Bush’s Theater of the Disingenuous

Bush's Theater of the Disingenuous

Wolffe: ..And for me the big giveaway was at the end of that answer, I don't know if you can see it on camera, but the President flashed a big grin to those of us sitting in the front rows. It didn't seem that he was quite as contrite as his performance. Crooks and Liars

Yesterday on “Countdown” with Keith
Olbermann, when Wolffe made the comment above, I just knew there had to
be a shot of it. Steve Soto found it and with John's video, maybe people will
get the picture, because you can't expect Chris Matthews to get
it, let alone report it. Yesterday, he was too busy slobbering over the Clintons sex life and comparing Bush
to Lincoln to be bothered. Lincoln? It was all Olbermann could do to keep from laughing,
I'll bet, as he rebutted Matthews. After all, there have been a whole lot of
deaths between “mission accomplished – bring it on – dead or alive”
and the latest presidential theater of the disingenuous.

I found the press conference wholly worth ignoring, because it was insulting.
Bush talking about “bring it on” being a mistake is like saying to
a military family, “Oops, your son is dead, my bad.” Besides, if “bring
it on” and all the other ad nauseam cowboy rhetoric was a mistake, why
is that? Why was it a mistake to say “bring it on”? Is it the impression
it made “over there” that was a mistake, which has been offered as an explanation. I thought the president didn't care what anyone thought. If it was a mistake to say “bring it on,” where does the trail of that mistake lead? What is the outcome
of the mistake? Is Bush finally, at long last taking responsibility for the
carnage in Iraq, the military deaths and the thousands of maimed, not to mention the destruction of the American image on his watch?

Froomkin takes it down.

Reading and watching the coverage of President Bush's joint news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair last night, you could be forgiven for concluding that Bush had suddenly started acknowledging the error of his ways. But you would be wrong. Bush expressed regrets last night for some of the cowboy rhetoric of his first term, and he acknowledged that the horrific prison abuse at Abu Ghraib was a big mistake. But he wasn't really conceding much. In the former case, he was expressing regret about style, not substance; and in the latter case, the only harm he acknowledged was to America's reputation — while taking no responsibility for any role he might have had in creating the conditions in which such atrocities could take place. And even more to the point, none of this was new. Reporters describing this as some sort of Bushian sea change seemed to be suffering from self-imposed amnesia. Bush first acknowledged regrets about his most outlandish swaggering almost a year and a half ago, in an interview that may have been disregarded by many reporters simply because it wasn't on television — which of course is no excuse. (snip) Quite to the contrary, the main intention of Bush's press conference was to have Blair endorse Bush's insistence that it was all worthwhile, and to show that his views — while frequently undermined by the facts on the ground — are shared by at least one other world leader. … No New Contrition – by Dan Froomkin

Bush is tap dancing as fast as he can, but his arrogance just won't let it
go without telegraphing to the world that he's got the press by their pads.
Luckily, there is the web and the progressive blogs that won't stop until Bush
is laid bare.

But there's another moral to this story. If you want the truth, look to the progressive blogs, because you aren't going to find it on cable, outside of Keith Olbermann's “Countdown.”

This picture is why I ignored it all… until we got the goods. (source: Steve Soto)