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Bush and Maliki It's a Snub, Bub!By Rick Horowitz "No one should read too much into this." Stephen
J. Hadley, White House national security adviser "Fat chance."
Everyone
else A snub? A slap? A diplomatic dissing? Not at all! Or so the traveling White House would like the rest of the big wide world to believe. The president journeys to Jordan for a two-day summit with the Iraqi prime minister, except that the Iraqi prime minister suddenly blows off the first day's meeting with the president, and it's not a snub? And the blow-off follows by only hours the leaking of a secret White House memo that sharply criticizes the prime minister's leadership abilities, if not his integrity and even his grip on reality -- and it's still not a snub? Swampland for Sale in Aisle 3!
Look -- there's putting the best face on a bad situation, and then there's putting lipstick on a pig. This one's a porker, plain and simple. Still, you have to marvel at how hard the various Bushketeers labored to spin it another way. It wasn't that Nouri al-Maliki decided to show the president that he could play tough, too -- of course not! It was that Maliki had already had such a productive meeting earlier in the day with Jordan's King Abdullah, the summit's host, that they all decided that a three-way session with the president wasn't "the best use of time." There wasn't "an agenda for the three for a trilateral that they felt was necessary." (Funny -- it had seemed pretty necessary when they went to the trouble of scheduling it.) And besides, they insisted, the president had topics beyond Iraq to discuss with Abdullah, so it was just as well that Maliki wasn't around that first evening. Or as one senior official so elegantly put it, "You have one shot at dealing with the king." Well, OK then. As long as you -- Wait a minute. They can't do better than that? Any high-school kid who's ever squirmed out of a terrible date or a missed homework assignment can do better than that! Even we can do better than that. So here's a little lifeline: a mini-catalog of excuses those "senior officials" can use when the going gets tough and that empty third chair starts becoming a real embarrassment. Too late to help them this time? Maybe. But the way things are going for this president, there's every chance they'll be needing a few more creative no-show excuses before long. For instance...
Just trying to help. Posted 12/3/06. Get
award-winning commentary from syndicated columnist Rick Horowitz twice
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Rick Horowitz
