Will Bush have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of himself inside himself?

At today’s Bush speech on the Iraq War, the 1,263rd in a continuing series, he made a charge against Saddam Hussein that we haven’t heard in a while, presumably since it was understood conclusively that there were no WMDs, that he “was deceiving [UN weapons] inspectors”. Um, about what?

Says “I fully understand that the intelligence was wrong, and I’m just as disappointed as everybody else is.” Disappointed? Is that the word for it? And I think that Cindy Sheehan and many other survivors of dead soldiers, to say nothing of most of the 25 million Iraqis, might be a tad more “disappointed” than Bush is.

He did his usual thing about how his father fought the Japs and now he & Koizumi are bestest buds, although he added a surprising condemnation of Hiroshima & Nagasaki, at least I think that’s what this is:

the war -- and by the way, it ended with an old doctrine of warfare, which is, destroy as many innocent people as you can to get the guilty to surrender. That’s changed, by the way, with the precision nature of our military, and the way we’re structured, and the way our troops think, is we now target the guilty and spare the innocent.

I’ve commented before on Bush knowing only one adjective, interesting. Between the speech & the q&a, he used the word 18 times. For a man whose lack of intellectual curiosity is renowned, nay, legendary, he sure finds a lot of things interesting.

Which is more than I can say for this speech, although one audience member gave him a dressing down:

Q: I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself inside yourself.

THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, sure, that’ll happen.

I may have made up the response, although it would sure have been interesting if he had said that, huh?