Bush says he is "going to hang Bashar by the balls" - that's President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
Robert Fisk is not so sure:
The problem, of course, is that Mr Bush is in no position to do that. Indeed, it is the army of Iraqi insurgents who appear to have Washington by the balls and it is Mr Bush who may need President Assad's help to relieve this terrible pressure. For at the end of the day, Syria and Iran are the two countries which the US needs so it can extract itself from Iraq.
Elsewhere, a grieving mother explains how Bush gave her a presidential coin to compensate for her son's death, then told her: "
Don’t go sell it on eBay.” This lady doesn't sound too educated, but she sure ain't no fool:
"So a couple of days after that they called me and said that President Bush would like to meet me. And I said well okay, only at his cost because I was not spending my money to meet him. So he flew about a hundred families back to Fort Carson.
"And in the room that I was in it was only me and four more other families. And I asked him questions you know, on um why we were over there? He couldn’t answer that. I said, well what are we fighting for? He said to finish a mission.
...
"But you know, they so brilliant, they up there in D.C., now, that a mother with a high school diploma can sit down and say, okay, now I won’t send them over a hot spot without protection.
"President Bush, he just didn’t see that, and he told me I was kind of, seemed like I was kind of hostile. I said, ‘yes I am hostile, because you sent my son over there.’ So my thing is -- all the questions that I asked him, he didn’t know nothing then, and he definitely don’t know nothing now, because the United States is in worser shape now that it was in 2003 that my son died.
"When he told me -- I said what’s, what’s the mission? He couldn’t give me an answer. I says, well I’m going to tell you what: I’m on my mission now. My mission had just begun. And my mission is to fight to bring these troops home, to take care of these troops when they get home.
"Then he gave us a presidential coin. Now you check this out: He gave six of us a presidential coin, tell us not to tell the rest of the people that was there, and then after that he told us don’t go sell it on eBay. Now you tell me how insensitive that can be? What kind of caring person is that?"
