Firing Bullets

The press declared war on the war yesterday.

I can reach no other conclusion after watching the president's press conference.

With each successive question, White House correspondents essentially asked why anyone should believe that Bush has a viable strategy for success in Iraq. The clear subtext is that the commander-in-chief has little or no credibility left on the subject.

Compare that to the tone of the questioning in 2003 and 2004, and the difference is striking.

Was it a biased performance? Journalists were reflecting the growing public outcry for an end to the war, as reflecting in a slew of polls and the expanding group of Republican senators who are breaking with Bush on his Iraq strategy. When the war was popular, reporters were treading carefully. Now that it's unpopular, reporters are openly doubting the original decision to go to war, the way the war was prosecuted, and the seemingly grim prognosis for the future.

Way overdue, liberals say. Unfair to the president, conservatives say (at least those conservatives who haven't broken with Bush over Iraq, immigration and governmental competence). Bush, meanwhile, sticks to his message, repeating again and again his core beliefs about the war and why failure is not an option. That is part of his problem: he has no new news to make on Iraq, so what makes headlines is the rising opposition. He deflects questions containing contrary information, such as yesterday's Bob Woodward report that CIA chief Michael Hayden warned the Bush administration last November that the Iraqi government "cannot function" and that this seemed "irreversible."

If there was a question about what will happen in Iraq if we pull out, I missed it. The entire political system now seems geared toward pressuring the administration into some kind of redeployment or pullback, and that remains the media's focus.

"President Bush struck an aggressive new tone on Thursday in his clash with Congress over Iraq," says the NYT, "telling lawmakers they had no business trying to manage the war, portraying the conflict as a showdown with Al Qaeda and warning that moving toward withdrawal now would risk 'mass killings on a horrific scale.'

"Hours later, the Democratic-controlled House responded by voting almost totally along party lines to require that the United States withdraw most combat troops from Iraq by April 1.

"The 223-to-201 House vote, in which just four Republicans broke with their party, came as the White House continued its intense effort to stem a growing tide of Republican defections on the war. Officials from the White House -- beginning with the president himself -- have been reaching out to party members all week, trying to persuade them to wait until September to pass judgment on Mr. Bush's current military strategy of sending more troops to quell the sectarian fighting and pursue insurgents."

"He rode into office on plain speech and core conviction," says the Chicago Tribune Globe. "In the years following the Sept. 11 attacks and throughout the Iraq war, that persona of tough resolve only hardened. But on Thursday, President Bush found himself almost wistful, conjuring a rocking-chair moment at his Texas ranch when he will reconcile his unpopularity with the knowledge that he honored his principles about the war.

"In a notable departure from his typical approach, during a White House news conference beamed out to the world, the president acknowledged the personal toll of sticking with his beliefs when they were so profoundly in opposition to those of the American people. 'You know, I guess I'm like any other, you know, political figure--everybody wants to be loved,' the president said. 'Just sometimes the decisions you make and the consequences don't enable you to be loved.' "