IT WAS PROBABLY just a coincidence, but did you notice that just as White House communications guru Karen Hughes was wrapping up her last day at the office before leaving town on Monday, President Bush was delivering a remarkably undisciplined–and for that reason quite amusing–press conference? By undisciplined, I mean only that the president took no pains to hide his impatience with the questions and was frequently sarcastic and uneuphemistic.
Three moments stood out (you can’t quite get the full effect from the transcript, but you can get audio and video links here.)
1) The biggest, baddest Sheriff in the West moment. When he was asked for the second time about Osama bin Laden, specifically about his promise to track down bin Laden dead or alive, the president wore one of his patented smirks: “I don’t know if he is dead or alive. . . . He may be alive. If he is, we’ll get him. If he’s not alive, we got him.” It was pretty clear from this that the president thinks bin Laden is dead.
2) The screw the NAACP moment. The president was asked how he responds to criticism for not attending the NAACP convention and more general criticism “that your civil rights record in the administration is not a stellar one?” Of course, the last time Bush attended an NAACP convention (as a presidential candidate in 2000) he was paid back with a repugnant, race-baiting ad campaign that accused him of complicity in a lynching. So you could say the president was restrained in his response, even though by normal White House standards, it was a dramatic kiss-off. “Let’s see,” Bush said. “There I was, sitting around the table with foreign leaders, looking at Colin Powell and Condi Rice.” Next question.
3) The Arafat kleptocracy moment. The president was dilating on the need for a Palestinian state to emerge. So that the Palestinian people would finally have the sort of government “which will give us all confidence in its ability to fight off terrorist activities; in its ability to receive international aid [and here there was a pointed and dramatic pause] without stealing the money.” Stealing the money! The Oslo era truly is over. I think the preferred term at the State Department is “transparency.” But somehow I don’t think the president has been spending quality time with the diplomatic set.
Why was the president so full of vinegar? Who knows. Maybe this is his usual mood, and now that we’re entering the post-Karen Hughes era, no one’s telling him to play nice. Maybe he was just ticked off over all the questions about his stock trades when he was a director of the Harken oil company in 1990 insider trading scandal (that story is a gigantic nothing-burger, as you can see by spending 5 or 10 minutes reading the SEC documents). Regardless, it was a breath of fresh air. Now if he’d just learn how to pronounce “malfeasance.”
Richard Starr is a managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
