Question Details	Asked By	Asked On
Meet The Press This Morning	XCHOUX	02/08/04
President Bush made a rare Q&A appearance---on 'Meet The Press' this morning with Tim Russert. Tim asked some hard questions and Bush looked terrible. He was all puffy faced and his answers were canned and terrible. HE was a mess. What the heck is going on? How could the powers that be let him out there like that. He looked and acted like a drunk on the morning after. Bush is going to have to get it together or he doesn't stand a chance in NOvember. Comments?
Answered By		Answered On
ETWolverine		02/09/04
Chou, Have you seen John Podhoretz's op-ed article in this morning's NY Post. It covers this very topic. Here it is. February 9, 2004 -- PRESIDENT Bush didn't deliver a peak performance on "Meet the Press" yesterday in the midst of the dreariest days of his presidency. But still, he was very much himself - the same George W. Bush as he was last year and the year before that. He showed his usual discipline and restraint. He spoke carefully to ensure that he didn't say more or less than he wished to say, and felt no compunction about repeating himself to hammer home his defense of the war against Saddam Hussein's regime and his conduct as president in the months before it. "I based my decision [to go to war] on the best intelligence possible, intelligence that had been gathered over the years, intelligence that not only our analysts thought was valid but analysts from other countries thought were valid. And I made a decision based upon that intelligence in the context of the war against terror," the president said. "We remembered the fact that he had used weapons, which meant he had weapons. We knew the fact that he was paying for suicide bombers. We knew the fact he was funding terrorist groups. In other words, he was a dangerous man. And that was the intelligence I was using prior to the run up to this war." He said it, and he said it, and he said it again, as Tim Russert tried repeatedly to trip him up and make news - either by seducing Bush into contradicting previous statements or getting him to lose his cool and lash out at his critics. Bush knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to state his case in his own words, in a forum with a tough interviewer, so that nobody could say he was ducking issues or going into hiding. It was an inherently defensive performance because the president is in a defensive position - under attack, his motives and his judgment questioned and his policy decisions characterized in the harshest possible terms. What Bush said yesterday was this: I did what I thought was best for the American people, and the world, and in November, you will be the judge. Our ongoing involvement in Iraq is a vital matter for our national security, as the president explained: "The best way to secure America for the long term is to promote freedom and a free society and to encourage democracy . . . The long-term vision and the long-term hope is - and I believe it's going to happen - that a free Iraq will help change the Middle East. "You may have heard me say we have a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. It's because I believe so strongly that freedom is etched in everybody's heart. I believe that, and I believe this country must continue to lead." Some of my fellow conservatives found his performance wanting. Or more than wanting. As the show was airing, National Review magazine's Web site was firing on all cylinders as participants in its blog, The Corner, threw brick after brick at the president. Talk-show host Michael Graham called it a "disaster." Rod Dreher, formerly of this paper and now of the Dallas Morning News, said Bush made him wince: "He looked nervous, defensive and intellectually insecure." The vituperative John Derbyshire called Bush "pretty dismal." This is fairly typical of attitudes expressed these days by conservative opinion leaders, who are upset with the administration for a variety of reasons. Some don't like his immigration proposal. Others are disgusted by the free spending in his budget, particularly on the matter of the prescription-drug benefit. As a frustrated White House official told me last week, everything the president has done to anger conservatives arises from proposals he made while he was running for president in 2000. They accepted his advocacy of the proposals then, so why are they complaining now? He did not run for president as a small-government conservative, and yet they backed him to the hilt four years ago. So why the enmity today? It's a good question, and a sobering one. Recall that conservatives backed Bush in 2000 without knowing just how dreadfully he and this nation would be challenged by the events of 9/11 and their aftermath. They supported him, in other words, when he was merely promising to be a big-spending conservative. The president they got turned into a great wartime leader, and now some conservatives are griping about how he is actually fulfilling some of the promises they were willing to overlook when they wanted to back a winner four years ago. Many of his accomplishments are now being forgotten amid the Democratic onslaught and the news of the past few weeks. Liberals and Democrats need the American people to forget them in order to win in 2004. The real question for conservatives is: Are you going to let the triumphs of the Bush presidency disappear down the memory hole? John Podhoretz's book "Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane" is being published this month. E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com --------- Elliot

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