John brought this up yesterday, it's been on CNN this morning, and now AP has the details. Sometimes I think that I'm really over George Bush, and then he does something to make me so sick the anger is palpable. This is one of the latter moments. From AP:
It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday's vote on a new Iraqi constitution.Mr. President, it disgusts me that after 2000 dead you've screwed it up so bad that you need to put words in the mouths of our troops. They put their lives on the line every day for what we now know were your outright lies - truth and honesty in government be damned. Democracy and free speech be damned. It's always been just propaganda with you. Only "leaders" like Kim Jong Il and Russian Communist Party Apparatchiks need propaganda to sell their "ideas". You are a truly pathetic man and if you weren't doing such damage to the country that I love, I might feel sorry for you for a moment. Failure, at any level is tough to take. But failure of this magnitude, well let's just say it would certainly explain the drinking.
"This is an important time," Allison Barber, deputy assistant defense secretary, said, coaching the soldiers before Bush arrived. "The president is looking forward to having just a conversation with you."
Barber said the president was interested in three topics: the overall security situation in Iraq, security preparations for the weekend vote and efforts to train Iraqi troops.
...
A brief rehearsal ensued.
"OK, so let's just walk through this," Barber said. "Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?"
...
Paul Rieckhoff, director of the New York-based Operation Truth, an advocacy group for U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, denounced the event as a "carefully scripted publicity stunt." Five of the 10 U.S. troops involved were officers, he said.
"If he wants the real opinions of the troops, he can't do it in a nationally televised teleconference," Rieckhoff said. "He needs to be talking to the boots on the ground and that's not a bunch of captains."
Anyone who didn't see this coming and voted for him in 2004 should be ASHAMED of themselves. It's time for you to shut the hell up and get out of the way and leave making decisions for the nation to those who at least still believe in the ideals it was founded on. Free elections, free speech, accountable government. Not propaganda and a dim wit Soviet Premier.
