"We serve the cause of liberty, and that is, always and everywhere, a cause worth serving." - The President held a press conference last night to reassure the people of our country about our role and goals in Iraq. You can find a transcript of the address here. The Washington Times has a relatively good sum up of the address. John Podhoretz at the New York Post has a great column today about the press conference. Some highlights:

THE purpose of last night's presidential press conference was to show purpose, and rarely has a president seemed quite so purposeful as George W. Bush did last night.

The purpose of the White House press corps was to make the president confess to weakness - to corner him into creating the soundbite of all soundbites, in which Bush would acknowledge his errors as president and thereby give John Kerry all the material he would need for a killer TV ad or two.

The president achieved his purpose. The press corps did not achieve its purpose. He would not fall into their astonishingly blatant trap. He simply refused to offer a satisfactory answer to four - four! - different questions demanding that he either enumerate or apologize for his failures.

No one should be fooled by the way he stumbled through some of his answers about his mistakes as president. Bush knew exactly what he was doing, as he always does.

Rather than apologize to the 9/11 families for the terror strike that day, the president said the responsibility for the attacks rested squarely on the shoulders of Osama bin Laden. And it's a mark of how demented the debate has gotten in the past few weeks that this simple statement of truth seemed bracing and even daring.


Why doesn't it surprise me the press corps were trying to lure the president into confessing some sort of wrong doing. While Richard Clarke is apologizing to the families of 9/11 for our falilure, like the Bush administration is directly responsible for Mohammed Atta flying a plane into the Twin Towers and killing thousands, the president places the blame on the responsible parties, Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. By no means is the PDB (read text here) a document that clearly telegraphed the terrorists' bold plan to use airplanes as missiles.

I'll leave you with comments from another John Podhoretz column:

How on earth can anybody say that the Aug. 6 PDB is a warning of 9/11 when it never mentions suicide bombing?
It's vital to remember that what happened on 9/11 wasn't just the same old thing al Qaeda had done in the past. Nobody - no terrorist organization, no government, nobody - had ever done any of these things:

* Used 19 people at the same time as a suicide-attack squad.
* Hijacked four planes within an hour of each other.
* Slammed passenger jet planes into skyscrapers.
* Flew a jet plane into a government building in Washington, D.C.

On 9/11, al Qaeda did all these things - and did them simultaneously.

When government officials from President Bush to Condi Rice to Donald Rumsfeld say nobody could have imagined the attacks of 9/11, they're right - and everybody who says otherwise is delusional, stupid or dishonest.