From Dowd:
"My conscience is clear," Rummy volunteered to Bob Woodward, talking about how he's interviewing people for his memoir.
Woodward was stunned. "I was as speechless as I was in July 2006 when I interviewed him and he said he was not a military commander, that he could make the case that he was 'by indirection, two or three steps removed,' " Woodward told me afterward...
...Asked by People magazine what moments from the last eight years he revisited most often, W. talked passionately about the pitch he threw out at the World Series in 2001: "I never felt that anxious any other time during my presidency, curiously enough."
Asked by Fred Barnes and Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard if he had made progress in some areas for which he hasn't gotten credit, the president put trying to privatize Social Security at the top of his list.
Somehow, these statements don't sound like spin to me. Rummy and Bush sound like part of them actually believe what they're saying here. When we make errors, we find ways to justify our actions retroactively. You and I just don't happen to have made errors that resulted in untold thousands of deaths because we lied to the world and then went out and executed the war based on our lies haplessly.
As for the baseball thing, I think he just has no idea how this sort of talk comes across to people (i.e., he sounds like an insensitive and shallow fool). Anyway, it'll be nice to be governed by people from planet Earth.
