Bush Talks, Networks Speechless

ABC, CBS and NBC all decided not to carry President Bush's speech live at 8 Monday night. "They said yesterday that they made this call because the White House never asked them to carry the speech live," reports the Washington Post. "But the White House said it did not put in the usual formal request because it wanted to keep the American public from thinking we were going to war." However, the fact that we are going to war did manage to register with a few pundits. As media critic Doug Ireland observes, "it was politically savvy David Gergen -- spinmeister for four presidents, both Republican and Democratic -- who got it absolutely right when he told MSNBC the speech was 'blunt, hardline, a prelude to war.' ... And Gergen accurately delivered the most frightening on-air analysis of all: 'The logic of the speech says that Iraq is our first stop, not our last stop, in the Middle East.'" (The Institute for Public Accuracy has prepared a line-by-line critique of the misrepresentations in Bush's speech.)