crow in the last week that he was suffering from a touch of the avian stomach flu.

Click here to read the Times editorial.

Remember the Alamo?

"Knowing what I knew then and knowing what I know today, America did the right thing in Iraq," President Bush is reported to have said today to an audience of military personnel and cadets in Charleston, South Carolina.

Then, according to unnamed Internet sources, Bush went into a rant that made Howard Dean sound like Mr. Rogers (if Mr. Rogers was still alive, of course):

“Hey, Spider Hole Saddam was such bad man that he had to go, WMD’s, or not. After all, didn’t the Hitler of the Middle East grind up and eat Iraqi children by the millions? How disgusting is that? Now, do you want us to let him go, so he can eat our babies, too? Didn’t the man bury left-handed people alive? Don’t you know someone who is left-handed? Didn’t he mock me -- me! -- the president of the greatest nation in history? Didn’t he try to kill my daddy? Remember how he gassed the nerds, er, Kurds?

“Hey, forget about what liberals say about my missing National Guard records. They’re gone. Gone! And, who cares? Don't side with Saddam. Remember the Alamo!”

Meanwhile, AP reports: "In his first public defense of prewar intelligence, CIA Director George Tenet said today that U.S. analysts had never claimed Iraq was an imminent threat, the main argument used by President Bush for going to war.