{"id":9598,"date":"2007-01-12T11:10:30","date_gmt":"2007-01-12T16:10:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9598.html"},"modified":"2007-01-12T11:10:30","modified_gmt":"2007-01-12T16:10:30","slug":"odd-silence-at-fort-benning-during-and-after-bushs-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/odd-silence-at-fort-benning-during-and-after-bushs-speech\/","title":{"rendered":"Odd silence at Fort Benning — during and after Bush’s speech"},"content":{"rendered":"

I admit at the outset that I did not hear the president’s remarks at Fort Benning, Georgia, yesterday. Bush was reportedly looking for a “friendly audience and a patriotic backdrop<\/a>” to help sell his “new” escalation policy, and the president who can hardly resist using troops as props probably thought this trip to a military base would be similar to others.<\/p>\n

Except it wasn’t. The New York Times<\/a> said Bush “received a restrained response from soldiers who clapped politely but showed little of the wild enthusiasm that they ordinarily shower on the commander in chief.” The Washington Post<\/a> noted that Bush received minimal applause, which was “hardly the boisterous, rock-star reception Bush typically gets at military bases. During his lunchtime speech, the soldiers were attentive but quiet. The LA Times<\/a> said the president “received a less enthusiastic reception.” The far-right Washington Times<\/a> said the troops’ response to the president was “tepid.”<\/p>\n

But it’s sometimes difficult to gauge an audience’s reaction solely from applause. It’s far better, in this case, to talk to the troops themselves, and get their perspectives on the war, escalation, and the president. And the plane-full of reporters who were on hand for the Ft. Benning event would have done just that — if only the Bush gang had let them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[The White House] didn’t want the reporters to talk to those soldiers — or any others, for that matter.<\/p>\n

Scott Stanzel, the deputy White House press secretary, initially told reporters that they’d be able to speak to some of the soldiers who had listened to the president’s speech in a large dining hall in Fort Benning, a sprawling facility in Georgia. That would have been the first opportunity for many reporters to talk to those most directly affected by the Bush administration’s Iraq troop escalation: the soldiers who will be sent to Iraq sooner, and kept there longer.<\/p>\n

When the president finished his prepared remarks, however, reporters were shooed out of the dining hall by White House aides and public-affairs personnel from the military base, who said that soldiers were now off-limits to the media.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If I didn’t know better, I’d say White House officials, after noticing the troops’ response to the speech, decided they better not risk letting soldiers talk to reporters. A bunch of quotes from angry active-duty men and women probably wouldn’t help the p.r. campaign right now, would it?
\n
\nNow, reporters were none too pleased by this. They’d been promised access to the troops, and then denied access without justification. But, the White House reminds us, they eventually reversed course. Sort of<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Fort Benning personnel called the media filing center around 4:30 to say that they had picked out a small number of soldiers who would be willing to speak to reporters. With the press charter to Washington leaving less than an hour later, however, reporters skipped the opportunity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, let’s review:<\/p>\n

— Reporters are told they can talk to the troops.<\/p>\n

— Reporters are told they’re forbidden from talking to the troops.<\/p>\n

— Shortly before leaving, reporters are told they can talk to a hand-picked, small group of troops, but no one else.<\/p>\n

You don’t suppose those carefully-chosen group of soldiers would magically have stuck to the White House talking points, do you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I admit at the outset that I did not hear the president’s remarks at Fort Benning, Georgia, yesterday. Bush was reportedly looking for a “friendly audience and a patriotic backdrop” to help sell his “new” escalation policy, and the president who can hardly resist using troops as props probably thought this trip to a military […]<\/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-9598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9598","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=9598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9598\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}