{"id":10489,"date":"2007-04-12T11:16:15","date_gmt":"2007-04-12T15:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/10489.html"},"modified":"2007-04-12T11:16:15","modified_gmt":"2007-04-12T15:16:15","slug":"running-to-bushs-right-on-the-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/running-to-bushs-right-on-the-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Running to Bush’s right on the war"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past couple of months, the [tag]White House[\/tag] seems to have gotten a little sensitive about overtly<\/i> questioning critics’ patriotism. In almost every recent speech, top WH officials usually add some caveat about the motivations of congressional Dems. Last week, [tag]Bush[\/tag] said<\/a> Dems may disagree with him, but they are “fine, fine people,” who are “patriotic.” Cheney wouldn’t go that far, but he did tell<\/a> Limbaugh last week, “I’ve got some friends on the other side of the aisle, and I don’t want to question everybody’s motives.”<\/p>\n

Enter [tag]John McCain[\/tag], stage right. The senator has apparently looked at the political landscape and decided that when it comes to the war, the Bush gang hasn’t been harsh enough<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

[Yesterday], John [tag]McCain[\/tag] did the full [tag]Cheney[\/tag]. In his speech at the Virginia Military Institute in which he laid out his extensive support for the war in [tag]Iraq[\/tag], the Arizona senator matched the vice president’s scorn for his political opponents. McCain said Democrats who oppose the president’s plans for Iraq are not just wrong on the facts but are seeking “advantage in the next election” and “the temporary favor of the latest public opinion poll.” […]<\/p>\n

What’s new here is obviously not McCain’s unhedged support for the [tag]war[\/tag]. He’s talked about that at length. What makes this speech different is the full-force, no-caveats attack on his opponents. It went beyond attacking policy inconsistencies — such as the fact that Democrats voted to confirm Gen. David Petraeus as Iraqi commander but against his plan for action — or raising questions about how opponents of the war would deal with the chaos following an American withdrawal. It repeatedly questioned not just their views but their motives, ending with a moving story about a heroic Navy SEAL officer whose bravery McCain juxtaposes with those seeking “temporary political advantage.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The McCain campaign had been playing up the speech at VMI for weeks, telling reporters that it would be the key turn-around point for the senator’s struggling presidential campaign. But ultimately, what did McCain have to offer? Bush rhetoric, wrapped in a bitter attitude.
\n
\nAnd when I say “Bush rhetoric,” I mean that literally<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Arizona Sen. John McCain stood before an auditorium of uniformed cadets at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Va., on Wednesday with a message about the war in Iraq. “There are the first glimmers of progress,” McCain said, in what his campaign billed as the first of three major policy speeches that will lead to the official announcement of his presidential campaign later this month.<\/p>\n

McCain was reading the words off a teleprompter in the back of the room, but it was hard not to notice how closely they matched a statement made just 25 hours earlier by President Bush, who had also come to Virginia to talk to a military audience. “We’re beginning to see some progress towards our mission,” Bush had declared to American Legion Post 177 in Fairfax.<\/p>\n

The echo-chamber effect did not end there. On Tuesday, Bush told his listeners that the Democratic leadership was “irresponsible” for attaching restrictions on funding for the troops, which Bush called a “political statement” that could risk the war effort. On Wednesday, McCain told the VMI cadets that Democrats had chosen a “reckless” road that would “deny our soldiers the means to prevent an American defeat.” On Tuesday, Bush praised Iraq’s new oil law, warned of a power vacuum that would be caused by a U.S. withdrawal, and spoke of the lessons of Sept. 11. On Wednesday, so did McCain.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m not going to pretend to be a Republican strategist, but I am having a hard time understanding the coherence of McCain’s approach. Apparently, his idea for turning things around is to talk like Bush, enthusiastically embrace Bush’s war, and use the kind of cynical demagoguery Bush used to use, but now shies away from.<\/p>\n

Ladies and gentleman, I give you John McCain’s four-more-years strategy. Apparently, he’s under the impression that what America really<\/i> wants is more of the same. Let’s see how that works out.<\/p>\n

Towards the end of yesterday’s speech in Virginia, McCain said<\/a> it’s incumbent upon Dems in Congress “to offer an alternative strategy that has some relationship to reality.”<\/p>\n

Given McCain’s recent pronouncements<\/a>, he’s hardly in a position to lecture anyone about reality. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past couple of months, the [tag]White House[\/tag] seems to have gotten a little sensitive about overtly questioning critics’ patriotism. In almost every recent speech, top WH officials usually add some caveat about the motivations of congressional Dems. Last week, [tag]Bush[\/tag] said Dems may disagree with him, but they are “fine, fine people,” who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}