George W. Bush kept seeming to lose interest in his own remarks last night
as the president did that rarest of rare things -- for him -- and held a
prime-time news conference. Televised live on all the major networks from
the East Room of the White House, the occasion found Bush declaring this to
be "an important moment" for America and the world, yet he spoke with
little urgency and no perceptible passion.
Have ever a people been led more listlessly into war? It's tempting to
speculate how history would have changed if Winston Churchill or FDR had
been as lethargic as Bush about rallying their nations in an hour of
crisis. There were times when it appeared his train of thought had jumped
the tracks.
Occasionally he would stare blankly into space during lengthy pauses
between statements -- pauses that once or twice threatened to be endless.
There were times when it seemed every sentence Bush spoke was of the same
duration and delivered in the same dour monotone, giving his comments a
numbing, soporific aura. Watching him was like counting sheep.
Network commentators by and large tippy-toed around the subject of Bush's
curiously subdued performance. But at least Terry Moran of ABC News dared
to say that the White House press corps had definitely seen Bush "sharper"
than he was last night. Tactfully and gingerly, Moran said Bush seemed to
be "trying to keep his mannerisms as cool as possible" as he fielded
questions and spoke of ultimatums. The lethargy was contagious;
correspondents were almost as logy as Bush was.
Nobody even bothered to ask a question about Osama bin Laden, whose capture
was rumored to be imminent yesterday and is still in the public mind a more
reprehensible monster than Saddam Hussein.
Bush popped the balloon that bin Laden had been found when he failed to
make a dramatic opening statement, instead reiterating for the umpteenth
time some of his many charges against Hussein, whose token efforts at
disarmament amounted to "a willful charade," Bush said. In one of his more
effective moments, Bush said that the tragedy of 9/11 showed what
terrorists can do with only four airplanes and so we should imagine what
Saddam Hussein could do with his notorious weapons of mass destruction. But
there were few effective moments.
At times during the hour, Bush almost appeared to be backing off the
previously immutable notion that Hussein's intransigence makes war
virtually inevitable. "We don't have to go to war," he said at one point.
"I'm hopeful that he does disarm," Bush said of Hussein. "It may require
force" to get him to do it, but "I hope it can be done peacefully," he said
in separate remarks. While at another point he seemed to say, contrary to
previous statements, that he was "optimistic" about "diplomacy" doing the
job so that U.S. troops won't have to, he also said, with respect to
disarming Hussein: "Diplomacy hasn't worked. We've tried diplomacy for 12
years."
He also said the "use of force" remains "my last choice" as a means to
disarm the Iraqi leader.
"I recognize there are people who don't like war. I don't like war," Bush
said. But as in the past, he referred to Hussein at various points as a
cancer, a murderer, a master of deception and just generally an inhuman
fiend who must be destroyed or exiled. The statements did not come across
as particularly cogent or consistent. Then again, perhaps Bush was just
offering a summary of everything that's been said on the issue over the
past few months.
The contrast between the foggy Bush of last night and the gung-ho Bush who
delivered a persuasive State of the Union message to Congress not so long
ago was considerable. Maybe Bush thought he was, indeed, coming across as
cool and temperate instead of bored and enervated, and this was simply a
rhetorical miscalculation. On the other hand, it hardly seems out of order
to speculate that, given the particularly heavy burden of being president
in this new age of terrorism -- a time in which America has, as Bush said,
become a "battlefield" -- the president may have been ever so slightly
medicated.
He would hardly be the first president ever to take a pill.
MORE ON...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54629-2003Mar7.html
