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http://library.northernlight.com/FB20020519550000012.html?
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Story Filed: Sunday, May 19, 2002 12:01 PM EST
NEW YORK, May 19, 2002 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- At a private
gathering of Republican senators last week, President George W. Bush
felt the need to talk tough -- at length -- behind closed doors. As a
vicious political war erupted on the Hill, ignited by what the
president may have known before September 11, one senator said
Bush "was shaken," when he walked into the room, Newsweek reports in
the May 27 issue (on newsstands Mon., May 20).
(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20020519/NYSU011 )
Several sources who were in the Mansfield Room of the Capitol
building last Thursday afternoon say the president held a jut-jawed,
disjointed discourse with a tinge of diatribe and a crescendo of
podium pounding, reports Chief Political Correspondent Howard
Fineman. He dismissed questions about his administration's counter-
terrorism actions -- or lack of them -- before Sept. 11 as mere
Democratic partisanship. "I sniff some politics in the air," he
scoffed.
On the Middle East, Bush recounted a blunt Oval Office conversation
with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. He said he'd asked Sharon
if he really hated Yasir Arafat. Sharon answered yes, according to
the president. "I looked him straight in the eye and said, 'Well, are
you going to kill him?'" Sharon said no, to which the president said
he'd replied, "That's good."
"Now you guys really got me going," Bush said. He threatened to block
the entire defense bill if it contained money for the controversial
and costly Crusader artillery system. "I mean it. I'll veto it," he
said tersely, glancing at Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma, where
Crusader would be build. Bush ended with an attack on North Korean
dictator Kim Jong Il. "He's starving his own people," Bush said, and
imprisoning intellectuals in "a Gulag the size of Austin." The
president called him a "pygmy" and compared him to "a spoiled child
at a dinner table." Stunned senators didn't know quite what to make
of the performance as it ended. "It was like in church, when the
sermon goes on too long and you're not sure what the point is," one
senator tells Newsweek. "Nobody dared look at anybody else."
The White House's vaunted "message discipline" and internal unity
were falling apart under the strain of criticism. Privately, some
hardliners criticized press secretary Ari Fleischer for confirming
the basic substance of the Aug. 6 memo when it was first
reported. "We should have piled up the sandbags and said, 'None of
your buisness, it's highly classified,'" one insider grumbled. Others
criticized National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's press
briefing. "She wasn't ready for prime time," said one staffer.
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