Tag Archives: President George W. Bush

Don’t Let The Truth Get In The Way Of A Good Political Attack

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Yesterday The Daily Caller posted an article about a recent article posted in The Washington Post. The Washington Post article dealt with a government policy choosing not to renew the passports of people born near the border, as they are skeptical that those people were actually born in the country.

The Daily Caller reports:

…It’s not until the ninth paragraph that the article begins to address that the policy began under the Bush administration and continued under Obama.

The article was titled, “U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question” and was written by Kevin Sieff.

The article addressed the problems faced by “a growing number of people whose official birth records show they were born in the United States but who are now being denied passports.”

The fourth paragraph referenced President Trump, saying, “The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown.”

The Daily Caller article concludes:

But five paragraphs later, the article clarifies, “The State Department during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations denied passports to people who were delivered by midwives in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.”

So in spite of the fact that this informal policy began under previous administrations, the article first connects it to President Donald Trump.

If you are a never-Trumper reading this blog (I assume that occasionally happens), this is the kind of reporting that may have shaped your view of President Trump. In this instance, he is simply carrying out the policies of the prior two administrations, but is held responsible for the policy. I suspect that somewhere in The Washington Post article is a quiet accusation that President Trump is racist for carrying out this policy. Well then, what about President Bush and President Obama? Were they racists too?

I would just like to note at this point that during his second term, President George W. Bush was so beaten down by the press that he didn’t stand up to anyone. Because of that, very little was accomplished during his second term. Hopefully, the fact that President Trump seems to be able to ignore the relentless attacks from the media and the political establishment will allow him to accomplish the things that need to be accomplished to bring America back to its economic strength and leadership role in the world.

About That Last Republican Debate

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I will confess that I did not watch the entire Republican debate. I don’t deal well with cage fights. However, I did see the part of the debate where Donald Trump attacked Jeb Bush for the actions of George W. Bush in Iraq. Aside from the fact that it was totally tacky to attack George Bush on his brother’s record, all of the charges made were simply false.

Donald Trump seems to have forgotten that there were a number of reasons why we went into Iraq. Saddam Hussein was consistently violating a United Nations established no-fly zone–therefore, the credibility of the UN was at stake (I would just as soon get rid of the UN, but that was the situation). Saddam Hussein had already used poison gas on the Kurds (WMD). Saddam Hussein had previously fought with Iran and invaded Kuwait, and was not a stabilizing force in the region, and Saddam Hussein was training terrorists (google the airliner frame that was used to practice hijackings).

In 2006, Fox News posted a story about the discovery of WMD’s in Iraq. The Bush White House decided not to make a big deal of the discovery. I think this was a mistake, but you can follow the link to read the article.

Yesterday The Washington Times posted an article that sheds some light on the fact that we were not ready for 9/11.

Some excerpts from The Washington Times article:

As Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump hammers away at former President George W. Bush for not stopping the September 11 attacks, another factor could be added to the debate: Mr. Bush inherited from Bill Clinton an intelligence community in terrible shape.

This fact comes not from a Republican partisan but from George Tenet, President Clinton’s CIA director, a post that at the time made him the country’s top intelligence officer.

…In addition to Mr. Tenet’s book, other intelligence sources have told The Washington Times that the CIA in the 1990s dramatic cut the number of case officers — the people who recruit spies — from 1,600 to 1,200. The CIA closed operating bases, even the one in Hamburg, Germany, where September 11 Islamists plotted the attack. The NSA, the nation’s listening post, was not keeping up with the Internet revolution and was stymied at times by cell phone technology.

Mr. Bush reversed that trend by pouring billions of dollars into the CIA to hire new officers and into the NSA to set up new technology development units.

Mr. Tenet wrote that he personally asked President Clinton for billions more, but received no increase.

…“Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right?” Trump said Saturday at a debate in South Carolina.  “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none.”

With that line, Mr. Trump is picking up the slogans of the left wing which said, “Bush lied, troops died.”

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a special blue-ribbon panel looked into the claim, and both unanimously concluded the WMD finding was solely the product of the intelligence community, free of White House interference. Neither Mr. Bush nor the CIA lied, the panels said.

So I have a few questions about this attack. Why was Donald Trump spouting Democratic talking points? He also failed to mention that because of the actions of Al Gore and Bill Clinton, President Bush was not able to put his security team in place in a timely manner–his election was declared later than usual and he was delayed in putting his people in place. Donald Trump also failed to mention that Iraq was on its way to being a stable ally before President Obama prematurely withdrew his troops.

I am not a supporter of Jeb Bush, and I believe that his response to this attack was totally ineffective, but the attack was totally out of line and inappropriate. If I were a supporter of Donald Trump (which I am not) his actions during this debate would cause me to reconsider.

A Grown-Up Perspective

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The media has been focused on the Senate Intelligence Report released by the Democrats on the committee yesterday. I am sure that almost everyone is tired of hearing the Monday-morning quarterbacking of the decisions made and the actions taken.

There is, however, one statement that stands out in the noise. The quote is in a Washington Times article posted yesterday.

The article reports:

The real point of the report, however, was not to blame Mr. Bush, but rather to say he was clueless about the program. A New York Times story alleged that Mr. Bush was purposely kept in the dark and that he was “once again been misinformed” about the effectiveness of the program (sticking with the meme that the Yale and Harvard graduate is a Texas hayseed).

Yet even that was wrong. He wrote in his book “Decision Points”: “I knew that an interrogation program this sensitive and controversial would one day become public. When it did, we would open ourselves up to criticism that America had compromised our moral values. I would have preferred that we get the information another way. But the choice between security and values was real. Had I not authorized waterboarding on senior al Qaeda leaders, I would have had to accept a greater risk that the country would be attacked. In the wake of 9/11, that was a risk I was unwilling to take.”

And he closed with this: “My most solemn responsibility as president was to protect the country. I approved the use of the interrogation techniques. The new techniques proved highly effective.”

The article concludes:

Perhaps there’s a lesson in that passage for the current president as Islamic terrorists continue to behead Americans. He planned to “talk” with America’s enemies, but sometimes, a president needs to do more to protect Americans.

I think we need more grown-ups in the room.