Tuesday, April 13, 2004
AND FROM THE RIGHT Here's bleeding-heart liberal Jonah Goldberg on tonight's press conference:
I am sure there is a brilliant, well-formulated and principled rationale on offer at the White House to justify Bush's refusal to admit any pre-9/11 mistakes. But I haven't heard it and I think Bush is making a mistake by not offering some token answer that changes the subject. But what I find amazing is that Bush didn't even prep an answer -- even a glib one -- to the question. He was asked it in one form or another a bunch of times and he even said he was "put on the spot" by the question. I thought he was sincere in his flummoxed-ness. You'd think someone would tell Bush that he could just say "Oh I wish I'd realized just how deep the structural problems at the FBI were," or "I wish we'd passed the Patriot Act before hand." The answer doesn't even have to be a good one, it just has to show that he's reflected on his pre-9/11 tenure in office enough to come up with something substantive.
