I don’t know. But like Wes Pruden I feel better for having heard those unscripted remarks of Mr. Bush in conversation with Tony Blair:
George W.’s heartfelt outburst yesterday at the G-8 summit, describing the Hezbollah attack on Israel (and by implication the terrorists themselves) as barnyard excrement, is stout-hearted and reassuring. This president gets it.
Even more reassuring were the president’s remarks expressing frustration — even disdain, perhaps — for Kofi Annan’s predictable proposal to send his crack United Nations peacekeepers to straighten out the Jews (and maybe Arabs) in Lebanon. The U.N. has a long record of incompetence and corruption in the administration of “peace,” and its peacekeepers, sometimes better at rape than rehabilitation, have distinguished themselves by occasionally making things worse everywhere they go.
The beauty part of the president’s unscripted and inadvertent (so we’re told) commentary at the G-8 summit is that it demonstrates not only that the president gets it, but Tony Blair does, too. The contempt for Kofi Annan’s game of both men was palpable. ‘What about Kofi Annan?’ the president asked Mr. Blair. ‘I don’t like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically ’cease fire and everything else happens.’
For a prissier take on the open mike, here is the Washington Post.