Americans watching President Bush on Thursday could be forgiven for confusing his press conference with the movie Groundhog Day. In the 1993 film, Bill Murray wakes each morning only to realize he's reliving the previous day. Discussing the mushrooming CIA tapes scandal yesterday, President Bush claimed he had no recollection of knowing about the tapes' destruction in 2005 until briefed by CIA director Michael Hayden last month. Of course, that's virtually the same line he offered regarding the controversial Iran NIE just two weeks earlier. And as it turns out, Bush has been reading from the same script ever since the 2003 Plamegate affair.
Asked Thursday about his previous knowledge of and support for the 2005 destruction of secret CIA detainee interrogation tapes, President Bush did what comes naturally - he played dumb:

"The first recollection is when Mike Hayden briefed me. That's pretty clear. Secondly, I am confident that the preliminary inquiry conducted by the AG and the IG of the CIA, coupled with the oversight provided by the Congress, will end up enabling us all to find out what exactly happened. And therefore, over the course of these inquiries and oversight hearings, I'm going to reserve judgment until I find out the full facts."

President Bush first debuted his version of Alberto Gonzales' Sgt. Schultz defense regarding the CIA torture tapes 9 days earlier during an interview with ABC's Martha Raddatz:

"My first recollection of whether the tapes existed or whether they were destroyed was when [CIA Director] Michael Hayden briefed me," Bush said.
"There's a preliminary inquiry going on and I think you'll find that a lot more data, facts will be coming out," he said, "that's good. It will be interesting to know what the true facts are."

(It is worth noting that President Bush's pleas of ignorance were central to the White House's attack on the New York Times on Wednesday. When the Times reported that top administration lawyers were involved in meetings with the CIA leadership over the tapes, press secretary Dana Perino cited Bush's "no recollection" statement to successfully counter the charge that the "White House Role Was Wider Than It Said.")
If President Bush's evasion in the CIA tapes imbroglio sounds familiar, it should. After all, he deployed virtually the same language when describing the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran released earlier this month.
On December 4, President Bush faced withering criticism for his recent inflammatory "World War III" statements and other fear-mongering belied by the just released NIE. Again, Bush played dumb. Despite overwhelming evidence that he knew about the conclusions of the NIE and Iran's cessation of its nuclear weapons program no later than August, President Bush claimed he'd just been briefed:

BUSH: I was made aware of the NIE last week. In August, I think it was John - Mike McConnell came in and said, We have some new information. He didn't tell me what the information was. He did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze...
REPORTER: Are you saying at no point while the rhetoric was escalating, as World War III was making it into conversation - at no point, nobody from your intelligence team or your administration was saying, Maybe you want to back it down a little bit?
BUSH: No - I've never - nobody ever told me that.

Bush's formula tried and true scandal deflection formula of proclaiming both his ignorance and his desire to know the "full facts" dates back at least to the Plamegate affair. On October 7, 2003, a comically nonchalant Bush pretended he wanted to get to the bottom of the outing of covert CIA operation Valerie Plame, skullduggery which involved at least four members of his administration:

"I mean this town is a -- is a town full of people who like to leak information. And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's a lot of senior officials. I don't have any idea. I'd like to. I want to know the truth. That's why I've instructed this staff of mine to cooperate fully with the investigators -- full disclosure, everything we know the investigators will find out. I have no idea whether we'll find out who the leaker is -- partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers. But we'll find out."

As it turned out, not so much. After then-press secretary Scott McClellan disastrously announced the innocence of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, the Bush White House quickly shifted to the new "ongoing investigation" talking point. As Dana Perino demonstrated again with the CIA tapes case ("I'm not able to comment on anything...except for what I said on Friday - which is now, and since then, the Justice Department and the CIA have started a preliminary inquiry"), that old canard remains a White House scandal-fighting staple.
So we're being treated to the Groundhog Day presidency of George W. Bush. Or as Yogi Berra famously put it, "it's deja vu all over again."