I Can See This Went Went Well...

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

If you're in a tight spot and you want someone to help you, I recommend assuming an expression other than "I wish this joker would shut his piehole so I can presidentially tell him what to do" when they're speaking.


From the AP story:

President Bush told an Iraqi power broker on Monday that the United States was not satisfied with the progress of efforts to stop the sharp escalation of violence in Iraq.

Bush met at the White House with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shiite leader of the largest bloc in Iraq's parliament.

Al-Hakim said that he ''vehemently'' opposes any regional or international effort to solve Iraq's problems that goes around the unity government in Baghdad.

''Iraq should be in a position to solve Iraq's problems,'' al-Hakim said.

The president said he spoke with al-Hakim for more than an hour and said they had a ''very constructive conversation.''

(...)

''We talked about the need to give the government Iraq more capability as soon as possible so the elected government of Iraq can do that which the Iraqi people want to secure their country from extremists and murderers,'' Bush said. ''I told his eminence that I was proud of the courage of the Iraqi people. I told him that we're not satisfied with the pace of progress in Iraq. And that we want to continue to work with the sovereign government of Iraq.''

The rest of the story basically covers the fallout from the Rumsfeld and Hadley memos and the administration's unwillingness to withdraw even if the Iraq Study Group recommends it.

I don't really have any insightful analysis here - we already know that Iraq is a disaster and we're not leaving anytime soon. I just wanted to post the photo because it's such a perfect visual distillation of Bush's pissy, arrogant contempt for everyone who is not his tame creature.