British Prime Minister

Tony Blair announced today that he will resign his post sometime in the next twelve months. The New York Times reports, “The announcement comes a day after an extraordinary procession of eight junior aides resigned to protest Mr. Blair’s refusal to set a date to leave office soon.”

A post by Matthew Slutsky

Quote of the Day

Ok, this one was easy. This is from Bush’s private conversation with T. Blair that was caught by a microphone that was left on. Read the entire transcript, it’s great!

See, the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it’s over.”

Read the entire transcript here.

A post by Matthew Slutsky

Regrets, I Had A Few

To follow-up on Peter’s post from yesterday…

George W. Bush is a man who doesn’t have too many regrets. In fact, one of the classic lines from the second 2004 Presidential Debate was in response to a gentleman’s questions to the President asking him to detail three mistakes that he’s made as President. Here was his answer:

GRABEL: President Bush, during the last four years, you have made thousands of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision, and what you did to correct it. Thank you.

BUSH: I have made a lot of decisions, and some of them little, like appointments to boards you never heard of, and some of them big.

And in a war, there’s a lot of — there’s a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say: He shouldn’t have done that. He shouldn’t have made that decision. And I’ll take responsibility for them. I’m human.

But on the big questions, about whether or not we should have gone into Afghanistan, the big question about whether we should have removed somebody in Iraq, I’ll stand by those decisions, because I think they’re right.

That’s really what you’re — when they ask about the mistakes, that’s what they’re talking about. They’re trying to say, “Did you make a mistake going into Iraq?” And the answer is, “Absolutely not.” It was the right decision.

The Duelfer report confirmed that decision today, because what Saddam Hussein was doing was trying to get rid of sanctions so he could reconstitute a weapons program. And the biggest threat facing America is terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.

We knew he hated us. We knew he’d been — invaded other countries. We knew he tortured his own people.

On the tax cut, it’s a big decision. I did the right decision. Our recession was one of the shallowest in modern history.

Now, you asked what mistakes. I made some mistakes in appointing people, but I’m not going to name them. I don’t want to hurt their feelings on national TV.

But history will look back, and I’m fully prepared to accept any mistakes that history judges to my administration, because the president makes the decisions, the president has to take the responsibility.

But what’s that you say? Now, after over three years of a failed war in Iraq and more scandals and incompetence than any American can stand, President Bush finally admits that he’s made some mistakes.

Now granted, they are relatively minor mistakes. I mean, who cares that at the beginning of the Iraq war Bush told the terrorists to “bring it on?”

In a presser last night with British Prime Minister and cute lapdog Tony Blair, Bush finally admitted to some of the mistakes he’s made on Iraq.

A post by Peter Slutsky

Earth To George

From last night’s joint press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair:

Bush and Blair

Listen, I want our troops out, don’t get me wrong . . . but it’s vital that we do the job. A loss in Iraq would make this world an incredibly dangerous place.

The world is a dangerous place. Bush just doesn’t get it. The fight in Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror or the hunt for Osama. Fighting in Iraq is not making America safer. We are making enemies in every region of the globe, we are alienating our strategic and diplomatic allies and we are losing thousands of brave American lives.

Bush also addressed his pompous missteps that directly led to the deaths of many innocent American troops. His answer:

President Bush admitted Thursday he regrets “tough talk” like telling Iraqi insurgents to “bring it on” and saying he wanted Osama Bin Laden “Dead or Alive.”

“I learned a lesson about expressing myself in a more sophisticated manner,” Bush said. “In certain parts of the world, it was misinterpreted, so I learned from that.”

Answering a question, Bush listed the “bring it on” comment from July 2003 and “Wanted Dead or Alive,” as well as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, as mistakes made along the way since the 2003 invasion.

The President has credited First Lady Laura Bush with urging him to lose the cowboy talk.

Earth to Bush!