Insecure Fear Mongers, Liars, and Grateful Immigrants
Those are the sort of people we got to hear from last night in primetime before the president himself came onto the stage. Below I give my reaction to the president’s warm-up acts. I’ll try to post my reaction to our Dear Leader later today. As you'll see while I sort of felt like I it was my duty as a good citizen to hear what the president's team had to say, I wasn't remotely impressed by what I heard.
Gen. Tommy Franks (Rumsfeld toadie): Hmmm. How to describe him? Idiot? Scum? Both? Well, take your pick. He started off talking about how we could choose to fight the terrorists “here” or “there”, and how he chooses “there”. Well General, personally, and I would have thought the president would have backed me up on this, I favor fighting them wherever we need to fight them. Then he maligned the opposition by saying that there are “those” who want to assume a defensive posture and cower and hope the terrorists don’t attack here? Who are these people? I don’t know them and Franks didn’t name them, but they are certainly not John Kerry and John Edwards. Then he went on to talk about Bush having the courage and commitment to fight the terrorists. It’s a shame he didn’t show that commitment during his lengthy vacation in August of 2001 (you know, the vacation he took after he got that memo saying “al-Qaeda planning to attack in the United States”), or for that matter during the first eight months of his presidency. And of course he talks about how terrorism against Americans started decades before 9/11 (for my response to that, read the preceding sentence a second time). Then Franks talked about how great it was that Afghan girls were no longer under the Taliban regime. I agree, but that’s certainly not the reason we invaded Afghanistan. One last thought – what in the hell was that “Bush has created the largest coalition in the history of the world” line about? By what measure? And does the president suddenly want to run IR through coalitions? I missed that memo.
I think the best response to this bit of clap-trap came from Bill Schneider. When the man who is arguably the biggest kiss-ass among media analysts says “there are an awful lot of red herrings in this room” we can bet that the mendacity meter was pretty high.
Next up was US Senate candidate and former HUD Secretary Mel Martinez of Florida. It was your basic American dream, immigrant speech, competent, but nothing special. And it was hard for me to really see what this speech had to do with voting Republican (yes, he did mention reasons, but they were your usual vague mom and apple pie kind of things). It did though once again make me think of how you’d think one of the parties would wake up and get behind an amendment to allow immigrants to run for president. It’s a winner on substance, and I think it would be a winner politically. Why they both sit on their hands while high-profile immigrant politicians rise up through the ranks of national office is mystifying to me.
I then listened to a radio interview with young conservative radio host Ben Ferguson who actually said that the terrorists killed the job market. Uh huh. Nation-wide, that’s most definitely not accurate. But I don’t feel like bashing a 23 year old at the moment. Good for him for being interested in politics. It’s just a shame he's ill-informed and apparently has a show on which to spread such inaccuracies.
The final speaker before our Dear Leader was New York Gov. George Pataki. He gave a hell of a speech. It was very effective, and I think it’ll definitely boost his chances as if he runs against Jeb, Mitt Romney, Chuck Hagel, John Ashcroft, and Tom Ridge for president in 4 years. And parts of it were really uplifting and focused on bringing the country together. Of those parts, I approve. But again, the red meat in it was mendacious. This whole flip-flop nonsense is such an insulting canard. In the first place, you might very well vote for and against the same thing in the Senate on the same day. Votes aren’t on whether or not you favor X. There are a variety of bills and amendments on most issues, and to say that just because you voted against one form of something that your against it is silly. This was a lousy tactic when it was used against Bob Dole, and it’s a lousy tactic against John Kerry. And of course it’s not like Bush hasn’t flip-flopped himself. Examples? Well just for starters there’s McCain-Feingold, the Department of Homeland Security, the 9/11 Commission, working with the 9/11 Commission, and perhaps most fundamentally the entire direction of his foreign policy, which looks nothing like the platform he ran on in 2000. Still, given Team Bush’s long-standing commitment to mislead America, I suppose making supposed flip-flops an issue is predictable. So we’ll save my deepest ire for his comments on how Bush has protected America when Clinton didn’t. He lists a litany of terrorist attacks in the 1990’s and says it would have been good if the Clinton administration had responded to them. Bush did respond to an attack, so he’ll protect us in the future. Well, that’s just grand. A shame he wasn’t doing more to protect us on September 11. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the raft of books and reports on this White House and the previous administration it’s that the Clinton administration took this issue much more seriously than Bush did pre-9/11. He down-graded terrorism to a Team B issue on the NSC, and showed no interest in it himself. Bush could have responded to the
Cole attack, but he didn’t. And he did nothing to prevent the worst attack on America in memory. Yeah, that’s a record of protecting us. And what’s this nonsense about the terrorists not banking on Bush in the White House? If Gov. Pataki had actually studied al Qaeda he’d know that the US directly engaging them in a war is one of their greatest dreams. Terrorist attacks around the world have increased since Bush launched his version of the war on terrorism, recruitment into al-Qaeda appears to have increased (though both before and since you’re dealing with a very small number of people), and the President of the United States was kind enough to move over 100,000 American targets into a place in which they are vastly easier to kill than in the United States. Now which part of that displeases al Qaeda? And what kind of weird measure for success is that anyway? Both al Qaeda and many Americans want changes in Saudi. Many al Qaeda operatives want to die, and many Americans want them dead. It’s not like all of our interests are in conflict with theirs. All in all in was a very good speech, but one built upon a skewed version of reality.
Posted by armand at September 3, 2004 11:07 AM
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