Quotes of the Morning: Dinner and a War Movie

“Well, Fearless Leader is all set up to meet with the Prime Minister of Iraq today after having missed a dinner with him last night. Nothing odd about that.”
-Skippy

“Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki arrived in Jordan on Wednesday and met with Jordan's King Abdullah. However, he skipped a dinner with President Bush and Abdullah, and is to meet with the president on Thursday, said Counselor to the President Dan Bartlett.”
-CNN, November 29, 2006

“See? Nothing unusual at all. He just missed a little dinner. Probably filled up on the plane on the way in and wasn’t hungry.”
-Skippy

“The President is going to have a bilateral and dinner with the King of Jordan. Since the King of Jordan and Prime Minister Maliki had a bilateral themselves, earlier today, everybody believed that negated the purpose for the three of them to meet tonight, together, in a trilateral setting. So the plan, according to — since they had such a good, productive bilateral discussion, was just for the President to deal with bilateral issues and other issues with the King this evening in a dinner setting, and then the meetings set for tomorrow will still take place as scheduled.”
-White House Consul Dan Bartlett, November 29, 2006

“The President requested the meeting. This was the President requesting the meeting with the Prime Minister. And the substantive meetings on Iraq — look, they were not going to be doing a full detail discussion in a trilateral setting about Iraq and the future of Iraq and the strategy anyway, that just wouldn’t be appropriate. So it was going to be more of a social meeting anyways. But the fact that they had already had a good meeting together, felt like it negated the purpose to doing so. And the President and Prime Minister Maliki will have a very robust and lengthy dialogue tomorrow morning.”
-White House Consul Dan Bartlett, November 29, 2006

“It was just a dinner. Just a social meeting, and Fearless Leader, being the straightforward kind of guy that he is, didn’t want to go over stuff that had already been discussed (even though he’d flown into Jordan specifically to meet with al-Maliki as Iraq is too dangerous for him to go to now).”
-Skippy

“President Bush's high-stakes summit with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was put off Wednesday amid political unrest in Baghdad and public disclosure of U.S. doubts about the Iraqi leader's capacity to control sectarian warfare.”
-Associated Press, November 29, 2006

“No, no, no.. This was not a ‘high-stakes summit’. It was a social event. If it was a high-stakes summit it would look like the head of Iraq didn’t want to meet with Fearless Leader, and that can’t be true because Fearless Leader is loved all over the world. If this was a brush-off there would have had to have been a darn good reason.
-Skippy

“The political bloc of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announced earlier Wednesday that it would suspend its activities in the Iraqi government because the meeting was being held. The group also threatened to eventually quit the government if certain demands weren't met.”
-CNN, November 29, 2006

“Not good enough. I mean, when did we start caring what the Iraqis think? If we cared about that we’d never have invaded in the first place. Our puppet government needs to learn that what we want comes before what they want.”
-Skippy

“The White House has avoided saying that Bush would pressure al-Maliki at the meeting to do more to stop the bloodshed. National security adviser Stephen Hadley says the Iraqi prime minister pushes himself — and that Bush will be listening to al-Maliki's ideas, not imposing plans on him.
But in a classified Nov. 8 memo following his Oct. 30 trip to Baghdad, Hadley expressed serious doubts about whether al-Maliki had the capacity to control the sectarian violence in Iraq, and recommended steps to strengthen the Iraqi leader's position, The New York Times reported in Wednesday editions.
‘The reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action,’ the memo said.
In an unusual move for a White House that typically refuses to discuss classified material, the White House did not dispute the accuracy of the memo. But a senior administration official said the document, taken as a whole, was an expression of support for al-Maliki. ‘You have a constant reiteration of the importance of strengthening the Maliki government, the need to work with him, to augment his capabilities,’ the official said.
He added that Bush and Maliki have a ‘personal relationship’ that allows them to ‘talk candidly about the challenges.’"
-Associated Press, November 29, 2006

“Oh.. So the ultra-secretive Administration leaked information that made al-Maliki look stupid and implied that he didn’t know what was happening in his own country just before a summit with him. Yeah, I can see how he might be a little miffed about that. Still, he shouldn’t have blown off dinner. When you fight you should never go to bed mad..”
-Skippy