Delving Into The Past

(originally posted 3-23-09)

I was doing a bit of research and stumbled across some stuff that was simply too good to pass up a chance to comment on. Additionally, I came across another whole issue, the media's seemingly determined and coordinated attempt to portray President Bush as an anti-intellectual, incurious moron, that produced so much material I've put it into a separate post.

Anyway, into the wayback machine...

3-18-01, STEWART M. POWELL Times Union Washington bureau

Democrats are looking to the midterm congressional elections in 2002 to help overcome their mounting handicaps at the outset of the Bush presidency.

As President Bush begins the third month of his presidency on Tuesday, Democrats remain stymied by the chief executive's successes in peeling away Democratic lawmakers to support his initiatives on Capitol Hill.

Veteran Democratic partisans also are finding it difficult to make headway against a Republican president who co-opts Democratic issues such as improving public education.

Good thing the Dems finally realized they could lie about Bush not being bipartisan and the media would carry them on their back all the way to 2006.

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4-27-01, CALVIN WOODWARD Associated Press

What Americans saw in the presidential campaign, they're pretty much getting in the president.

Three months on the job, President Bush is pushing the tax cuts and education package he promised as a candidate, while bending to some political realities on both. His 100th day in office is Sunday.

Boy, those were the good old days, huh?

With his "rifle" approach, Bush is striking a greater percentage of targets than Clinton did with his shotgun, Pfiffner said.

Consider this a lesson not learned by President Teleprompter.

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6-18-01, NYT, Suzanne Daley

Go on and try to square this with what the press would go on to report for the next 7+ years (particularly note how suckered the Europeans were by the media's portrayal of Bush and compare with Europe's reaction to Candidate Teleprompter, who has since insulted the Germans, British, etc etc, in just a few days in office):

As the dust settled on President Bush's first official visit to Europe, many experts and newspapers on the Continent called his five-country excursion a success, at least compared with what they had expected.

"He proved he was not quite the Texas dolt that everyone thought he was," said Josef Joffe, a German foreign policy analyst. "And he used moderate language. In international relations, that is very important."...

By the end of his visit, neither Mr. Bush nor the Europeans moved an inch from their starting points, but the American president gave his Europeans allies at least some of what they wanted: he came offering handshakes, back-slapping, some gentler wording and the promise of future discussion.

Mr. Bush's brand of good cheer, first names and small jokes -- for instance, he called Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain "Mr. Landslide" -- charmed his hosts from Spain to Slovenia. During a long dinner with European Union leaders in Sweden, he apparently deftly handled a barrage of questions on global warming and defense issues.

"Really," a Scandinavian official said, "he left a very positive impression of knowing some facts."...

But headlines across Europe suggested a softening of tone. "No More Mr. Unilateralist," said The Financial Times of Britain. The left-wing French daily Libération wrote, "George W. Bush is manifestly not the 'superficial buffoon and arrogant Texan' portrayed in the media."...

Charles Grant of the London-based Center for European Reform said: "The personal stuff is quite important. Europe's big worry was that he was not interested and ignorant. Just the fact that he spent a week here goes a long way."

Experts point out that most new American presidents have been regarded at first with skepticism and derision in Europe...

But European leaders seemed eager to like Mr. Bush, and one measure of their newfound comfort may be that as soon as he left, he was hardly mentioned again for the remainder of the summit meeting.

They must have seen the writing on the wall. Those that remained by Bush's side received aid and support from the US and were generally re-elected. Those that ended up turning on Bush found their governments replaced with US-friendly ones.

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4-4-02, TU editorial

It is, was and always will be one of President Bush's best moments. On the very night of Sept. 11, he made it clear that any country, or any political movement, that harbors terrorism will be regarded as terrorist and confronted accordingly. Suddenly U.S. policy was a good deal clearer, and certainly firmer, than it had been, in this administration and especially those before it.

Except if you follow this policy to remove a country that harbors terrorism like Iraq. Then it's bad.

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9-23-03, TU editorial

It's safe to assume that few Americans know who David Walker is, much less what he does. But Mr. Walker has a message that no American -- least of all those in the White House and Congress -- can afford to ignore.

David Walker is the comptroller general of the United States. As such, he serves as head of the General Accounting Office, which is charged with presenting the fiscal facts to the nation, free of partisan bias. He has done just that, and he's worried.

Last week, in comments that went largely unnoticed, Mr. Walker warned that the nation's finances are in far worse shape than most Americans realize. So bad, in fact, that the country could be digging itself into a hole from which it might not escape...

There are numbers that give some context to Mr. Walker's assessment. Next year's federal deficit is expected to reach $480 billion, far above the previous record of $290 billion set in 1992. Over the next 10 years, the red ink will total $1.4 trillion, wiping out the 10-year $5.6 trillion surplus that the Congressional Budget Office had forecast in 2001.

Laughing (sadly), yet? Did that 10-year estimate of "surpluses" happen to include a corporate accounting scandal, a recession, the bursting of the tech bubble, or a trillion-dollar terrorist attack on NYC and DC followed by the need to rebuild our gutted military and fight a two-front war? I'm thinking that would be a negative.

Non-partisan GAO warns about long term debt due to military spending under Bush - PANIC! Non-partisan CBO warns about long term economic crippling and stratospheric debt due to Obama's spending - GO OBAMA! YOU ROCK!

Bush deficit of $480 billion? PANIC! Obama deficit of TRILLIONS? JUST WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED!

10 year guesstimate of $1.4 trillion debt from Bush? DOOM!!!! 10 year guesstimate of $10 TRILLION DEBT from Obama? MORE, MORE, YOU SEXY THANG!

2-26-09 editorial:

The President also should be able to explain how the deficit can be reduced while only the tiny percentage of Americans that makes more than $250,000 a year will have to pay more income tax and almost everyone else pays a bit less.

Yeah, I'd like to see that considering the numbers show that if you tax 100% of the income of everyone making over $75,000 a year you'd barely scratch the surface. They actually praise the Teleprompted One for saying he'll 'cut' the deficit, even though his actual plans increase them by a trillion bucks a year. Pay no attention to the spending behind the curtain!

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10-25-06, TU editorial

In the war of lexicon and propaganda, seemingly every bit as important to the White House as war itself, President Bush has just done what the Republicans have long accused the Democrats of wanting to do.

That's right, Mr. Bush has cut and run. You won't hear him say "stay the course" anymore.

What had been a frequently uttered phrase from a commander in chief who for so long was either unwilling or incapable of acknowledging the increasing futility of the war he sent American forces to fight in Iraq is a casualty in its own right...

Not since another presidential mouthpiece, Ronald Ziegler, insisted that some of the Nixon crowd's prior statements about the Watergate scandal were no longer "operable" has the frequently unintentional parody known as the White House daily news briefing tinkered with the vernacular and, in doing so, insulted the public intelligence.

If only taking troops out of harm's way were as remotely easy as taking words out of a political script.

Wow, they sure absolved an overwhelming vote by Congress, including a whole honking load of Democrats of any responsibility (and, with the war won, I guess credit) for Iraq. Of course, because I try not to say idiotic things that will come back to haunt me in short order, I don't have to worry about people going back and reading this editorial and see I ignore it when my golden boy does the same thing - and I don't call it "insulting the public intelligence". You see, the Times Union hasn't seen fit to editorialize about Obama dropping the term "enemy combatant". They haven't seen fit to worry about how easy it is to campaign on immediately pulling out of Iraq only to find that maybe it would be best to follow Bush's plan and how it's easy to take "words out of a political script" about Guantanamo Bay, but not so easy to decide what to do about those not-enemy combantants.

(update)
It only gets worse:

The administration ends the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by defining them away. Instead of fighting a global war on terror, our sons and daughters are risking their lives in an "overseas contingency operation."

President Obama has proven to be a master campaigner and speaker as he reads from his teleprompter. He's learned the power of words and knows you can control the debate by getting your opponents to use your terminology...

We give tax "cuts" to people who don't pay taxes, spending is "investing," wars are no longer wars but rather "overseas contingency operations" and the people who tried to kill Americans on and off the battlefield are not "enemy combatants."...

In a memo e-mailed to Pentagon staff members this week, the Defense Department's office of security review said that "this administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror.' Please use 'Overseas Contingency Operation.' " As Gen. Sherman once said, overseas contingency operations are hell.

Recently the Justice Department announced in a court filing that it was dropping the term "enemy combatant." No particular substitute was provided, only the explanation that in the future only those who provided "substantial support" to terrorist groups would be detained, not those who "provide unwitting or insignificant support" to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

How can any support of terrorism ever be "insignificant"? Was 9/11 al-Qaida's version of an "overseas contingency operation"?

It was not terrorism, at least in the eyes of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. It was a "man-caused disaster" — you know, just like Pearl Harbor.