It seems like ancient history, but the 2004 presidential election wasn’t that long ago. It was even recent enough for me to remember some of the things voters were told.
For example, Bush-Cheney ’04 told us that we couldn’t vote for Kerry or we’d see an increase in government spending. As it turns out…
Having skirted budget restraints and approved nearly $300 billion in new spending and tax breaks before leaving town, Republican lawmakers are now determined to claim full credit for the congressional spending. Far from shying away from their accomplishments, lawmakers are embracing the pork, including graffiti eradication in the Bronx, $277 million in road projects for Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), and a $200,000 deer-avoidance system in New York.
When the year started, President Bush made spending restraint a mantra, laying out an austere budget that would freeze non-security discretionary spending for five years and setting firm cost limits on transportation and energy bills. But now, as Congress fills in the details of the budget plan, there is little interest in making deep cuts and enormous pressure to spend. […]
“If you look at fiscal conservatism these days, it’s in a sorry state,” said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), one of only eight House members to vote against the $286.5 billion transportation bill that was passed the day before the recess. “Republicans don’t even pretend anymore.”
Or if we voted for Kerry, it might lead to bilateral negotiations between the United States and North Korea. As luck would have it…
The Bush administration has discovered the art of diplomacy in dealing with North Korea…. So the Bush administration is finally waking up to talking the talk, and learning to give and take. After consistently refusing one-on-one talks with Pyongyang, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill has had four private sessions with North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan in Beijing where six nations have gathered to try to steer North Korea away from becoming a nuclear power.
Or if Kerry were president, we might have an administration that doesn’t fully appreciate what the “war on terror” actually means. Oh wait…
President Bush publicly overruled some of his top advisers on Wednesday in a debate about what to call the conflict with Islamic extremists, saying, “Make no mistake about it, we are at war.”
In a speech here, Mr. Bush used the phrase “war on terror” no less than five times. Not once did he refer to the “global struggle against violent extremism,” the wording consciously adopted by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other officials in recent weeks after internal deliberations about the best way to communicate how the United States views the challenge it is facing.
In recent public appearances, Mr. Rumsfeld and senior military officers have avoided formulations using the word “war,” and some of Mr. Bush’s top advisers have suggested that the administration wanted to jettison what had been its semiofficial wording of choice, “the global war on terror.”
In an interview last week about the new wording, Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, said that the conflict was “more than just a military war on terror” and that the United States needed to counter “the gloomy vision” of the extremists and “offer a positive alternative.”
For the record, Bush started out after 9/11 insisting that he was leading a war on terror. From there, he said his administration had “actually misnamed the war on terror,” and said it should be “the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world.” Bush later added, “I don’t think you can win” a war on terrorism.
Since then, Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said he has “objected to the use of the term ‘war on terrorism’ before,” while Rumsfeld moved away from the “war on terror” description, saying the conflict is a “global struggle against violent extremism.”
During the campaign, of course, Bush and Cheney scored campaign points by arguing that a Kerry administration wouldn’t send a consistent signal to the world about our efforts to combat terrorism. We can’t have that, now can we?
I guess it’s too late to do the election over again. It’s a shame; considering what we know now, I don’t think Bush would have wanted to vote for himself.