I'd like, if we could, to do this in a
serious way. I was answering a post on a different diary and ran into this topic.. so what follows is the train of thought that led me there.. but what I'm asking for here is,
If you were at a press conference and could ask President Bush one question, what would it be?
Here's my train of thought, then:
If I were giving Dean some talking points on his stance on Iraq, going into the general election, I'd say that Dean thought the President to be a man of his word, which is why he expected Bush to tell the American people the real reasons for going to war. But Bush did not actually make the case.
That's obvious but I think there is a good angle here, which is that Dean, frankly, does not think Bush is a deliberate liar - and that he does (or did, back then!) think the President would be a man of his word, had Bush put it on the line by clearly saying, Saddam is an imminent threat to the United States. I've had the impression that Dean's statements on the case for war in Iraq were based on a respect for the presidency and a sense of the responsibilities that come with it, including providing the American people the reasons for major decisions, the first of which being the decision to go to war.
Let me elaborate on why I think Dean was saying something more complex than "Bush didn't tell the truth about the war." Basically, Bush owed it to us - meaning all Americans, whether they supported his policies or not - to make a clear, honest and consistent case for the war. Why? Well, it is to let us have a national debate on war on the merits of the case, instead of by playing a guessing game based on faulty evidence and by having an endless argument where we don't even start with the same facts.
This, I think, is a critique that applies to so much of what Bush has done in office: where is his sense of responsibility to the American people as a whole? Why this resistance to clearly explaining the rationale for, and the goals of, his own policies? Instead, we get doublespeak and secrecy, which is fine for those who support everything he does unconditionally, but which attempts to shut down honest debate before it starts.
It's way too idealistic to expect the President to tell 100% of the truth about why certain policies are made, but we get hardly anything out of Bush - if it's a point of pride for him to never look back, I feel like I know nothing either of where he would take the country in the future. The past doesn't matter, the present is bizarro-world for at least half of the country, and the future, uncertain..
If I had one question to ask, actually, it would be about his future plans and it would go something like this: Are we fighting the war on terror, or are we winning the war on terror, and if so, when will we have won the war?