The Palm Beach Playbook - Bush bungles and panders

[dArKeR]

Bush showed his weak grasp on details at his press conference. But his new Mideast policy proves he can count votes
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Updated: 3:47 p.m. ET April  16, 2004

April 16 - We have a president who operates by belief, not reason, and who lives in a hermetically sealed alternate reality. How else to explain his performance before the press this week?

Bush said he couldn’t imagine planes being turned into missiles and flown into buildings, a statement that, if he read the newspapers, he would realize had been rescinded by his national-security adviser. That scenario was routinely envisioned, though on a lesser scale than 9/11, whenever there was a high-profile event, like the Olympics or a visit from the pope, former FBI director Louis Freeh testified this week.

Bush also clings to the fiction that finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is still a prospect, citing the recent discovery of mustard gas buried on a turkey farm in Libya. Who is feeding Bush such claptrap? “A president is only as good as the information he is given,” says Jack Valenti, who was in the White House with Lyndon Johnson when Vietnam was raging. What Valenti remembers most from the meetings he attended is how wrong the military assessments turned out to be once they were filtered up from the field to Saigon to the Pentagon. By the time they reached LBJ, there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. link here

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4759304/