George W. Bush – Page 5

Political whoppers, Bush edition

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)

First trooper singular

Linguist John McWhorter, in a commentary for NPR’s “All Things Considered,” March 27:

One cannot refer to a single soldier as a troop. This means that calling 20,000 soldiers “20,000 troops” depersonalizes the soldiers as individuals, and makes a massive number of living, breathing individuals sound like some kind of mass or substance, like water or Jell-O, or some kind of freight.

President Bush, March 29:

We stand united in saying loud and clear that when we’ve got a troop in harm’s way, we expect that troop to be fully funded.

Not our commander in chief

Garry Wills has written a brilliant essay on the militarization of American society in general, and of the presidency, especially George W. Bush’s, in particular. No summary or excerpt will do it justice, so no quotes here. Just read it.

Bush in a Flash

I was out during President Bush’s speech last night, so the first thing I did when I got home was to start looking for the video on the Internet. So kudos to New England Cable News, which had posted it in easy-to-load Flash video. Even CSPAN.org couldn’t beat that.

As for the substance, I have to confess that Bush’s words came across as recycled boilerplate to such an extent that it was hard to pay attention. Besides, most of the details had been leaked out in the preceding days. But I found the lead of this Sheryl Gay Stolberg analysis in the New York Times to be suitably horrifying:

By stepping up the American military presence in Iraq, President Bush is not only inviting an epic clash with the Democrats who run Capitol Hill. He is ignoring the results of the November elections, rejecting the central thrust of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and flouting the advice of some of his own generals, as well as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq.

Unless you believe that Bush knows more than all of the aforementioned people (including the voters who rejected his policies last November), then you should be as horrified as I am.