FLASH: U.S. President mistakes Iraq War for Lent

I’m sure you’ve heard by now. The USA Today headline gasped in shock and awe: Bush gives up golf ‘in solidarity’ with families of Iraq war dead.

Now I keep a Republican friend, The Last Boy Scout, on retainer for just this sort of comedy emergency. I sent him the story immediately, expecting we’d both share a laugh about W’s tone-deafness. Every once in a while, he and I come together on a political issue, and this one looked like a slam dunk.

Not so fast!

He fired back that if the President had continued playing golf, we Lefties would have piled on him for that. Probably. He then went on to say that if Bill Clinton had done the same thing during his tenure, we wouldn’t have had anything snide to say about it. Hell, I could even grant him that. That’s what talk-radio is for, to hoist the left on their own petard.

Still, I felt compelled to take the issue farther. I wrote back:

Here’s what I think: If you’re going to give some up something as insignificant as golf – to in some way balance out the lives of the men and women you’re putting in harm’s way – you should keep it to yourself. If the story had been about him flagellating himself with a cat-o-nine-tails every night, I woulda thought, “It’s still not enough, but maybe he does get it.”

Come on, golf? It would be like you or me giving up listening to KISS or Johnny Cash... It would suck for us, but it wouldn’t bring [a mutual friend’s brother, killed in Iraq recently, back to life]. Bush should give up something really important to him. Like for three weeks out of every month, his staff should be allowed to dress in jeans and t-shirts and be late for meetings. That would be a sacrifice he would feel!

The Last Boy Scout, a former newspaperman himself, wrote back: Maybe Bush has given up other things as well. Was he asked directly about why he doesn’t play golf anymore, or did he bring this up on his own? That would be an important piece of information, and I didn’t read the story closely enough to see if it was included.

He had me. I hadn’t read past the headline and first couple of graphs either. So I went back and checked it out. Here it is verbatim from politco.com:

President Bush warned in an interview Tuesday that the Democratic presidential candidates' plans to withdraw abruptly from Iraq could "eventually lead to another attack on the United States" and would "embolden" terrorists.

In a White House interview with Politico and Yahoo News — a president's first for an online audience — Bush said his doomsday scenario for a premature withdrawal “of course is that extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States."

"The United States pulling out of Iraq or pulling out of the Middle East or not maintaining a forward presence would send all kinds of signals throughout the Middle East," he said in the Roosevelt Room. "And it would shake everybody's nerves, and it would embolden the very same people that we're trying to defeat.

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.

“I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights.

“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It's just not worth it anymore to do.’"

I thought about it, and wrote back: That’s actually a nice sentiment. He should have kept it for his memoir. It’ll make a great scene if anyone ever decides to fund a pro-Bush biopic. It might have been poignant in retrospect – after the war, after his presidency – but you can certainly see how it’s going to be spun by the late-night TV jokesters, and blogger douschebags like me. Watch for analogies to Nero giving up fiddling as Rome burned. I’m mulling that one over myself.

Unsatisfied, TLBS wrote back a single-line reply about the Politico story: This doesn’t say whether he was asked about it or not.

So I went back to work, by which I mean, I watched Keith Olbermann’s “Special Comment” on the matter on his show on MSNBC tonight. I’m sure it’s all over the internet by now if you want to go Googling for it. He also showed clips from the Politico interview, and it immediately became apparent that TLBS’s question was more salient than I had thought it would be. I wrote him back:

Okay, I’ve seen the clip – of course there’s a clip, even for an online interview – and the question is a total set-up. It’s like watching “The Tonight Show” and Jay says, “So, have you been anywhere on vacation lately?” and Sandra Bullock laughs and replies, “Yes, the craziest thing happened on the beach at St. Bart’s...”

The Politico interviewer says something like (and I feel free to paraphrase because this clip is gonna be everywhere by morning) “Is there anything you’ve given up?” and after the first part of W’s big reveal, the interviewer follows it up with, “Was there any particular incident that occurred that led to this decision?”

It was like watching community theater and somebody is feeding an unprepared understudy lines while on stage. “SO, Hamlet, do you ever wonder if it’s nobler in the heart to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or... Or... Or whether by... By...? By opposing, do what with them? Begin them...?”

You’re sure to see the footage, and you can judge for yourself, but I went from grudgingly giving W the benefit of the doubt earlier today, as you may recall, to not only being appalled by the breach of journalistic ethics represented by the planted question, but about how badly it was executed, let alone the fact that anyone thought it would be a good idea in the first place. Olbermann did one of his patented rants on it tonight; again, they’re usually ubiquitous within hours. He’s a bit of a blowhard for my taste (Olbermann). He’s not quite as clever as he thinks he is, and that grates at maximum self-righteousness. But this time his outrage sure seems to have the facts, pesky things that they are, on his side.

Haven’t heard back from TLBS yet. Good thing, too, because now there’s a flood of empirical, non-partisan evidence pouring in that W continued playing golf even after the incident he describes in the interview. Better bloggers than me will cite dates and times (I’m looking at you, dailykos and thehuffingtonpost); research was never my strong suit.

But good god, it’s not enough that Bush is so stupid he equates temporarily forsaking his favorite pastime with somehow ameliorating the blood of the thousands of American lives he has on his hands, but then it turns out that even that insignificant ‘sacrifice’ is a fucking lie, some kind of sick political/PR prevarication! Somebody in his administration cooked up this little stinker, fed W the answers and the Politico “journalist” the questions, and within 24 hours the lie’s veracity has been completely debunked.

Stupid, nasty, selfish, incompetent little man. Christ on a cross, is it really still seven more months till you go away?

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Addendum: The Last Boy Scout remains a journalist first, and a partisan second! He wrote me the following while I slept last night: I saw the clip and researched the “reporter” a little bit, and it does appear that it was a planned question, which makes the whole affair very lame. I still believe Bush made the right decision to stay off the golf course, and I wouldn't mind if he gave the same answer to a legitimate question, but it's bad form to bring it up this way.