Tonight:

QUESTION: Do you feel that the number of troops that you’ve kept there is limiting your options elsewhere in the world? …

BUSH: I appreciate that question.

The person I asked that to — the person I asked that to, at least, is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, my top military adviser.

I said, Do you feel that we’ve limited our capacity to deal with other problems because of our troop levels in Iraq? And the answer is no, he doesn’t feel we’re limited. He feels like we’ve got plenty of capacity.

You mentioned the Korean Peninsula. We’ve got good capacity in Korea.

Perhaps Gen. Myers was being coy that day. Here’s what he said in February:

Joint Chief of Staff chairman Gen. Richard Myers told Congress that the US military “would have trouble responding as quickly and effectively as commanders would like if it had to go to war in Iran or North Korea.” Myers “said a sudden military crisis in one of those two nations…would likely force the Pentagon to remobilize reserve and Guard components that have rotated home from Iraq to rest.” [USA Today, 2/17/05]

President Bush tonight:

President Putin believes in democracy. I take him at his word.

One week ago: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “criticised the course Russia was taking under President Vladimir Putin, noting a lack of clear alternatives to the current, dominant Kremlin regime. ‘Trends have not been positive on the democratic side,’ Dr Rice told reporters on board her plane to Moscow, where she was due to meet Mr Putin and other top officials. ‘The centralisation of state power in the presidency at the expense of countervailing institutions like the Duma (parliament’s lower house) or an independent judiciary is clearly very worrying. ‘” [4/21/05]

The problem with John Bolton isn’t so much that he’s not afraid to speak his mind…it’s that he has shown a pattern of being against others speaking theirs.

President Bush said, the way to defeat terror is to spread democracy.

This week, however, former 9/11 Commission chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton said President Bush isn’t moving fast enough to improve efforts to spread American values in the Muslim world. As Kean said, the United States is still perceived in the Middle East as a military enforcer. “We cannot continue to be the man in the tank — and that’s our image in the Arab world.” But although Bush appointed adviser Karen Hughes to lead this effort to spread democracy, for some reason, she’s not starting that new job until this fall.

Though President Bush has announced that tonight’s press conference will be on Social Security and energy, the press certainly will not limit their questions to those two topics. However, there is one question we are unlikely to hear: Why are you ignoring the ongoing genocide in Darfur?

It has been nearly eight months since then-Secretary of State Colin Powell stated that genocide is occurring in Darfur. But on a recent trip to the region, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick backed away from that conclusion and attempted to downplay the number of victims. The latest estimates place the number of dead at 400,000 — dying at a rate of nearly 15,000 a month — with an additional 2 million Darfuris in refugee camps. Since Secretary Powell’s statement, an estimated 120,000 have been killed by the government-backed Janjaweed militia. Obviously, simply calling it genocide is no substitute for action. In the absence of presidential leadership, Congress has taken the lead — Senators Corzine and Brownback introduced the Darfur Accountability Act, which calls for an expansion of the current African Union mission to include the protection of civilians; a no-fly zone; and meaningful sanctions against the perpetrators. Decisive American action can put an end to the worst humanitarian crisis since the Rwandan genocide eleven years ago.

The press cannot ask this question because it is one they must ask of themselves as well. If reporters are going to critique President Bush for turning his back on these atrocities, then they must do some introspection as to why, in their own capacity, they are not doing more to try and put an end to this genocide. Why are the images not emblazoned on the front page of every paper, every day? Why are editorial pages not demanding action? Why are we not keeping a running toll of the deaths until the sheer number of victims overwhelms our senses enough to reignite what seems to be smoldering moral outrage?