Bush expresses regret for Iraq rhetoric, but the right regrets the regret
For quite a while, when the president was asked whether he’d made any mistakes in office, Bush would struggle to come up with something. More recently, he came up with a stock answer: Bush thought it was a mistake to use warmongering rhetoric such as “bring ’em on.”
This week, in the midst of a European trip, the president elaborated on this.
President Bush has admitted to The Times that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he was a “guy really anxious for war” in Iraq. He said that his aim now was to leave his successor a legacy of international diplomacy for tackling Iran.
In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric.”
Phrases such as “bring them on” or “dead or alive”, he said, “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace”. […]
He also offered words of encouragement for another ally, Gordon Brown, whom he will meet on Sunday…. But he delivered a thinly veiled warning to Mr Obama that his promises to renegotiate or block international trade deals were already causing alarm in Europe and beyond.
This is interesting on a few levels. First, it’s kind hilarious that Bush is troubled by the notion that he’s not perceived as a “man of peace.” He, you know, launched a preemptive attack against a country that wasn’t a threat and then refused to leave. Bush is considered a “guy really anxious for war” in Iraq because he really was a guy really anxious for war in Iraq.
Second, it’s really hilarious to hear Bush suggest that leaders in “Europe and beyond” are worried about an Obama presidency. Trust me, they’re far more worried about Bush.
But the angle I hadn’t expected was the conservative outrage over Bush expressing regret in the first place.
My friend Alex Koppelman explained that conservatives aren’t responding well to the president’s comments, and are accusing him of betraying himself.
Michelle Malkin was one very predictable source of indignation about this, and she played to type. Her post on the comments is titled “Bush Goes Mushy.” In it, she quips, “He’s putting the lame in lame duck.”
Similarly indignant, if more strident, was Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs. Geller called Bush’s interview “pathetic,” wrote, “Memo to Bush: STFU” (her emphasis) and said, “Bush regrets his legacy as a ‘man who wanted war?’ … It was not your legacy, it was al qaeda and company’s legacy. Not aggressively defending ourselves is a moral depravity. Apologizing for defending this great nation is morally bankrupt.” […]
And the bloggers at Powerline, who’ve previously gone a wee bit over the top in their admiration for Bush, were up in arms. The site’s John Hinderaker referenced a comment he says former Sen. Rick Santorum made to him about the Bush administration having “battered President syndrome” and said, “Bush appears to have more or less internalized the criticisms that his enemies have lodged over the years … Bush [repeated] one of the sillier attacks the left has launched on his Presidency.” One of Hinderaker’s co-bloggers, Paul Mirengoff, concurred, writing, “Bush seems determined to drive his approval rating down to roughly zero percent.”
Bring it on.
Boy George II has talked with Scott McClellan and discovered the wonders of introspection.
Of course all the Bushites and Conservative Pundits are surprised and dismayed.
Bo Ho.
Hmm, does Mr. Bush regret deregulating the new electronic oil futures contracts trading market? That action has added about 60% to the retail price of gasoline, almost all because of corporate speculation. At $4.25/gallon, that comes to about $2.55/gallon as the speculation fee handed to banks, hedge funds, pension funds and speculators who are busy buying and selling oil futures contracts. The price of gas would be about $1.75/gallon without speculation. Shut down the unregulated electronic oil futures contracts market now. It only serves to enrich the speculators; it is stealing our money with every gallon of gasoline we purchase.
We’re being ENRONed again: this time by oil futures contracts speculators who are unnecessarily and very profitably driving up the price of crude oil and hence retail gasoline prices. Curious as to why you are suddenly paying over four dollars a gallon for gasoline? No, it’s not due to “supply-and-demand,” no, it’s not due to “OPEC,” nor is it due to “peak oil.” It’s due to totally unregulated electronic oil futures trading in world markets. Check out the very lucid article that explains the unseen financial machinations in oil futures markets written by F. W. Engdahl on May 2, 2008, entitled, “Perhaps 60% of Today’s Oil Price is Pure Speculation.” It may be viewed at http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/2008/0502.html.
In a nutshell, he suggests that the Bush Administration dropped the ball in January 2006, when they allowed totally unregulated electronic trading of oil futures contracts in New York. Previously these electronic trades had been made at the London Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) Futures Market. With that decision by the Bush Administration, all of the world’s oil prices were then opened to upward pressure from speculative futures contracts. In essence, oil futures contracts made by speculators, banks, hedge funds and pension funds all competed with real demand on the spot markets and had the effect of driving up both wholesale oil prices and retail gasoline prices. Speculators have made billions of dollars on their trading of oil futures contracts. All of their profits come right out of our pockets.
Even with a stable oil supply, there is a slow worldwide increase in demand for oil, which creates a long-term upward pressure on oil prices. However, with the relentless saber-rattling and war-mongering by Bush and Cheney in the last several years, and the more recent war talks by McCain and the Israelis, the oil futures markets are rife with speculation and paranoia. This war talk keeps ratcheting up the prices on the oil futures contracts and hence the wholesale spot market prices. It is an endless spiral of greed and paranoia.
As long as there is no tough and effective oversight of the electronic oil futures markets by the Bush Administration, the oil prices will climb endlessly. These oil prices will be quickly followed by hikes in the retail gasoline prices at the pump. The 60% speculation share of the $4.25/gallon gasoline price, is about $2.55/gallon, which is what we consumers are paying to these oil speculators as a “service fee.” Not a bad “fee,” since the speculators produce no usable goods or services…Just a few large greedy oil futures traders helping themselves to your gas money.
Without this added-on oil futures “service fee,” you would be paying about $1.75/gallon for gasoline. Write, call or smoke-signal your Representatives and Senators today and suggest that they read the June 2006 report by The U. S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations entitled, “The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices.” Then demand that they investigate and then force the Bush Administration to firmly regulate the computerized oil futures contracts trading in New York, London and Dubai.
There you go again.
…the conservative outrage over Bush….
And so, the Royal Anointing of Senator Nightmare-Under-the-Rotunda as heir apparent to the Grand High Pooh-Bah of Bushylvania begins. The only way they can separate their candidate from Bush is to make Bush look worse.
Which is fine with me, since Senator McDubya’s-Mini-Me will always be linked to his mentor—and it’ll be fun watching the ReThug radicals trash their last commander-in-chief-for-the-21st-century down to a single-digit approval rating. I imagine there’s a college that wants to re-think the GWB
obstruction of justice and tampering/destroying of evidence center“Library….”George W. Bush is a compassionate warmonger.
why would ONLY a few simple words standout in his memory?
Liberals are obsessed with pinning the Iraq war on the President, but he will leave a legacy far beyond that.
This confirms the view I’ve had of Bush for a while, that he’s more stupid than evil. It seems like enough reality has finally forced its way through the bubble, and the deep-down decent, if utterly ignorant and incompetent, human being is appalled at the damage his policies have done. Too late to correct the damage or earn redemption, of course, but it’s some comfort to think that he’ll at least have regrets as he transitions into post-presidential irrelevance.
Michelle Malkin was one very predictable source of indignation about this, and she played to type. Her post on the comments is titled “Bush Goes Mushy.” In it, she quips, “He’s putting the lame in lame duck.”
Similarly indignant, if more strident, was Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs. Geller called Bush’s interview “pathetic,” wrote, “Memo to Bush: STFU” (
Hey Dowd, time for a column about the emasculating-women on the Right. Perhaps a calendar.
Because simple mind have simple thoughts.
james k. sayre said:…God, what an excellent post. Thanks. So few people around here understand how much this affects the price of gas/gal. or how totally unnecessary it is for these people to be profiteering off what should be noted as a national emergency.
Pamella Geller is another of those making up her own facts…Iraq was not connected to al qaeda or in company with them till after America invaded her. These war cheerleaders cannot accept their captain admitting “foul”. Bush should be apologizing for increasing terrorism all around the world by his yahoo cowboy rhetoric and actions. Playing army with our troops however is unforgivable.
Malkin is so inconsequential to the world of reality as to just be ignored.
See, even Bush lacks my resolve to stick to his guns in Iraq, and never admit to saying anything I regret.
I meant it’s not important “if” our troops come home, but “when”! — 2113 A.D.
Yes. All I ever hear about on BBC World News is how europe’s leaders are pissing their pants over the prospect of an Obama Presidency.
JRD (8)This confirms the view I’ve had of Bush for a while, that he’s more stupid than evil.
No offense, but I suspect that saying the opposite would have confirmed the same view.
You know what’s scary? I actually agree with Pamela Geller. In a way, it is al qaeda’s legacy that their horrific but inexpensive tactics caused Bush to lose thousands more American lives and spend a trillion dollars we don’t have. We likely would have invaded Iraq anyway on some pretext, but she is correct to call out Bush’s stupidity in reacting to 9/11 in a way that furthers al qaeda’s goals of causing maximum loss of life, political isolation, and economic harm to the US.
I love the smell of wingnuts eating their own in the afternoon. You can tell they know how screwed they are. And I’ll bet McCain will give them plenty of “mushy” statements to pour their venom on, by November they’ll be trying to get Fred Thompson to get back in as an independent.
LOL
Even my lifelong Republican dad doesn’t think Bush has done anything worthwhile. The only legacy he has is the Iraq War, which is a monumentally disastrous legacy to leave. Oh, by the way, did he catch Bin Laden yet?
james k. sayre #2 – thanks for the excellent post on the latest speculative bubble that is costing Americans and the rest of the world such financial distress for no reason other than the pure, unbridled greed of certain traders and “investors” in unregulated markets.
There’s been plenty of action on the part of Congress lately, and you can catch some of it on C-Span and C-Span 2, but of course the media are ignoring one of the biggest scandals ever, and the attempts of a few brave souls to rein in the Enronization of the oil market. How it will come out is anybody’s guess. The bottom line is what you’ve so painstakingly pointed out: there’s no real oil crisis at this time. Somebody’s making all that money at our expense, and our president couldn’t care less. The Republican response is a shrill, monotonous “Drill, drill, drill.”
It’s a huge scandal, and almost nobody is paying attention.
My mom is waiting for the approval rating to go below zero (with margin of error).
james k. sayre (2) Your link doesn’t work. This one should.
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/engdahl/2008/0502.html
Now that McCain is Bush, Bush can distance himself from himself.
And Bush was very welcome in the UK:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9284
Bush is such a great representative for the people of the US. Aren’t we all proud?
“No offense, but I suspect that saying the opposite would have confirmed the same view.”
Saying the opposite would more have confirmed that the bubble remained intact, I think. Though if Bush were fully cognizant of the results of his policies and nevertheless proud of them, I think that would move the scale closer to evil than stupid. Though Bush certainly lies somewhere in the middle, between the extremes of Huckabee and Cheney.
Dear DanP, Thanks for the correction on the link to the article in question:
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/engdahl/2008/0502.html. I just tried it and it works fine. This electronic oil price futures scandal is costing US drivers about $969,000,000.00 per day! That number is based on 60% speculation fee of a gasoline price of $4.25/gallon and on US 2004 consumption of 380,000,000 gallons/day. Tell you Senators and Congresspersons to simply shut down this unregulated electronic oil futures contract trading market. Then the price of gasoline will slowly drop to about $1.75/gallon…The only way that oil price futures contracts make money is if the price of oil goes up in the future, say, 30, 60 or 90 days later. This futures market serves no social need. It is just for corporate greed. The corporate speculators are probably also gaming/ENRONing the wheat and corn futures markets the same way.
First, it’s kind hilarious that Bush is troubled by the notion that he’s not perceived as a “man of peace.” He, you know, launched a preemptive attack against a country that wasn’t a threat and then refused to leave. — CB
Not only that, but that little “peaceful dove” cooked the books to get his war going. So yeah, the perception that he was gung-ho and hell-bent on I-wrecking is quite correct.
As for Malkin and other “pundicks” of the right getting in a stew over what they see as bowing down to pressure and recanting some of his prior stance… I wonder if they could have, actually, bought into his original spin. Geller in particular sounds as if she’d believed every word of his “rationalization” of why we went there.
Phrases such as “bring them on” or “dead or alive”, he said, “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace”…????
How can this Bush guy and this Malkin lady criticize the Commander in Chief???!!! My god, why do these people hate Americans and the troops so terribly? They should be strung up, sent to the front, off with their heads for their horrible lack of patriotism!
Every patriot knows that the President started this war in Iraq for peace! He’s a man of peace! Just ask Sadaam’s lynch mob.
Yeah, David Broder, and it’s exactly that lasting legacy that makes peoples’ skin crawl and their nether-regions loosen. Especially at the prospect of four more years of the same, with Bush’s heir apparent, McCain.
And part of that legacy will be the poop in the Augean Stables he’s created over the past 7+ years. Where IS Hercules when you need him?
And who else should the two wars be pinned on? Vendel Vilkie? Liberals don’t NEED an obsession to pin it on Bush – it was already pinned there, by himself, right next to his flag pin. So I guess the flag pin makes it patriotic and okay, right?
The neocons got so hyped at having a warmonger/bornagain to help turn the world into a big theocracy, that they forgot there was a Last Day for their fun and games.
And just before that will be a Day of Judgment – in common parlance, it’s called an ELECTION.
Game Over.
Oh, my! Why must we quibble over Bush being ruled more by his stupidity or his evil? They can both lie quite comfortably, side by side, in the same brain, you know.
The evil part has not yet been registered, much less accepted, by the American people. We still accept the 9/11 report, where airplanes and corpses simply “vaporized”, and steel structured skyscrapers could collapse, all from jet fuel heat – against the Laws of Thermodynamics. For the nonce, it seems okay to Americans that the immutable laws of physics were somehow “suspended” on that terrible day. But then, those laws are science – and under this administration, “science don’t count” – it’s not in Genesis.
The evil will register, though. Just hope I’m still alive to see it happen. And when it does, I hope Bush/Cheney, et al are still alive to face the consequences.
We just don’t want to accept that our own president – or any American – could be so evil as to attack his own country. Understandable. But truth has a way of becoming known, even through fierce denial. And this is a particularly unlovely truth. It’s a truth we really NEED to assimilate, so we can take steps to see it doesn’t happen again.
And “it ain’t over yet,” because the neocons are still running things. If it worked for them before, why not again?
Methinks W. is already working on a redux, to justify invading Iran before he sings his presidential swan song. But then, if not, there’s always McCain, ready to sing “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.” Yeah, the legacy wants go to on. By next January, it’s entirely possible we’ll all wish we’d impeached him when we still had the chance. After that, we might still have McCain to grapple with.
The question is will we permit it? Actually, are we STUPID enough to permit it?
Remember that time, after all, wounds all heels.
I’d vote for Britney Spears or Mickey Mouse before I’d vote McCain.