WASHINGTON, 28 March 2004 — When President Bush made jokes this week about the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he touched off a flap among critics who decried them as offensive and renewed the debate in Washington, D.C., over where the line is between poor taste and harmless humor.
At the annual black-tie Radio-TV Correspondents Dinner on Wednesday night, Bush attempted to poke fun at himself — the leitmotif of these events. Displaying a big-screen photo album of his administration, he showed himself futilely looking under cabinets and desks in the Oval Office.
“Those weapons of mass destruction have to be here somewhere,” Bush joked in his verbal caption. “Nope, no weapons over there. Maybe under here.” The audience of 2,000 journalists and government officials laughed. But after cable news programs began rebroadcasting the event, some families of servicemen complained to news organizations that the attempt at jocularity was inappropriate when their children were risking life and limb in Iraq.
George Medina, whose son, Spec. Irving Medina, 22, died in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, last year, told the New York Daily News that the jokes were “disgraceful. He doesn’t think of all the families that are suffering.”
And Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., put out a statement Thursday saying, “If George Bush thinks his deceptive rationale for going to war is a laughing matter, then he’s even more out of touch than we thought.”
The White House countered that Bush was aware of the suffering of soldiers and their families.
“The bulk of his remarks focused on a stirring tribute to our fighting men and women,” said White House spokesman Trent Duffy.
Don Penny, a film producer and comedy writer who penned jokes for Republican presidents in the 1970s and 1980s, agreed that the Bush joke might have crossed the line.
“Comedy is not funny when people are not happy,” he said.
