Bush's Battlefield Envy

" CJ" wrote: "I can't remember exactly what I asked the President because I was choking up having just mentioned my good friend SSG Stevon Booker who died in front of me in Iraq. I just started babbling after that. It was pathetic, you should have seen it. I thanked him for finally taking the fight to the enemy and having the nerves of steel to see it through to the end - whatever that means."

Steve Schippert wrote for National Review's The Tank blog: "It is hard to write without tearing, so forgive the brevity. It is surreal to me that an Illinois farm kid finds himself - with absolutely no traditional pedigree beyond sweat, focus and self-study - seated in the Roosevelt Room with the President of the United States discussing the direction, progress and challenges as we see them in a conflict that history will reflect defines this generation."

Blogger Bear wrote: "The biggest impression I came away with is best expressed in a thought that occurred to me during the session, which was that anyone who sat through an hour with this man as I did and came away unconvinced that he sincerely believes in the message of freedom and the necessity of this fight would have to be crazy. He exudes sincerity and passion when he speaks of the this mission, and I'm simply baffled by anyone who tries to claim that it's all politics, or all Halliburton, or all about the oil. Not for the man I saw today, it isn't."

It does sound, however, like there were at least a few unvarnished moments.

Bear quotes Bush saying about a possible withdrawal from Iraq: "If you think it's bad now, imagine what the world would be like if we created a void [by withdrawing]."

Et Tu, Maestro?

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Bob Woodward writes in Saturday's Washington Post: "Alan Greenspan, who served as Federal Reserve chairman for 18 years and was the leading Republican economist for the past three decades, levels unusually harsh criticism at President Bush and the Republican Party in his new book, arguing that Bush abandoned the central conservative principle of fiscal restraint. . . .

"Greenspan, 81, indirectly criticizes his friend and colleague from the Ford administration, Vice President Cheney. Former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill has quoted Cheney as once saying, 'Reagan proved deficits don't matter.'

"Greenspan says, ' "Deficits don't matter," to my chagrin became part of the Republicans' rhetoric.'

"He argues that 'deficits must matter' and that uncontrolled government spending and borrowing can produce high inflation 'and economic devastation.' . . .

"Greenspan was intensely criticized for endorsing a large tax cut in 2001 in congressional testimony during the first weeks of the Bush administration. He notes that he was recommending any tax cut, even a smaller one proposed by some Democrats. But he acknowledges that those who had warned him about the perception he was backing Bush's plan were right. 'The tax-cut testimony proved to be politically explosive,' he writes."

And: "Without elaborating, he writes, 'I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.'"

In today's Post Woodward follows up with Greenspan about that last comment, and writes that Greenspan "said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been 'essential' to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq."