Did Bush ever say he was sorry for taunting the Iraqis to Bring It On?

[NNN0LHI]

Cost of Violence in Iraq

Number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq 2,814
Number of US troops wounded 21,419
Number of Wounded unable to return to duty 10,789
Number of troops killed this month 103
Cost to you and me in programs and budgets
Iraq war $350 billion
per month about $8 billion.

[derby378]

1. Well, sorta...

But I don't think the national media, with Democrats in tow, ever ganged up on El Diablo and demanded he apologize for that remark.

[SammyWinstonJack]

8. How did he "sorta" apologize? I don't recall any apology out of george

for that remark.

[indepat]

2. No apology is warranted when one never makes a mistake

[papau]

3. The GOP/Bush makes simple all things "complicated" so media understands

You can never go wrong thinking the media is stupid, or refuses to discuss complications if they can't get someone else to doso - and if they can get someone they will frame it as confused with no direction/no plan versus determined Bush. Indeed the media's he says/she says always equates GOP lies as equal in value to obvious truths.

CNN.com - Bush warns militants who attack U.S. troops in Iraq - Jul. 3, 2003
Challenging militants who attack U.S. forces in Iraq, President Bush said Wednesday they would be dealt with harshly, and declared, Bring 'em on.
on.www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/02/sprj.nitop.bush

[zbdent]

6. No-one ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the masses

[Eric J in MN]

4. Years later, Bush said that "Bring it on" was a mistake.

Bush didn't actually apologize for it, though, in any remarks I've heard.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0529-20.htm

[sendero]

5. Or for calling the war..

... in Iraq a "comma", thereby relegating to total insignificance the deaths of thousands?

[genie_weenie]

7. Unfortunately it does not matter.

What matters in today's power politics is slandering your opponent and rewriting your own gaffes out of existance. Bring 'em on, just a Number, Iraq is a Comma will be ignored, forgotten, dismissed.

[Tansy_Gold]

9. It's not so much a matter of * apologizing as it is of

whether or not the media and the Dems jumped all over him for it. And of course we know they didn't. And I supposed that even if they had, the administration and its apparatchiks would just have turned up the volume. (Remember the battle of the chads and the recount???)

At some point it's got to stop. At some point, someone has to fight back and call their bluff.

I'm so furious right now I can hardly type. And I didn't get much sleep last night either, so if this isn't exactly coherent, blame it on fury and insomnia.

NONE OF US, and I mean NONE OF US, has gone through life without making a verbal gaffe. Some of us make more than others. "Is our children learning?" comes immediately to mind. Indeed. Is any of we learning? Apparently not.

We -- meaning the members and especially the leaders (?) of the Democratic Party -- need to stop being such chickenshits about issues like this.

John Kerry misspoke in the process of telling a "joke" he's apparently told several times before about how not paying attention, not learning, not getting an education (when it was handed to him on a silver platter) allowed booosh to get us into this megaquagmire in Iraq. Knowing that the pukes will jump on anything, Kerry blasted right back at them when they called him on it.

IMHO, his responding statement lacked one thing -- it lacked that simple element of "oops, I'm sorry I was misunderstood. I screwed up telling a joke and it may have sounded to some as if I was dissing our military, but for fuck's sake, you morons, do you really think *I* would do that?? I'm no Jon Stewart or (thank God) Dennis Miller. I don't do stand-up comedy. I've used this line a dozen times before and was kind of going on auto-pilot, and I screwed it up. Now, let's run a few clips of the OTHER times I've said it and said it correctly . . ." as a segue to the rest of his comment.

What's burning my ass this morning is that NONE OF THE FUCKING DEM LEADERSHIP is standing with him. There are a dozen pukes -- boooosh, Snow, McCain, etc. -- screaming about this but where the fucking hell are the Dems? Do they walk away from a comrade at the drop of a poorly-executed joke? Apparently they do, and so do a lot of DUers.

If the Democratic Party had a real leader -- it doesn't -- there'd be someone to focus on as a spokesperson, someone to come out and lend weight to any demonstration of support for another member of the party. But there is no leader. Hillary? Nope. She may be the front-runner for the nomination in 08, but she is not the symbol of the party in any way comparable to the way boooosh is the iconic representative of the GOP as well as his fucked-up administration (which as we all know is really run by Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rove). Where's the darling Obama? WHERE'S THE FUCKING SOLIDARITY????

It's the solidarity, the staying on message, that got the pukes where they are today. And it's the fear of them, and the abject inability to even FIND a message of our own to stay on, that has kept the Dems down.

John Kerry was NOT dissing the troops. His outrage at the Rove machine for their insinuations could just as righteously be directed at some people who post right here on DU. And Don is right -- Where was the apology, the groveling, repentant apology from boooooosh for not only the "Bring it on" insanity but all the other dung that has flown from that rotten piehole of his? Where was the apology for the "Can't find the WMDs here under the desk" fiasco? Where was the apology for even ONE of the flat-out lies he and his administration have foisted on the world? Where is the apology to the thousands and thousands and thousands of people who have been brutally affected by his "war on terror"? The dead and maimed Iraqis and their families, the dead and maimed military personnel and their families, the Iraqis who have fled their homes in fear of the militias that have arisen, the entire nation of Afghanistan, the women who still live every second of their lives in fear of brutal death, the girls who still live every second of their lives in fear of rape and murder.

May every god and goddess ever dreamed of damn you, John Forbes Kerry, if you utter one word of apology for anything beyond a blown punch line. May you instead, throw all the need for "an apology" -- as if that would EVER be enough -- back on that disgusting piece of pig shit (with apologies, of course, to all four-legged swine) that sits in the Oval Office and has made our entire planet a poorer, more dangerous place.

And those who enable him, who refuse to stand up to him, who demand purity in "our" leaders before following them, are just as guilty.


Tansy Gold

[Balbus]

10. He said he "regretted" using that statement and other fiery rhetoric.

Is that an apology? don't know. :shrug: