Six Ribbons for APEC Leaders

Journalist Mark Riley is typical of many Australian Journalists with his anti conservative, anti US Republican rhetoric. He has said many times how he feels the US President is stupid. Then he has this conversation with Mr Bush ..
Q Mark Riley (phonetic) for Seven Network Australia.

Mr. President, welcome to Sydney.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Thank you, sir.

Q I can assure you it doesn’t always look like this, with steel fences and concrete barricades and armed guards on the street. But I wonder, is the—

PRESIDENT BUSH: I hope you feel safe.

Q I feel—

PRESIDENT BUSH: You feel inconvenienced, obviously.

Let me just say, before you get—you’re trying to maybe get a response. But to the extent I’ve caused this, I apologize. Look, I don’t want to come to a community and say, you know, what a pain it is to have the American President. Unfortunately, however, this is what the authorities thought was necessary to protect people. And you live in a free society. People feel like they want to protest; fine, they can. And unfortunately, evidently, some people may want to try to be violent in their protests. But I apologize to the Australian people if I’ve caused this inconvenience.

Q Well, I wasn’t going to blame you personally, sir. But anyway—

PRESIDENT BUSH: I guess I must be feeling guilty, you know what I’m saying? (Laughter.)

Q The point I was going to make is, as leader of the free world, the people of Sydney don’t see their city looking all that free at the moment. And how’s that going? We thought that we weren’t going to allow terrorists to do this to our free society. And so your very positive view on Iraq and progress towards reconciliation there is of interest to us if you’re meeting the opposition leader tomorrow, and his view is that there should be a staged withdrawal of troops from Iraq next year. How would that affect the positive view you put today? And what will you say to disavow him of that decision?

PRESIDENT BUSH: First of all, in terms of whether Sydney is going to return to normal after I leave, or after we leave, I suspect it might, don’t you?

Many thanks to Mr Andrew Bolt for the transcript.