Damien wrote:WASHINGTON (Associated Press) Confronted with strong opposition to his Iraq policies, President Bush decides to interpret public opinion his own way. Actually, he says, people agree with him.
The president says Democrats have it all wrong: the public doesn't want the troops pulled out they want to give the military more support in its mission.
"Last November, the American people said they were frustrated and wanted a change in our strategy in Iraq," he said April 24, ahead of a veto showdown with congressional Democrats over their desire to legislation a troop withdrawal timeline. "I listened. Today, General David Petraeus is carrying out a strategy that is dramatically different from our previous course."
That was April 24th.
Here's what Criddic said on May 6th:
It's funny, because most people agree that we can't just pick up and leave in Iraq, and yet Bush is criticized for saying we have to make it work. He's begun a new plan that few are allowing to even get off the ground. There is no pleasing the opposition here.... They said change the course in Iraq. He brings in Gen. Petraeus, with a new plan to make it possible for a political solution to happen.... Still, not happy.
I called him a liar. (I don't mince words with him anymore.) Bush says the same thing, the AP demonstrates that Bush is a liar. And they have evidence to back them up. And that evidence can be applied to Criddic's statement.
I also called him a parrot. Note how eerily similar the two statements are. Just a few words have been altered so that Bush (or his speechwriters) handiwork can't be detected. "Change of course in Iraq" instead of "change in our strategy in Iraq", "plan" instead of "strategy"... like that.
Monkey see, monkey do. And how humiliating for a monkey to imitate a chimp.
Someone needs to slip Downfall into Bush's DVD player. His narrow-minded, messianic view of the world stage at the moment is starting to get truly frightening.
Edited By flipp525 on 1180396268
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
BUSH LOOKS AT PUBLIC OPINION ON IRAQ AND DECLARES IT SUPPORTS HIS DECISONS
by Jennifer Loven
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) Confronted with strong opposition to his Iraq policies, President Bush decides to interpret public opinion his own way. Actually, he says, people agree with him.
Democrats view the November elections that gave them control of Congress as a mandate to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq. They're backed by evidence; election exit poll surveys by The Associated Press and television networks found 55 percent saying the U.S. should withdraw some or all of its troops from Iraq.
The president says Democrats have it all wrong: the public doesn't want the troops pulled out they want to give the military more support in its mission.
"Last November, the American people said they were frustrated and wanted a change in our strategy in Iraq," he said April 24, ahead of a veto showdown with congressional Democrats over their desire to legislation a troop withdrawal timeline. "I listened. Today, General David Petraeus is carrying out a strategy that is dramatically different from our previous course."
Increasingly isolated on a war that is going badly, Bush has presented his alternative reality in other ways, too. He expresses understanding for the public's dismay over the unrelenting sectarian violence and American losses that have passed 3,400, but then asserts that the public's solution matches his.
"A lot of Americans want to know, you know, when?" he said at a Rose Garden news conference Thursday. "When are you going to win?"
Also in that session, Bush said: "I recognize there are a handful there, or some, who just say, `Get out, you know, it's just not worth it. Let's just leave.' I strongly disagree with that attitude. Most Americans do as well."
In fact, polls show Americans do not disagree, and that leaving not winning is their main goal.
In one released Friday by CBS and the New York Times, 63 percent supported a troop withdrawal timetable of sometime next year. Another earlier this month from USA Today and Gallup found 59 percent backing a withdrawal deadline that the U.S. should stick to no matter what's happening in Iraq.
Bush aides say poll questions are asked so many ways, and often so imprecisely, that it is impossible to conclude that most Americans really want to get out. Failure, Bush says, is not what the public wants they just don't fully understand that that is just what they will get if troops are pulled out before the Iraqi government is capable of keeping the country stable on its own.
Seeking to turn up the heat on this argument, Bush has relied lately on an al-Qaida mantra. Terrorists remain dangerous, and fighting them in Iraq is key to neutralizing the threat, he says. "It's hard for some Americans to see that, I fully understand it," Bush said. "I see it clearly."
Independent pollster Andrew Kohut said of the White House view: "I don't see what they're talking about."
"They want to know when American troops are going to leave," Kohut, director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, said of the public. "They certainly want to win. But their hopes have been dashed."
Kohut has found it notable that there's such a consensus in poll findings.
"When the public hasn't made up its mind or hasn't thought about things, there's a lot of variation in the polls," he said. "But there's a fair amount of agreement now."
The president didn't used to try to co-opt polling for his benefit. He just said he ignored it.
In Ohio in mid-April, for instance, Bush was asked how he feels about his often dismal showings. "Polls just go poof at times," he replied.
It was the same the next day in Michigan. "If you make decisions based upon the latest opinion poll, you won't be thinking long-term strategy on behalf of the American people," the president said.
After weeks of negotiations between the White House and Capitol Hill's majority Democrats, last week ended with things going Bush's way. Congress passed and he signed a war spending bill that was stripped of any requirement that the war end.
But the debate is far from over.
The measure funds the war only through Sept. 30 around the time that military commanders are scheduled to report to Bush and Congress on whether the troop increase the president ordered in January is quelling the violence as hoped. Even Republicans have told Bush that a major reckoning is coming in September, and that they will be hard-pressed to continue to stand behind him if things don't look markedly better. Also due that month is an independent assessment of the Iraqi government's progress on measures aimed at lessening sectarian tensions that are fueling the violence.
Between now and then, Democrats don't intend to stay quiet. They plan a series of votes on whether U.S. troops should stay in Iraq and whether the president has the authority to continue the war.
Bush isn't likely to stay quiet, either.
Wayne Fields, an expert on presidential rhetoric at Washington University in St. Louis, said the president's new language exploits the fact that there is no one alternative strategy for the public to coalesce around, which clearly spells out how to bring troops home. Bush can argue that people agree with him because no one can define the alternative, Fields said.
But, with the president's job approval ratings so low and the public well aware of what it thinks about the war, Bush is taking a big gamble.
"This is a very tricky thing in our politics. We want to think that we want our leaders to stand up to public opinion. But we also like to think of ourselves as being in a democracy where we are listened to," Fields said. "He risks either the notion of being thought out of touch ... or to be thought simply duplicitous."
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
"Wonderful experience to be" there? Wow...well, I guess you have to be delusional to delude the country...I'm sure he was torn up about it...
I hate the practice of honorary degrees anyway. If you didn't do the work, you shouldn't get the degree. It's a cheat. It's disrespectful to all of those people who worked to get theirs.
Wesley Lovell
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
FEAR-MONGERING AND FICTION: CHENEY ADDRESSES WEST POINT GRADS
Washington Dispatch: The veep last spoke at West Point four years ago. He is still peddling the phony link between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
By Paul McLeary
May 26, 2007
With the poise and purpose that has been drilled into them during the past four years, the cadets filed slowly into West Point's Michie Stadium in crisp lines, standing at attention as they reached their seats. Here stood the graduates of the nation's premier military academy, nearly a thousand of them, who would soon swear the oath of the United States Army and be commissioned as second lieutenants.
The class of 2007, the first to enter the academy after the invasion of Iraq, has chosen the motto "Always Remember, Never Surrender" and a crest that includes these words emblazoned above a scene that shows the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Before long, it's likely that many of these men and women will deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, complex and asymmetric battlefields that have forced the military to rethink its approach to warfare. The nature of the war on terror has caused the staid military academy itself to revisit its curriculum. In Iraq and Afghanistan these soon-to-be officers will lead platoons, where they will be called upon to carry out their missions not just as soldiers, but as diplomats and cops and sometimes a combination of the three.
Vice President Dick Cheney, on hand to deliver this year’s commencement address, acknowledged that this crop of West Point grads is unique. “It is rare in West Point history for a class to have joined during war time and graduate in the midst of that same war,” he said. Addressing the academy’s graduates, the vice president, who drew a crowd of protestors outside one of West Point's gates, relied on the same brand of doomsday rhetoric that has characterized his remarks since 9/11. "We know," he told the audience at one point, that Al Qaeda is “working feverishly to obtain even more destructive weapons and using every form of technology they can get their hands on. This makes the business of fighting this war as urgent and time sensitive as any task this nation has ever taken on.”
Not only is the threat real, he warned, it’s immediate. “The timeline is no longer a calendar, it’s a watch,” he said, quoting a line used recently by Mike McConnell, the director of National Intelligence. Cheney then claimed that the “enemy likely has cells inside our own country.”
As Cheney told the graduates of the enemies they may soon face — terrorists "who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character" — there were moments when it seemed that he had simply recycled an old speech from 2002. Indeed, long after most members of the Bush administration have distanced themselves from some of the more insidious claims that propelled the U.S. into war with Iraq, the vice president continues to repeat them as fact. At one point today he cited the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda (which has been thoroughly debunked) as the reason why the U.S. invaded Iraq. "America is fighting this enemy in Iraq because that is where they have gathered," he told the West Point graduates. "We are there because, after 9/11, we decided to deny terrorists any safe haven."
In a subtle irony, the vice president last addressed graduating West Point cadets the very year the class of 2007 entered the academy, in 2003. It was close to a month after the president declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq and Cheney crowed that “the battle of Iraq was a major victory in the war on terror.” At the time, two West Point graduates had been killed in Iraq. Since then an additional 49 tombstones have risen on West Point's campus, marking the graves of graduates who were killed in Iraq, fighting a war the vice president had previously assured them they’d already won.
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
"Because here’s the thing about life: There’s no accounting for what fate will deal you. Some days when you need a hand. There are other days when we’re called to lend a hand." -- President Joe Biden, 01/20/2021
WHITE HOUSE REJECTED WARNINGS ON IRAQ WAR
Declassified reports released by the Senate intelligence panel show that President Bush was warned that sectarian strife was likely.
By JONATHAN S. LANDAY
WASHINGTON -- U.S. intelligence agencies warned the Bush administration before the invasion of Iraq that ousting Saddam Hussein would create a ''significant risk'' of sectarian strife, encourage al Qaeda attacks and open the way for Iranian interference.
The Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday released declassified prewar intelligence reports and summaries of others that cautioned that establishing democracy in Iraq would be ''long, difficult and probably turbulent'' and said that while most Iraqis would welcome elections, the country's ethnic and religious leaders would be unwilling to share power.
Nevertheless, President Bush, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top aides decided not to deploy the major occupation that force military planners had recommended, planned to reduce U.S. troops rapidly after the invasion and believed that ousting Saddam would ignite a democratic revolution across the Middle East.
The administration also instituted a massive purge of members of Saddam's Baath Party and disbanded the Iraqi army -- moves that helped spark the country's Sunni Muslim insurgency -- even though the newly declassified reports had recommended against doing so.
WASHINGTON--President Bush at a Rose Garden press conference on Thursday insists he is credible when it comes to the war.
Q Mr. President, after the mistakes that have been made in this war, when you do as you did yesterday, where you raised two-year-old intelligence, talking about the threat posed by al Qaeda, it's met with increasing skepticism. The majority in the public, a growing number of Republicans, appear not to trust you any longer to be able to carry out this policy successfully. Can you explain why you believe you're still a credible messenger on the war?
THE PRESIDENT: I'm credible because I read the intelligence
Damien wrote:This morning, Bush was a litttle more full of shit than usual.
From the Washington Post:
Is there no safe haven for President Bush?
It happened midway through his news conference in the Rose Garden yesterday morning, in between his 10th and 11th mentions of al-Qaeda: A bird flew over the president and deposited a wet, white dropping on the upper left sleeve of his jacket. Bush wiped the mess off with his bare hand.
==========================
Richard Woolf of Newsweek joked, "Clearly that bird hates our freedoms."
Okay, the bird dive-bombed him. Not his fault. Could happen to anyone. But this barnyard animal pretending to be the president WIPED IT OFF WITH HIS BARE HAND! What is the matter with him??
Even more proof he's vulgar and uncouth. And I'm not talking about his leadership. I'm talking about the way he conducts himself in public. No wonder the twins loved to be photographed drunk. Look at the pathetic father figure they were saddled with.
