servicemembers who died in the post-9/11 war zones Bush created, as well as the many more who were wounded. And I also mourn the more than 7,000 U.S. More than 20 years later, people are still dying needlessly. According to The Costs of War project, more than 207,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in that nightmare, while the number who died from the indirect violence of that war was far higher, given the damage done to the Iraqi health care system and the rest of that devastated country’s infrastructure. I was offended then, just as I was by Bush’s recent slip and his sorry attempts to minimize and excuse his responsibility for the blood on his hands, the massive death toll from his invasion, and so much additional destruction and suffering. Horrifyingly enough, many in that audience of journalists did indeed laugh. “No weapons under there! Maybe they’re here!” said the smiling president repeatedly in a sing-song voice, as if engaged in a child’s game. (None were ever found, of course.) At that dinner, Bush showed photos of himself supposedly searching for those devastating weapons in the Oval Office beneath a cushion on the couch and under the desk. Remember that, in the lead-up to war there, Americans were hammered with fearful and deceptive political messaging, emphasizing that only an invasion could stop that country’s ruler, Saddam Hussein, from having WMD. The Iraq War was underway and the president was at the yearly dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association, a black-tie event attended by both journalists and politicians.Īfter various comedy sketches, then-President Bush rose to present a short meant-to-be humorous slideshow featuring himself supposedly looking for the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I remember another of Bush’s attempted jokes that got an immediate laugh from his audience, but soon fell seriously flat. He suggested that his slip could be forgiven or excused because of his age, 75, and that his invasion and the destruction of Iraq could now be forgiven because of his cognitive decline.

But his initial attempt to sideline his comment only deepened the hole he was in. Initially, he seemed shocked that he had blurted that out and tried to back off his slip by shrugging and muttering, “Iraq, too,” as if it were a joke. The words spilled out of his mouth as he described “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified invasion of Iraq - I mean of Ukraine.” Still, asked to decry Russian president Vladimir Putin’s unjustified invasion of Ukraine, Bush inadvertently and all too truthfully placed his own presidential war-making in exactly the same boat. He clearly hadn’t planned to make a public confession about his own warmongering in Iraq when he gave a speech in Texas this spring. Bush, the president who hustled this country into war in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks.

Recent episodes of purposeful and accidental truth-telling brought to my mind the latest verbal lapse by George W. Bush appears via satellite at the 2008 Republican National Convention.

Tally hall ruler of everything