"Perhaps some in Congress don't think the program is important," Bush asserted. "That's fine. I don't know if they do or don't. I think it's vital."
First of all, that's not an assertion. That's a passive-aggressive, whiny, disingenuous hissy fit. Nobody disputes the program's importance. People dispute its legality, its efficacy, and, most deeply, its morality; more to the point, people believe it fails on all counts. He is like a disturbed child whose parents have forbid him to stick lit firecrackers in toads or to torture cats, and who then mischaracterizes the parents' position in as self-aggrandizing terms as his little brain can conceive: "They just don't want me to have any fun" [pouts, knits brow].
And I just love how every major media outlet seems to be missing the point, which is this: The Bushies were conducting secret campaigns of torture (by definition illegal.) When the secrecy was compromised, they had the gall not only not to resign, but to approach the American people and tell them that they will die if Congress does not pass legislation rendering the White House's past behavior legal (past behavior which they have continued anyway), because otherwise they will have to shut down the program (they won't, by the way...)
The rest of the Rose Garden Temper Tantrum was studded with some lovely, purely conservatarian gems of cognitive dissonance. Take, for example:
The president said he could not send thousands of troops into Pakistan to search for Osama bin Laden -- still at large five years after the 9/11 attacks -- without an invitation from the government. "Pakistan's a sovereign nation," he said.
VS
Bush expressed frustration that the United Nations has not sent peacekeepers to stop the misery in the Darfur region of Sudan. "What you'll hear is, well, the government of Sudan must invite the United Nations in for us to act..."
That's right, kids! We are a nation ruled by the brain-damaged.
