{"id":779,"date":"2003-10-22T11:42:07","date_gmt":"2003-10-22T16:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/779.html"},"modified":"2003-10-22T11:42:07","modified_gmt":"2003-10-22T16:42:07","slug":"another-bush-speech-another-round-of-fact-checking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/another-bush-speech-another-round-of-fact-checking\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Bush speech, another round of fact checking"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sunday, White House aides had to scramble when Bush, speaking without a prepared text, falsely claimed<\/a> that the U.S. government was prepared to “go forward with” a new package of military training programs with Indonesia.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, Bush had his staff checking their history books with yet another screw-up before an international audience.<\/p>\n

“America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people,” Bush said in a speech to the Philippine Congress. “Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.”<\/p>\n

That’s a nice sentiment, I suppose, but it’s completely wrong.<\/p>\n

The United States did not work with<\/i> Filipinos to “liberate” the Philipines from colonial rule. Just the opposite — Filipinos fought against<\/i> the U.S. over colonial rule.<\/p>\n

As Al Kamen explained<\/a> today, “In the war, or ‘insurrection,’ depending on your point of view, more than 4,000 U.S. troops died — about 1,000 in battle and the rest from disease and other causes. At least 16,000 Filipinos were killed in combat, and another 200,000 died from disease or starvation, according to a reference work called Warfare and Armed Conflicts. The Philippines remained a U.S. colony until 1946.”<\/p>\n

I can only imagine what the Philippine Congress thought of Bush after that one. I suspect they know their nation’s history well enough to know that Bush is clueless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sunday, White House aides had to scramble when Bush, speaking without a prepared text, falsely claimed that the U.S. government was prepared to “go forward with” a new package of military training programs with Indonesia. Yesterday, Bush had his staff checking their history books with yet another screw-up before an international audience. “America is proud […]<\/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-779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779","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=779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}