The Bush administration is to staging speeches what Mantovani was to strings. So consider this amazing circumstance: President Bush is being dogged by a photo op and a prop.
The prop: a banner saying "Mission Accomplished." The op: tailhooking onto the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to pronounce it.
Sunday night's speech about Iraq didn't count as a retraction. But as USA Today said, it did "recast the debate."
What debate? If the president says something, we believe it. What's to debate?
Look: 70 percent of Americans believe Iraq had direct involvement in Sept. 11. This is a wild claim that Bush isn't even flinging. (Karl Rove is kicking himself over a missed opportunity.)
You see? We believe what warlike voices tell us. Now we are being told, I think, that some of us have taken our president too literally, and that's our fault.
On "Mission Accomplished" we're told that we read too much into that.
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http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/0903/10special_young.html