Snow Makes a Virtue Out of Bush Bucking Public Opinion on Iraq

Bush's press secretary stands by war strategy


White House press secretary Tony Snow offered a spirited defense of President Bush Saturday night, saying he is standing "against the tempest of public opinion" over the war in Iraq.

"If he did not believe that what we're doing in Iraq was absolutely right, he wouldn't do it," Snow told more than 300 Mecklenburg County Republicans.

Snow, a Davidson College graduate, spoke at the party's annual Lincoln-Reagan Day Dinner at the Renaissance Suites Hotel. The gathering attracted dozens of GOP officials from Mecklenburg and elsewhere.

Among them was U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole. The Salisbury Republican repeated her intention to run for re-election in 2008. She described the last election, which gave Democrats control of Congress, as a "tough, tough cycle." But she predicted things will be different next year.

"There's a real enthusiasm out there among rank-and-file Republicans," she said.

Snow, a former Greensboro reporter and Fox News pundit, credited Bush's leadership with pulling Americans through a series of setbacks including 9-11, two wars, Hurricane Katrina and corporate scandals.

He said pulling out of Iraq would result in "the mother of all cataclysms." The Iraqi people, he added, "are beginning to get a little glimpse of what freedom means."


What "freedom" means:


Feb 25, 8:14 AM EST

38 Killed in Attack Near Baghdad College

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A suicide bomber struck Sunday outside a college campus in Baghdad, killing at least 38 people and injuring dozens as a string of other blasts and rocket attacks left bloodshed around the city.

Earlier, two Katyusha rockets hit a Shiite enclave in southern Baghdad, killing at least 10, and a bomb near the fortified Green Zone claimed two lives, police said.

A separate car bombing in a Shiite district in central Baghdad killed at least one person and injured four, police said.

Iraq's interior ministry, meanwhile, raised the toll from a suicide truck bombing in the violence-wracked Anbar province on Saturday to 52 dead and 74 injured.

Direct fire attacks on U.S. soldiers are up 70 percent in Diyala since last summer, and fierce battles have raged since the Baghdad security plan was launched.


http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2007-02-25-08-14-33



Four more US soldiers killed

Published: Sunday, 25 February, 2007, 09:51 AM Doha Time
BAGHDAD: Four more US soldiers have been killed in two incidents in Iraq, the military said yesterday, raising the toll for February to 66.
Three of them were killed on Thursday, “while conducting combat operations in Al-Anbar Province” of western Iraq, a statement said, without elaborating.
And in a second attack on Thursday, one soldier was killed and three others wounded by a roadside bomb south of Baghdad.
The blast tore through their Humvee vehicle on early Thursday near Diwaniyah, 181km (110mile) south of the capital, the statement said.
The death brought to 3,146 the US military’s losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion, according to an AFP tally based on Pentagon figures. – AFP

http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=134575&version=1&template_id=42&parent_id=18

his job is to spin his boss's failures so they sound like strategic virtues.

I don't think the historians are much fooled.

for the dwindling true believers to have something positive to say about this disaster

They'll just provide material for our ads later about how the repukes are out of touch.

:banghead: