Here's What's Left: Admitting your mistakes

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January 14, 2005

Admitting your mistakes

Remember the question from Bush's April 12 press conference?

Q. You've looked back before 9-11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have learned from it?

Remember the question from the 2nd debate?

GRABEL: President Bush, during the last four years, you have made thousands of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision, and what you did to correct it. Thank you.

At first, when I saw the headline to this story, I thought hell had frozen over. But I don't think it's what they had in mind:

President Bush says he now sees that tough talk can have an "unintended consequence."

During a round-table interview with reporters from 14 newspapers, the president, who not long ago declined to identify any mistakes he'd made during his first term, expressed misgivings for two of his most famous expressions: "Bring 'em on," in reference to Iraqis attacking U.S. troops, and his vow to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive."

"Sometimes, words have consequences you don't intend them to mean," Bush said Thursday. "'Bring 'em on' is the classic example, when I was really trying to rally the troops and make it clear to them that I fully understood, you know, what a great job they were doing. And those words had an unintended consequence. It kind of, some interpreted it to be defiance in the face of danger. That certainly wasn't the case."

You know what the funny thing is? Bush does make a lot of mistakes when he speaks, and those are two pretty dumb things to say. But they're not the dumbest things. Remember that time after the Iraq invasion that he claimed Saddam didn't let the inspectors in? Remember that time recently when he claimed Social Security would be bankrupt in 2040? Would have been nice if he had mentioned those.

-- Michael

Posted on January 14, 2005 at 02:01 PM | Permalink

Comments

"'Bring 'em on' is the classic example, when I was really trying to rally the troops and make it clear to them that I fully understood, you know, what a great job they were doing... some interpreted it to be defiance in the face of danger.

Huh? No, I just interpreted it to be a screaming example of his idiocy and arrogance, as well as a hint of his true motivations for the whole thing in the first place - to give himself a 'tough guy' image that he cannot earn through legitimate toughness and has to fabricate through proxies such as military photo ops.

As you pointed out, he did not actually pick a mistake to admit to. He instead blamed 'some' for misinterpreting what he said, as if it was not his fault at all. This is a classic example of pathological insecurity. If he ever once admits his culpability his eggshell-thin veneer of plausibility will crack and fall off.

Posted by: Cheryl | January 15, 2005 at 09:45 PM