The Kerry campaign was right to jump all over this; I only wish someone in the media would pick up on it.
On Monday, while boasting of his military “successes,” Bush told an audience in Ohio that our original foe is gone for good.
“And as a result of the United States military, Taliban no longer is in existence.”
Bush has been flirting with this ridiculous exaggeration for a while now — having said, for example, that the Taliban has been “put out of business” — but this was clearly an over-the-top claim, even for this president. “No longer in existence”? If Bush believes such nonsense, he clearly isn’t competent enough to be president.
The Taliban was driven from power in 2002, but when Bush shifted attention away from Afghanistan and towards Iraq, it regrouped and started reasserting its power throughout the country. Even Colin Powell acknowledged just two weeks ago that “remnants of the Taliban” are keeping the “Afghan people from getting to a better, brighter future.” Likewise, the United States Institute for Peace described the Taliban earlier this year as “re-emerg[ing] as a growing security threat.”
Or considers this Reuters report from just two months ago:
Taliban guerrillas kidnapped and killed 16 people in an Afghan province after finding them with voter registration cards for the country’s September elections, officials said Sunday.
The killings Friday night in the province of Zabul were the most serious attack yet on the elections, which the Taliban and allied Islamic militants have vowed to disrupt.
If the Taliban no longer existed, this would be a tough trick.
The Kerry campaign compared it to Gerald Ford’s 1976 comment “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” and given the circumstances, it’s an apt comparison. The difference is Ford said this during a presidential debate, which in turn, let the media to replay the remark over and over again. In contrast, Bush said this at one of his invitation-only rallies, which the media largely ignored.
Nevertheless, if my count is right, this is the fourth major national security rhetorical gaffe for Bush in just the last month. Reporters generally don’t touch on such things as presidential competence, but voters should realize that Bush may be too confused for our own good.
First, Bush’s “miscalculation” admission, marking the the first time the president had ever acknowledged, in public, that he made a tragic mistake on the biggest challenge of his presidency. Second was the bizarre “catastrophic success” line, in which Bush said our military was too efficient and it was the troops fault he was unprepared for the insurgency. Third was Bush’s stated belief that we can’t win a war on terror.
And now Bush says he doesn’t believe the Taliban even exists anymore. At what point does the president’s questionable competence become too much for the Republicans to defend?