Jon Keller has nominated his top five list of all-time political whoppers. Although Dick Cheney makes an appearance, President Bush is strangely absent. To rectify that, the crack staff at Media Nation has been hard at work for the past 12 or 13 minutes, putting together an all-Bush edition.
We think this holds up well even against such classics as “I am not a crook” (Richard Nixon) and “Last night I announced to the American people that the North Vietnamese regime had conducted further deliberate attacks against U.S. naval vessels operating in international waters” (Lyndon Johnson). But we’ll let you be the judge.
Here are our top five Bush whoppers, in chronological order. We realize we could have chosen many, many more.
1. “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” (Jan. 23, 2003)
2. “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.” (May 1, 2003)
3. “There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.” (July 2, 2003)
4. “[W]e are fighting terrorists in Iraq so that we will not have to face them and fight them in the streets of our own cities.” (Oct. 3, 2003)
5. “We do not torture.” (Nov. 7, 2005)
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“Bring it on” was a good one.
Which just shows, Keller’s a hack.
#1. Have you never had a trusted friend tell you something he believed to be true, and it turned out to be incorrect?#2. He articulated the situation as we all hoped it was.#3. . . . and we still have the force.#4. Painfully true; wait and see.#5. False.Score: One deliberate lie, if he doesn’t correct it.
Dan, You nailed it. I think Keller struck out looking on his.
[W]e are fighting terrorists in Iraq so that we will not have to face them and fight them in the streets of our own cities.To me this is the most patently inane statement of the lot. It’s so obviously ridiculous on its face I don’t understand why everybody just doesn’t burst out laughing whenever it’s mentioned.As if anyone who wanted to come to America to do harm, could not do so because we have them pinned down in Iraq, preventing them from reaching us. This is a reference, if Bush could ever be bothered to be this specific, to members of Al Qaeda in Iraq, who are mostly foreigners to begin with, and could get out of Iraq as easily as they got in if they wanted to.
I seem to recall some quotes about how Osama bin Laden was the center of attention.I’d love to see a good presidential historian track the quality of appointees. Why are we debating whether Paul Wolfowitz should stay at the World Bank … when he said Iraq could be conquered with 25,000 troops and its oil revenue would pay for reconstruction? If that’s not a lack of grasp of numbers, I don’t know what is. There are plenty of other appointees that were also baffling.
I got a kick out of Keller’s list — I’m not trying to say mine’s better. For one thing, he got some local stuff in there, which I didn’t bother with.
Gee, Dan, the fact that the ‘local stuff’ was all Dems wouldn’t have influenced you?I was for it before I was against it…and I eargerly await your Clinton Presidential Edition.
PP: Clinton — eight years of peace and prosperity. Good thing we got that over with.
Dan: No, that’s more like eight years of appeasment. “Bin Laden who?”
…as opposed to the last six years, where we’ve really pressed the hunt for Osama haven’t we. From one end of a country where he isn’t, to the other, we leave no stone unturned. Take that, Osama!
Keller has made a career out of belaboring the obvious and his lack of depth is nowhere more obvious than in his political whopper list. His shot at Kennedy is a political bromide, not an example of a political “whopper” if by that term we mean a knowing untruth. While convenient, the alleged ‘chaos’ of current immigration policy is rooted in many other factors other than the law as written — enforcement to cite one example. Immigrants in the country unlawfully can be and are removed under existing law.The shallow nature of the list misses perhaps the biggest ever around these parts, the Dukakis “lead pipe guarantee” that there would be no new taxes in the 1974 campaign, followed by the biggest increase in state history in 1975.