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Dubya does policy Hanging on Every WordBy Rick Horowitz
You think they made Abe Lincoln do all these "first 100 days" TV interviews? No way. (Marcy and me, we checked it out on Yahoo -- not a single video clip anywhere.) He wouldn't have stood for it, not Abe Lincoln, and besides, by then he was already busy fighting the Civil War. Who had time for interviews? Or George Washington? Not him either. We couldn't find out exactly what he was doing his first 100 days, except that since he was pretty much inventing the whole country right from scratch, he would have been way too swamped figuring everything out to waste his time sitting in front of some TV camera, am I right? That's when people respected the president, whoever he was. They weren't trying to trick him into maybe making some big mistake about something, and then he has to spend the rest of the day explaining himself. Which is why President Bush should have done what these other two did, just tell the TV guys, "Look, I'm sorry, I've got a job to do -- find somebody else to interview." He could have saved himself a lot of grief with this Taiwan thing. Did he change the policy? Did he not change the policy? If he did change the policy, did he know he was changing the policy? If he didn't change the policy, did he mean to sound like he was changing the policy? Ridiculous! First of all, it's not fair, this whole idea of a "first 100 days" interview. You want to make it fair, they should have the guys who ask the questions be new at their jobs, too, just like the president is. Otherwise, what you've got is some guy with years of experience throwing all these complicated situations at somebody who's only been doing this stuff since January -- you're just asking for trouble. And he couldn't even have Dick Cheney in the room with him! How fair is that? So maybe he said something about defending Taiwan if China tries any funny business that wasn't as fuzzy as how the other presidents said it. (I'm not talking Lincoln and Washington here -- Taiwan wasn't even on their radar screen back then -- I'm talking the newer ones.) They all tried to keep it like a mystery, so China wouldn't know exactly what and invade, and Taiwan wouldn't know exactly what either and declare independence. President Bush didn't do it that way. He came right out with it -- if it ever came to defending Taiwan from China, we'd do "whatever it took." Marcy and me, we couldn't believe the fuss. You'd think he said we were going to nuke Beijing or something, when all he was doing was giving them a little warning. But then because certain people got so nervous, either because he'd changed the policy or -- even worse -- because maybe he didn't even remember what the policy was -- he had to go out there in all these other "first 100 days" interviews and backpedal. Meanwhile, his own people were running around every which way defending him, saying it wasn't a change what he said, more like a shift. In emphasis. But it certainly wasn't a mistake, that was the main thing they wanted everybody to know, like that one who told the newspaper, "Obviously, the president chose his words carefully." Obviously. See, that's the other unfair thing, that they even had to say that about this guy. Bill Clinton said something, there was never any question he chose his words carefully, that he said exactly what he meant to say. Of course, half of what he said was lies, but that's a different problem. At least he never had people out there all the time saying he didn't know what he was talking about. That's like the most embarrassing thing you can say about a president. I'll bet they never said that about Abe Lincoln -- not after 100 days, not ever. Posted 4/26/01. Get
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Rick Horowitz
