Bush gives a speech that does nothing more than spin a bad policy. And why not more Jeter to center?
By: Hank Kalet
Nothing like repackaging bad product and hoping no one will notice. That, essentially, is what President Bush did yesterday when he made this speech at the Naval Academy.
Today’s editorial pretty much sums up my thinking:
"It has been obvious for months that Americans don’t believe the war is going just fine, and they needed to hear that President Bush gets that. They wanted to see that he had learned from his mistakes and adjusted his course, and that he had a measurable and realistic plan for making Iraq safe enough to withdraw United States troops. Americans didn’t need to be convinced of Mr. Bush’s commitment to his idealized version of the war. They needed to be reassured that he recognized the reality of the war.
"Instead, Mr. Bush traveled 32 miles from the White House to the Naval Academy and spoke to yet another of the well-behaved, uniformed audiences that have screened him from the rest of America lately. If you do not happen to be a midshipman, you’d have to have been watching cable news at midmorning on a weekday to catch him.
"The address was accompanied by a voluminous handout entitled ‘National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,’ which the White House grandly calls the newly declassified version of the plan that has been driving the war. If there was something secret about that plan, we can’t figure out what it was. The document, and Mr. Bush’s speech, were almost entirely a rehash of the same tired argument that everything’s going just fine. Mr. Bush also offered the usual false choice between sticking to his policy and beating a hasty and cowardly retreat."
The reality, as U.S. Rep. John Murtha has been pointing out, is that we are only enflaming the situation in Iraq and the civil war we are worried about has already started. Let’s get the troops out and take a new tack.
Seems to be consensus among regional papers on Route 92. Here’s what we had to say today.
The subject of moving either Alex Rodrigquez or Derek Jeter to center for the Yankees came up the other day and I just shook my head. Seemed an odd rumor.
And then I read this and realized just how logical the move might be.

