A Speech Meant to Rally Public Support Doesn't Answer Key Questions

[papau]

Seems folks are critical of the Bush prime time offering - but I thought the smart copper/peach powder base did an excellent job covering the scatches from the latest druken fall - and I note that no one has picked up on th Nader claim that Bush 'exaggerated for a purpose.' - a deception has taken place, and was intended in part to draw popular support for more militaristic policies and to generate military contracts for companies with close ties to the Bush administration" - so this sounds like sucess in just getting us off of impeachment talk! Show Resolve - but no mid-course correction when you have been right all along - and no point discussing final U.S. costs, length of stay for U.S. troops, or terms for the U.S. exit from Iraq - with a nod to the creator - is great as long as the US media lets him get away with it.

And the GOP media echo leads talk radio with Alan K. Simpson's (voters did not trust Mr. Kerry to provide any better answers) "If it's a threat to his re-election, then the question is, What is the other guy saying? What's Kerry going to do about it? Got any new ideas, chum?"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53141-2004May24.html

A Speech Meant to Rally Public Support Doesn't Answer Key Questions


By Robin Wright and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, May 25, 2004; Page A12


With only five weeks before the transition in Iraq and five months before the U.S. elections, President Bush last night called for more patience, more time, more resources and more support to transform troubled Iraq.

But Bush did not provide the midcourse correction that even some Republicans had called for in the face of increasingly macabre violence in recent weeks -- from the assassination of the president of Iraq's Governing Council and controversy over dozens killed by U.S. warplanes at a purported wedding party to the grisly beheading of an American civilian.

Nor did Bush try to answer some of the looming questions that have triggered growing skepticism and anxiety at home and abroad about the final U.S. costs, the final length of stay for U.S. troops, or what the terms will be for a final U.S. exit from Iraq. After promising "concrete steps," the White House basically repackaged stalled U.S. policy as a five-step plan.

In effect, the president said his current plan is good enough to win, and he set out to rally Americans to his cause with rousing language that placed the conflict in Iraq in the context of the larger, more popular battle against terrorism.

"Our terrorist enemies have a vision that guides and explains all their varied acts of murder," Bush said. "They seek to impose Taliban-like rule, country by country, across the greater Middle East." He asserted that extremists now see Iraq as "the central front in the war on terror."

Still, the questions left unanswered last night could continue to make the administration vulnerable to criticism. "The more explicit and precise, the better. A lot of rhetoric without altering the substance will not do," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, who has been critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy. "What's involved is basically American credibility