With the midterm election just 40 days away, the president is getting a little antsy. And when Bush gets antsy, he starts lashing out wildly, without regard for pesky details like facts.
In his sharpest partisan attack of this election campaign, President Bush denounced Democratic critics of his Iraq policy on Thursday and said “the party of FDR and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run.”
Seeking to rebut Democrats who say a new intelligence report indicates that Iraq is fueling terrorism rather than helping to counter it, Bush said voters face a choice “between two parties with two different attitudes on this war on terror.”
Republicans “understand the nature of the enemy,” he said. “We know the enemy wants to attack us again,” whereas Democrats “offer nothing but criticism and obstruction and endless second-guessing.”
Now, the timing is not only obvious, it’s ironic. Of all the times for Bush to hold himself out as the only person to really understand the war on terror, picking the week in which we learn that the president’s decisions are making the terrorist threat worse is probably not a great idea.
Nevertheless, while Bush is routinely bitter and partisan, he was unusually so yesterday. In a 40-minute speech in Alabama, the president lashed out specifically at Democrats, by name, 13 times. He condemned Osama bin Laden, by name, three times.
In other words, given yesterday’s remarks, the president is four times as focused on the minority party, which controls no branch of government and hasn’t blocked any of his key pieces of legislation, than he is on the terrorist behind 9/11.
Someone probably ought to remind the president that lashing out at Democrats doesn’t catch any terrorists, prevent any attacks, or protect any families. Indeed, if Bush directed the same passion into effective counter-terrorism as he does attacking Democrats, we’d all be better off.
Which is not to say that Bush’s sweeping condemnations were of no value at all.
On the contrary, I think they were a helpful reminder to congressional Dems, some of whom went along with the Bush-McCain Torture Bill, that it doesn’t matter how they vote, or whether they try to prevent too much “daylight” between themselves and the GOP on national security matters — the White House is going to smear them anyway.
Perhaps the Democrats who voted in favor of the bill really do believe that it’s critically important to let interrogators rough up their subjects and to deny detainees the writ of habeas corpus — so important that it’s worth undercutting America’s moral high ground in the war on terror and inviting other countries to treat our citizens just as badly as we’d apparently like to treat theirs. If that’s what they believe — all history and law and experience and good sense notwithstanding — then they were right to say “yea” when the clerk called their names.
But if the Torture Twelve think that today’s vote is going to buy them some kind of free pass from the GOP’s soft-on-terror claims, they’d better be prepared to be disappointed — again. Even as the Senate moved toward its vote today, the president was attacking the Democrats — all Democrats — at a political fundraiser in Alabama.
Dems can vote the way Bush wants them to or not, but the end result will be the same. They might as well vote their conscience.