{"id":2657,"date":"2004-09-30T13:30:49","date_gmt":"2004-09-30T18:30:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/2657.html"},"modified":"2004-09-30T13:30:49","modified_gmt":"2004-09-30T18:30:49","slug":"speechwriting-mystery-solved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/speechwriting-mystery-solved\/","title":{"rendered":"Speechwriting mystery solved"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It seemed odd to many that Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi&#8217;s address to a joint session of Congress last week would dovetail so perfectly with the Bush campaign&#8217;s message. Coincidence? No reasonable person could think so.<\/p>\n<p>Naturally, all of the likely suspects &#8212; Karen Hughes, Dan Senor, David Frum &#8212; denied having anything to do with it. Yet, as the Post&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/articles\/A55180-2004Sep27.html\">Dana Milbank noted<\/a>, Allawi&#8217;s language was eerily similar &#8212; at times, even identical &#8212; to Bush&#8217;s words on the same subject.<\/p>\n<p>In a follow-up, Milbank, to his credit, seems to have <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/articles\/A60725-2004Sep29.html\">solved the riddle<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[D]etails have emerged showing the U.S. government and a representative of President Bush&#8217;s reelection campaign had been heavily involved in drafting the speech given to Congress last week by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>No big surprise there, but maybe now we can have an honest discussion about the appropriateness of Bush bringing the Iraqi Prime Minister to be used as a campaign prop. <\/p>\n<p>Allawi&#8217;s congressional address &#8212; written in part by <i>campaign<\/i> aides, not White House staff &#8212; was part of a de facto campaign event for Bush. Someone in the administration needs to explain how and why this occurred.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It seemed odd to many that Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi&#8217;s address to a joint session of Congress last week would dovetail so perfectly with the Bush campaign&#8217;s message. Coincidence? No reasonable person could think so. Naturally, all of the likely suspects &#8212; Karen Hughes, Dan Senor, David Frum &#8212; denied having anything to do [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2657","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}