President Bush recently made some jokes in a speech to an assembled crowd of media types — the same ones who have a big dinner in D.C. every year to forget their troubles and have a few laughs.
The president is always invited and this time, Bush actually had time to come... and he gave a very funny speech.
But no good deed goes unpunished in an election season, and the president is now getting bad reviews for a recurring joke in his speech in which he made a little self-deprecating fun of the fact that his administration has famously and embarrassingly not found any weapons of mass destruction (search) in Iraq.
The president's speech involved some goofy photos taken around the White House, including a few snaps of him looking under a table or behind a curtain, and the punch line was... those WMD's gotta be around here someplace.
There were 1,500 people in the room, and they laughed heartily. But the next day, it started.
At a Donald Rumsfeld (search) news conference the next day, a reporter raised the issue — were the president's WMD jokes out of line?
Rummy ducked the question, but the newspapers are keeping the non-story alive... claiming soldiers families were insulted.
Look, nobody wants to insult the families of soldiers killed. But this was a light-hearted, self-deprecating moment... and the people complaining should realize the WMD issue and the issue of injured or killed soldiers has to be painful to President Bush...
Consequently, the joke should be regarded as just that — a joke for the very people who skewer him every day about not finding the WMDs.
That's My Word.
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