The president sat down on Friday with a small group of sympathetic conservative journalists — Bush is generally at his most comfortable around those who already convinced how right he is — and offered some insights into his perspective on Iraq.
“[L]ast fall, if I had been part of this polling, if they had called upstairs and said, do you approve of Iraq I would have been on the 66 percent who said, ‘No I don’t approve.’ That’s why I made the decision I made. To get in a position where I would be able to say ‘Yes, I approve.'”
Mark Kleiman translated the remarks for the rest of us.
“I’m not nearly as stupid as my supporters. Back when I was telling the world that things in Iraq were going well, and you folks were helping me by calling anyone who said otherwise a traitor, I knew we were all lying.”
It was an odd thing for Bush to concede, wasn’t it? Last fall, the White House was insisting, aggressively, that critics of the war were confused and misguided. To disapprove of the war, the president and his aides said, was to support a dangerous agenda that would necessarily undermine national security.
Except now the president is prepared to argue that he was with the unsatisfied majority. Here’s a follow-up: what does that say about Bush’s opinion of the one-third of Americans who bought into the White House line and told pollsters that they approved of how the war was going?
