Saturday, October 09, 2004

I'm amazed...

...that in all the post-debate coverage and analysis, no one has mentioned the fact that Bush absolutely blew his last question. The woman with the final question asked the President, out of all the thousands of decisions he's made during the last four years, name three clear examples that were mistakes.
Please realize this is a variation on a similar question put to him during a press conference some months ago. During that press conference, Bush famously went into "deer in headlights" mode and lamely answered "I'm sure something will come to me."
He's had nearly half a year to think about what he could have said. He clearly didn't take the question seriously then, clearly didn't reflect whatsoever and when it came up again tonight, he shuffled and hemmed and hawed and his answer was something about how he shouldn't have appointed certain people, but he wasn't going to get into it on national television.
Way to go champ. Oh and learn what the word facile means before you use it.

One more thing: I know that bogus facts and figures get thrown about freely in these things. For instance, Kerry distorted the unemployment numbers wildly (dude, they're bad enough, why fudge it?), but there's one stat that Bush insists on using that drives me up a wall. In the last debate he said: "The best way for Iraq to be safe and secure is for Iraqi citizens to be trained to do the job. We've got 100,000 trained now, 125,000 by the end of this year, 200,000 by the end of next year." He echoed this last night. Best case scenario: Bush has no clue what he's talking about. More likely: he's lying through his fucking teeth to paint a rosey portrait. As noted in The New Republic (and by Sully):
According to internal Pentagon documents recently obtained by Reuters, only 22,700 Iraqi forces have received enough training to be considered even "minimally effective." Barely 8,000 of the 90,000-strong police force have completed a full eight weeks of training--after a year and a half of occupation. While Lieutenant General David Petraeus wrote in a Washington Post op-ed on Sunday that the Iraqi civil-intervention force is "now conducting operations," the leaked Pentagon documents show that training hasn't even begun for its 4,800 members. And perhaps most significantly, while Bush promised 200,000 Iraqis would be trained by the end of the next year, the documents state that it will take until July 2006 to train 135,000 Iraqi police officers.


OK. Enough drunken, post-debate ranting from me.

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