60 MINUTES WITH BUSH

My sister's former public policy professor has a fascinating idea for how to get Bush to agree to speaking with the 9/11 commission for more than a mere hour.

So here's a modest proposal: Since the President obviously has many hours to spend at fund-raising events, let's combine the hearing with a fund-raiser. Sell seats at, say, $1000 per hour per seat, with the proceeds going to the Bush-Cheney campaign, and let the hearing go on for as long as there are at least 100 paying guests in the audience.

That way the public interest in knowing in some detail about the President's performance before and after the crash and the President's interest in having enough money on hand to tell convincing lies about that performance can be satisfied simultaneously.

There! Now who says I'm unreasonable?

Hehehe. Plus it all would be held in one place, which would allow Bush to actually curb spending somewhere.

But in making this joke, Kleiman makes an interesting point... well, he makes it in the paragraph prior to making the joke:

Given the President's documented capacity to pack enormous numbers of words into tiny amounts of meaning, he will probably have exhausted sixty minutes by the time he finishes answering the question, "Where did you go and what did you do immediately after hearing the news of the second WTC crash, and for the rest of that day?" which will leave him no time to answer the next question: "Who authorized the evacuation of all bin Laden family members and other prominent Saudi citizens from the United States before the FBI had a chance to interview any of them?"

Anybody who watched Bush's Meet the Press interview knows that his extravagant, long-worded, overly-broad answers to Russert's questions were designed to squeeze out a minute here, a minute there, and eliminate any possibility for Russert to follow up on any one point to any necessary extent. Surely he would attempt the same method with the 9/11 commission.

But doesn't this put Bush in bad company? Yes, because this was Gary Condit's strategy. Back in August of 2001, there was mounting pressure on the former Congressman to tell his side of the story, problematic as that may have been for him. He settled on ABC's Primetime Live, where he would be interviewed by Connie Chung. But there was a catch: He would only allow himself to be interviewed for one hour (perhaps less), and the interview would have to be aired unedited. The result was that in his interview, he babbled on and on, offering the same platitudes numerous times, and giving excessively long, but content-free answers to the interviewer, quickly exhausting all available time.

Now Bush wants to use the very same strategy, but this time related to a much more trivial, unimportant topic: The terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.