Á ég að nefna þrenn mistök ...

Það var eftirtektarvert í kappræðum forsetaframbjóðendanna í nótt, að er Bush var beðin um að nefna þrenn mistök sem hann hafi gert í embætti, gat hann ekki nefnt eitt einasta. Ástæða þessa hjá Bush er sú að það er starfsfólkið hans sem gerir öll mistökin og hann svo mannlegur sjálfur að fyrirgefa þeim. Hann ætlar þó sögunni að dæma síðar til um hvaða mistök hafi verið gerð.

Endilega rennið yfir þetta:

Q: „President Bush, during the last four years, you have made thousands of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision, and what you did to correct it. Thank you.“

PRESIDENT BUSH: „I have made a lot of decisions ― some of them little, like appointments to board you've never heard of, and some of them big. And in a war, there's a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say, you shouldn't have done that, you shouldn't have made that decision. And I'll take responsibility for them. I'm human.

But on the big questions about whether or not we should have gone into Afghanistan, the big question about whether we should have removed somebody in Iraq, I'll stand by those decisions because I think they're right. That's really what you're ― when they ask about the mistakes, that's what they're talking about. They're trying to say, did you make a mistake going into Iraq? And the answer is absolutely not. It's the right decision.

The Duelfer report confirmed that decision today, because what Saddam Hussein was doing was trying to get rid of sanctions so he could reconstitute a weapons program, and the biggest threat facing America is terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. We knew he hated us. We knew he had been a ― invaded other countries. We knew he tortured his own people.

On the tax cut, it's a big decision. I did the right decision. Our recession was one of the shallowest in modern history.

Now, you ask what mistakes ― I made some mistakes in appointing people, but I'm not going to name them. I don't want to hurt their feelings on national TV.

But history will look back, and I'm fully prepared to accept any mistakes that history judges to my administration. Because the President makes the decisions, the President has to take the responsibility.“