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Whopper of the Week: George W. BushDubya bad-mouths Clinton to the Brits.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, April 18, 2002, at 3:52 PM ET

"Somebody told me there's a story floating around that somehow I am blaming the Clinton administration for what's going on in the Middle East right now. … I appreciate what President Clinton tried to do. He tried to bring peace to the Middle East."

—George W. Bush, at an April 6 press conference in Crawford, Texas with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"Well, we've tried summits in the past, as you may remember. It wasn't all that long ago where a summit was called and nothing happened, and as a result we had significant intifada in the area."

—George W. Bush, in an interview with Britain's ITV, as reported by the Associated Press's Ron Fournier on April 5.

(Thanks to reader Zafar Sobhan.)

Got a whopper? Send it to . To be considered, an entry must be an unambiguously false statement paired with an unambiguous refutation, and both must be derived from some appropriately reliable public source. Preference will be given to newspapers and other documents that Chatterbox can link to online.

Whopper Archive:
April 11, 2002: The Rev. Robert J. Banks, archdiocese of Boston
April 5, 2002: George W. Bush
Mar. 29, 2002: Major League Baseball
Mar. 21, 2002: Billy Graham
Mar. 14, 2002: INS commissioner James W. Ziglar
Mar. 8, 2002: Robert Zoellick and the U.S. steel industry
Feb. 28, 2002: Al Sharpton
Feb. 22, 2002: Olympic skating judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne
Feb. 14, 2002: Kenneth Lay
Feb. 8, 2002: Enron spokeswoman Peggy Mahoney
Jan. 31, 2002: Monsanto
Jan. 24, 2002: Linda Chavez
Jan. 17, 2002: George W. Bush
Jan. 10, 2002: Simon & Schuster
Jan. 4, 2002: The Associated Press

(Click here to access the Whopper Archive for 2001.)

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Reader Comments From The Fray:


Maybe this one isn't such a whopper after all. Note that in the first passage Bush feints in the direction of denying that he's blaming Clinton "there's a story floating around that somehow I am blaming..." but then the actual denial doesn't appear. Checking the link to the transcript doesn't shed much light--the denial still isn't there. He clearly indicates that Arafat shares blame, but he doesn't deny that Clinton remains at fault. So passage 2 isn't really contradicted by this non-denial denial.

It's as if Clinton were to say "I'm told there's a story running around that I fool around with an intern in the Oval Office. I respect all the interns and I think it's a great program, one I'd like to see continue."

--Laertes

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

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