The newspaper fact-checkers aren’t giving any special prominence to GWB’s flat denial that he had ever said what we all well remember him saying: that he wasn’t concerned about ObL’s whereabouts. But Chris Suellentrop predicts that both the importance of the misstatement and the existence of a videotape contradicting it will lead it to dominate the airwaves tomorrow. (From his keypad to God’s monitor.)
Suellentrop also provides what seems to me a persuasive interpretation of Bush’s thought process. Bush, says Suellentrop, lives in a world where only states matter; once ObL no longer controlled Afghanistan, he was nothing to Bush, who then moved on to Iraq. Kerry, by contrast, understands that terrorist networks matter.