–Watching part of Bush’s interview with Bill O’Reilly (tip to Instapundit), I found Bush’s responses to questions about Rove having prior knowledge of the Swift Boat ads to be odd, to say the least. Of course, Bush can look uncomfortable even when he is saying something that he deeply believes in, but he looked awfully sick to his stomach in this exchange:
O’REILLY: You didn’t know anything about the Swift Boat ads before they went on the air, did you?
BUSH: No. I didn’t.
O’REILLY: Did Karl Rove know anything about it?
BUSH: I don’t think so. In other words, you’re asking if anybody coordinated this in our campaign?
O’REILLY: No, whether they’d give you a heads up they were going to do it.
BUSH: Not to my knowledge.
Now if Rove had advance knowledge of the timing of the Swift Boat ads, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Rove was coordinating the ads (as our readers have pointed out about all the Democrats who had advance knowledge of the CBS Guard and Yellowcake stories), but it would be relevant to such a question.
The tape and the transcript are available here. To see the relevant passage, click on VIDEO, then Tuesday, Part II; wait for the actual interview to start and move ahead to near the end.
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