Shorter George Bush- “I have no clue what the fuck is going on.”
And that doesn’t appear to be an accident:
Yesterday, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said, “when the President was told that we had some additional information, he was basically told: stand down; needs to be evaluated; we’ll come to you and tell you what we think it means.” Later in the briefing, Hadley reversed course and said, “In terms of stand down, they did not tell the President to stand down and stop talking about Iran’s nuclear program.”
White House officials are obfuscating on what they knew and when they knew it because the answer has the potential of further damaging the credibility of what they have asserted about Iran in the past few months. As ThinkProgress has noted, while the intelligence community was processing new information that Iran was “less determined to develop nuclear weapons,” President Bush was specifically warning that Iran was trying to “build a nuclear weapon.”
To recap: At the same time Bush was ratcheting up the rhetoric on Iran, he was told by his National Intelligence Director that that have “some new information.” Yet Bush wants the public to believe he never learned what the information was, nor was he interested.
UPDATE: The Washington Post reports this morning that “intelligence officials began briefing senior members of the Bush administration” about the new information “beginning in July.” But apparently, Bush was left completely in the dark until last Tuesday.
I guess my only question at this point is why President Cheney is allowing Vice President Bush in front of a microphone.