This is appalling.
Bush put on a slide show, calling it the "White House Election-Year Album" at the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association 60th annual dinner, showing himself and his staff in some decidedly unflattering poses.
There was Bush looking under furniture in a fruitless, frustrating search. "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere," he said.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040325/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_broadcasters_1
I'm sure the families of our soldiers in Iraq thought that was fucking hilarious. Ha ha ha, how about that invented pretext for sending at least 585 American soldiers to their deaths? Ha ha ha.. good times, good times. It's great that we can laugh about this, huh? It's great that the guy who sent our men and women over there to die thinks the fact that it was under false pretenses is a real riot.
How completely out of touch do you have to be to make a joke like that? The rationale he is mocking was directly used to start A WAR. With REAL PEOPLE GETTING KILLED EVERY DAY. And the President of the United States, the guy who told us there were all kinds of scary weapons pointing at our children, is making jokes about it.
I'm all for a good joke, and I have nothing particular against tasteless jokes, but my god, there is a line, and George Bush just took a big shit right on it. I just can't begin to fathom how he thought this would be taken well.
Drudge pulls out a joke Kerry made in 1998 about assassination: "Somebody told me the other day that the Secret Service has orders that if George Bush (I)is shot, they're to shoot Quayle."
It's hardly the same thing. That joke may be in poor taste, but he's not joking about an issue that has actually caused the deaths of thousands of human beings and thrown the world into a state of chaos unmatched in the past 50 years.
Indefensible.
UPDATE: David Corn of The Nation was at the dinner and recounts his experience.
