George W. Bush keeps getting away with his dog-ate-my-homework presidency

The headlines focused on Bush accepting responsibility for the dubious sentence in his state of the union speech, in which he reported that Saddam Hussein (according to the Brits) had been shopping for uranium in Africa. But at the press conference, Bush said nothing about how that line had made it into his speech--whether it had been inserted because his aides were so eager to make a case for war that they were willing to exploit unconfirmed information the CIA had opposed using. Bush quickly shifted to hailing his decision to go to war against Hussein.

During the press conference, Bush several times uttered the most disingenuous statements to defend the war. These were remarks that cannot withstand scrutiny. But it's good to be king (or president). You don't get laughed out of the room--or a rose garden--no matter what you say. Here are three examples:

http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=866

Consider this question & answer:

--snip--
Question: Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to al Qaeda were a key part of your justification for war. Yet, your own intelligence report, the NIE , defined it as--quote "low confidence that Saddam would give weapons to al Qaeda." Were those links exaggerated to justify war? Or can you finally offer us some definitive evidence that Saddam was working with al Qaeda terrorists?

Bush: Yes, I think, first of all, remember I just said we've been there for 90 days since the cessation of major military operations. Now, I know in our world where news comes and goes and there's this kind of instant--instant news and you must have done this, you must do that yesterday, that there's a level of frustration by some in the media. I'm not suggesting you're frustrated. You don't look frustrated to me at all. But it's going to take time for us to gather the evidence and analyze the mounds of evidence, literally, the miles of documents that we have uncovered.
--end of snip--

What he's saying here is that his justification for war in regards to al Qaeda connections rests on evidence yet uncovered.

By the same token, his justification in regards to weapons of mass destruction rests on whether WMD is discovered.

Considering that the war was justified on the basis of massive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and the reconstitution of nuclear weapons -- and the fact that if these WMD existed in the claimed quantities they would have been found by now -- his justification for war falls apart.

The dog ate my homework.


You can use this
or any similarly constructed excuse
along with an eyes wide
sincere
vacant
demurring
approach
and get away with it
at least 50% of the time
throughout college
and graduate school
so long as
you only use it
once
per
professor/instructor/lecturer.

He just took responsibility for it. I bet if someone would have done a followup question, we would have said that he still believed it was correct.

he is the poster child for underperforming schools.