A Speech about Nothing

After watching President Bush's prime-time poll numbers pep rally, I mourn the wasted thirty-five or forty minutes of my life that I'll never get back. That time could have been spent on much more productive activities, like playing Tetris or watching Dukes of Hazzard reruns. Instead I listened to President Bush lay out the same old strategy for Iraq that he's been laying on us for...well since this fiasco began. David Corn summed it up pretty well in his Capital Games blog for the Nation...

Twelve days ago, The Washington Post reported that the Bush White House had concluded that George W. Bush--who was facing sinking polling numbers regarding the war in Iraq--needed to "shift strategies." He would (of course) not be implementing any policy changes, the paper noted; his new approach" would be "mostly rhetorical." Yet in his prime-time speech on Iraq--delivered before a quiet audience of troops at Fort Bragg on Tuesday evening--Bush proved the Post report wrong. There was no shift of strategy--rhetorical or otherwise.

No new strategies of any sort, no new timeline for withdrawal, no influx of troops. It's really hard work, but we're going to stay the course. Lieutenant General William Odom (U.S. Army, retired) had some thoughts on that a while back...

When the president says he is staying the course, that makes me really afraid. For a leader has to know when to change course. Hitler did not change his course: rather he kept sending more and more troops to Stalingrad and they suffered more and more casualties.

When the president says he is staying the course it reminds me of the man who has just jumped from the Empire State Building. Halfway down he says, 'I am still on course.' Well, I would not want to be on course with a man who will lie splattered in the street. I would like to be someone who could change the course.

The president even pulled out the tired old chestnuts about 9/11 (several times) as if one had anything to do with the other. A man who had any shame would be ashamed.

All in all just a tiring recitation. I'm just glad I didn't play William Rivers Pitt's Bush Speech Drinking Game. I hope no one did or it'll be a busy night in the nation's ERs from an epidemic of alchohol-poisoning cases.

The only really interesting part of the speech came at the end. Right before the close, he said...

And to those watching tonight who are considering a military career, there is no higher calling than service in our Armed Forces. We live in freedom because every generation has produced patriots willing to serve a cause greater than themselves.

Hmmm. Wonder if Jen and Barb were paying attention to that?