{"id":5816,"date":"2005-11-11T14:33:57","date_gmt":"2005-11-11T19:33:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=5816"},"modified":"2005-11-11T14:33:57","modified_gmt":"2005-11-11T19:33:57","slug":"with-bush-its-deja-vu-all-over-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/with-bush-its-deja-vu-all-over-again\/","title":{"rendered":"With Bush, it’s deja vu all over again"},"content":{"rendered":"

White House aides leaked word<\/a> to reporters yesterday that Bush would exploit Veterans Day this afternoon with a blistering partisan speech in Pennsylvania. “It will be the most direct refutation of the Democrat charges you’ve seen probably since the election,” one official said<\/p>\n

But the description wasn’t quite right. It would have been more accurate to say that it’s the same refutation of charges used before<\/i> the election. Today was just more of the same<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“While it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which sounds an awful lot like the “revisionist historians” argument the White House liked to throw around in 2003<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges,” he said. “These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America’s will.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To criticize Bush is to undermine the troops and their mission — again. Equating silence and patriotism has been a Bush favorite for years.<\/p>\n

Before going to war, Mr. Bush said, Democrats and Republicans alike were privy to the same intelligence that indicated former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which is the same Bush talking point he used during the presidential campaign<\/a>. (It was wrong then, too.)<\/p>\n

“Some Democrats and antiwar critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war,” he said. “These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which might be persuasive if there weren’t ample evidence<\/a> demonstrating that the intelligence assessments made by intelligence officials were<\/i> changed, and if that investigation were actually allowed<\/a> to consider the administration’s misuse of the intelligence.<\/p>\n

“That’s why more then a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power,” Mr. Bush said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which might be persuasive if Bush wasn’t completely mischaracterizing<\/a> the resolution, as he’s been for two years.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, today’s speech wasn’t a direct refutation of anything, other than the notion that Bush has anything original to say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

White House aides leaked word to reporters yesterday that Bush would exploit Veterans Day this afternoon with a blistering partisan speech in Pennsylvania. “It will be the most direct refutation of the Democrat charges you’ve seen probably since the election,” one official said But the description wasn’t quite right. It would have been more accurate […]<\/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-5816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5816","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=5816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}