MSM on Bush's speech

As a general rule, Friday is not the best day to roll out a new position...

Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus are headlined in today's Washington Post with "Asterisks Dot White House's Iraq Argument". They write:

But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.

Richard Stevenson in the New York Times:

But the Senate review described repeated, unsuccessful efforts by the White House and its allies in the Pentagon to persuade the Central Intelligence Agency to embrace the view that Iraq had provided support to Al Qaeda. According to former administration officials, in early 2003, George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, and Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, rejected elements of a speech drafted by aides to Vice President Dick Cheney that was intended to present the administration's case for war, calling them exaggerated and unsubstantiated by intelligence.

Bill Sammon of the Washington Times:

The president, for his part, took the unusual step of criticizing the opposition party by name in a foreign policy speech.

Warren Vieth and James Gerstenzang in the Los Angeles Times:

Bush's aggressive rhetoric, which coincided with a similar attack on Democrats by the Republican National Committee chairman, reflected growing White House concern over signs that the public's confidence in the president was slipping and that misgivings about Iraq were a principal cause of his problems.

Rick Klein in the Boston Globe:

Though he'd delivered several major speeches about the war since the 2004 election, Bush came out swinging this time, taking on his critics with stinging charges reminiscent of the partisan campaign speeches that helped him win a second term. The aggressive tone seemed designed to turn the tables on critics in Congress who have turned the spotlight on the faulty intelligence the White House used to make its case for war.

Yes, Karl Rove was involved. This did have the tone of his campaign speeches. That is discouraging.

The Associated Press story:

But the clock is running. And Bush may already have passed the point of no return, suggested Paul C. Light, a professor of public policy at New York University.

"Unless Bush and his advisers do something dramatic to reposition the administration and stop the slide in public approval, they're going to find they have very few friends who want to come to the White House, let alone friends who want them to come to their districts," Light said. "And that's about the worst possible position for a president to be in."

As for the talkies:

I believe NSA Stephen Hadley is on ABC's This Week. I know he is on Wolf Blitzer's Late Edition (oddly named at 11 a.m. on a Sunday). Ahmed Chalabi is on Late Edition as well.