Five years ago tonight, on March 6, 2003, President Bush conducted a televised press conference – less than two weeks before he would order the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- stating in his intro, “We will not wait to see what terrorists or terrorist states could do with weapons of mass destruction.”
Some of the questions from the press were sharp, many others weak, but one asking about his religious strength gave him an opportunity to say, “My faith sustains me because I pray daily. I pray for guidance and wisdom and strength…. But it's a humbling experience to think that people I will never have met have lifted me and my family up in prayer. And for that I'm grateful.”
It was the mood of the affair that was most noteworthy. Bush smiled and made his usual quips, and many of the reporters played the game and did not press him hard. This was how these press gatherings had gone throughout the run-up to war. But this meeting was heavily scripted with Bush looking at a slip of paper and calling on reporters in a pre-arranged order. No one challenged him on this.
When it was over, I asked Ari Berman, then an intern with Editor & Publisher and now a talented veteran at The Nation, to come up with a few questions we wished reporters had asked that night. I added a few myself, and published them next day follow. We called it “Questions We Wish They’d Asked.”
Here are most of them. The episode is included in my new book, "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq."
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003720934Yeah, what a bunch of cheer-leading toadies! They failed us then and for the most part they continue to fail us!