{"id":3489,"date":"2005-02-04T11:49:03","date_gmt":"2005-02-04T16:49:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/3489.html"},"modified":"2005-02-04T11:49:03","modified_gmt":"2005-02-04T16:49:03","slug":"a-little-background-bush-neglected-to-share","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/a-little-background-bush-neglected-to-share\/","title":{"rendered":"A little background Bush neglected to share"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m not so coldhearted as to deny the beauty of the embrace<\/a> between Janet Norwood and Safia Taleb al-Suhail at the State of the Union the other night. It was an emotional moment; no doubt about it.<\/p>\n

That said, there are a few things about Safia Taleb al-Suhail that Bush left out of his speech the other night. To hear the president tell it<\/a>, al-Suhail, sitting in a chair that Bush used to reserve for Ahmed Chalabi, was a symbol of a free Iraq.<\/p>\n

“One of Iraq’s leading democracy and human rights advocates is Safia Taleb al-Suhail. She says of her country, ‘We were occupied for 35 years by Saddam Hussein. That was the real occupation. Thank you to the American people who paid the cost, but most of all, to the soldiers.’ Eleven years ago, Safia’s father was assassinated by Saddam’s intelligence service. Three days ago in Baghdad, Safia was finally able to vote for the leaders of her country — and we are honored that she is with us tonight.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m more than willing to praise anyone who was brave enough to vote in Iraq last weekend. Moreover, I’m also willing to believe that the emotion and appreciation al-Suhail showed on Wednesday was genuine. That said, a Kos reader did a little digging<\/a> and discovered some interesting things about al-Suhail’s background, including the fact that she was a writer for a neo-con think tank led by luminaries such as Steve Forbes, Newt Gingrich, Gary Bauer, and Richard Perle.<\/p>\n

A recently-liberated Iraqi appearing at the SOTU as a human example of a long-suffering population? Well, not exactly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not so coldhearted as to deny the beauty of the embrace between Janet Norwood and Safia Taleb al-Suhail at the State of the Union the other night. It was an emotional moment; no doubt about it. That said, there are a few things about Safia Taleb al-Suhail that Bush left out of his speech […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3489","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=3489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}