Politics In A Presidential Address? Who Would Have Thought?

Just for a change of pace, Tuesday morning I listened to NPR's Morning Edition during my workout. White House correspondent Don Gonyea had the story about President Bush's address to the nation on the 5th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. It seemed that Gonyea was not 10 seconds into the story before he mentioned what he apparently thought was a key fact: Bush had injected politics into the story by mentioned the war in Iraq and urging Americans to stay the course there. During the day, Bush's aides had been telling the news media that Bush's address would be non-political.

Oh, well, I thought; par for the course in the MSM.

But Fred Barnes has some more helpful information, the type that you'll never see in the L.A. Times or New York Times. Barnes reports that in "a 95-minute session in the Oval Office with seven journalists," the president commented on his address and the media's coverage of it in a way that showed revealing insight:

The president said he "can pretty well anticipate" what people will say about him and his actions. The response to his 9/11 speech "was a classic," he said. It was that he'd brought up the subject of Iraq, thus injecting politics into the address. "Well, imagine what would have been said if I didn't talk about Iraq." Bush said it would have been called a "failed policy, therefore we can't talk about it." But because he did talk about it, the complaint is "it's politics," he said. "It's just the nature of the deal."

Read Barnes' entire piece. It provides some real information about how President Bush thinks.