On CNN's Capital Gang, Mark Shields asked, "Can you imagine George Herbert Walker Bush saying 'I'll testify, but only if Dan Quayle sits alongside me'?" Even Bob Novak got a big laugh out of that one.
Bush's press conference was pretty hilarious too (from the WaPo):
Toward the end of the news conference, Bush was asked what lessons he had taken away from events since the Sept. 11 attacks. He stopped, shook his head, looked quizzical and then came up empty, although it was the kind of question he must have been told to prepare for. "I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer," he said. "But it hasn't yet."
[...]
A few minutes later he was asked why he and Vice President Cheney were appearing together before the 9/11 commission, when others have been interviewed individually. Bush replied, "Because the 9/11 commission wants to ask us questions. That's why we're meeting."
Pressed again why they insisted on appearing together, he replied, "Because it's a good chance for both of us to answer questions that the 9/11 commission is looking forward to asking us, and I'm looking forward to answering them."
And finally, here's a snarky little gem from another recent WaPo:
For the 2004 Election, an Import Surplus
By Mark Leibovich
This will be the most important election of our lifetimes. We know this because candidates keep telling us it will be.
Just like last time, and the time before that.
John Kerry calls this the "most important election of our lifetime." So did Howard Dean, and John Edwards. And Dick Cheney, just like four years ago at the Republican convention when he predicted that the George Bush-Al Gore race would be "the most important election in at least 50 years."
[...]
Ted Widmer, a professor of history at Washington College and a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton, says that politicians have a stake in stoking the loftiness of any given campaign. "There is no shortage of narcissism on the campaign trail," he says. "Politicians will always do anything to make that particular speech, that particular moment, seem incredible and historic."
[...]
[President Clinton] was particularly good at imbuing every occasion with the utmost momentousness. He won two presidential elections -- in 1992 and 1996 -- that he'd said were the "most important of our lifetime."
But when Clinton is not running himself, he tends, true to form, to hedge. "This is as important, if not the most important, election we've ever had in this country," Clinton said while campaigning for Gore in 2000. In a taped, get-out-the-vote phone message before the midterm elections in 1998, Clinton said, "Today's election is one of the most important elections in our lifetime."
This is not a partisan matter. As they did two, four, six and eight years ago, Democrats and Republicans seem to agree that this fall will be the most important election of our lifetimes. ("Of our lifetimes" is sometimes used interchangeably with "of our generation" or "of this century.")
Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie wears out variations of the term on the stump. So does Bush-Cheney campaign director Marc Racicot -- who, in an interview two years ago, merely called 2002 congressional races "probably the most important election of my lifetime."
[...]
In fact, the 2004 election might actually be more important than previous ones. The nation is at war, the economy is uncertain and the electorate is deeply divided about the incumbent. So next time Kerry, or Bush, or (count on it) Gephardt proclaims this "the most important election of our lifetime," you can be sure they mean it.
At least until 2006.