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See, this is what happens when I don’t blog for almost two weeks. Everything gets backed up and comes out all at once.

About this ‘staged’ press conference with the President and a group of soldiers in Iraq…

I’m going to let you in on a little secret of the media — EVERYTHING INVOLVING THE PRESIDENT AND A CAMERA IS STAGED WHENEVER POSSIBLE.

In fact, everything involving most high-profile politicians and cameras is staged. That’s just how politics work in America. You think Hillary Clinton just goes on TV cold turkey and takes her chances with what questions she might be asked? Not likely. Why do you think questions must be submitted ahead of time at ‘town hall’ meetings? Why do you think the protesting hippies were put inside razor wire pens at the Democrat and Republic National conventions? Why do you think most politicians avoid Bill O’Reilly like the plague? Politicians don’t like confrontation.

Regarding the press conference with the troops in Iraq, they were not told what to say. They were told what the President wanted to talk about, and then decided who was going to answer what question. I mean, he’s the President. He’s got a lot of stuff to do. He needs things like this to go as smooth and efficiently as possible.

Now, I’m not a fan of these sort of sanitized, softball question news conferences, but that’s just the way it is, and the President isn’t the only person that does them. If people are all pissed off about this press conference, they should be pissed off about every other press conference, town hall meeting, and national convention of the last 40 years.

Or, you know, we could ignore all that and just use it to bash Bush. That's pretty much standard procedure these days.