Okay, I will try one more time.
When he signed the AWB, did Bill Clinton say "This is a great day in the advancement toward a totalitarian peoples' paradase?"
No, because that would have alarmed the brain-dead third of voters who know so little they can swing one way or the other depending upon which episode of Howdy Doody they watched this morning.
In like manner, if Bush says "We must bury the AWB in the name of the Constitution, the Second Amendment and Patrick Henry," the same brain-dead one-third of the American electorate will flee in the opposite direction in abject terror.
DemoncRATS pass stealth legislation to get their way. We can stealthily let the AWB die, or we can give the DemoncRATS an issue they can use to stir up the brain-dead masses to vote for Hillary in 2004.
Can you guess what kind of replacement for the AWB Hillary will come up with?
I have made an honest attempt to explain how the process works and why you cannot always tip your hand by making pious prounouncements. The goal here is to sunset the AWB, and that can happen easy as pie because Tom Delay can be trusted to do his job, UNLESS the AWB pops up on Joe Brain-Dead's radar screen because knee-jerk "conservatives" demanded that Bush make a pious, "principled stand on an issue that is very important to his base."
If you still don't get it, please just leave me alone.
If you want to work quietly behind the scenes to kill something thats fine. Just do it quietly. Making the front page of the NYT in support of it doesn't qualify as "stealth" to me. Now Maloney et al are going to push towards their next objective.
We could have if the White House had remained silent. No one forced the Bush Administration to issue a statement.