If I’m lying, you’re dying: Pres. Bush was caught rewriting recent history in a speech he gave Thursday to the troops at Ft. Benning, Georgia, some of whom are preparing for their third deployment to Iraq. Here is the transcript of the president’s load of bull:
“The [Iraqi] Prime Minister came and said, look, I understand we’ve got to do something about this violence, and here is what I suggest we do. Our commanders looked at it, helped fine-tune it so it would work. . . .
“The commanders on the ground in Iraq, people who I listen to — by the way, that’s what you want your Commander-in-Chief to do. You don’t want decisions being made based upon politics, or focus groups, or political polls. You want your military decisions being made by military experts. And they analyzed the plan and they said to me, and to the Iraqi government, this won’t work unless we help them. There needs to be a bigger presence. . . .
“And so our commanders looked at the plan and said, Mr. President, it’s not going to work until — unless we support — provide more troops. And so last night I told the country that I’ve committed an additional — a little over 20,000 more troops, five brigades of which will be in Baghdad.”
Meanwhile, back in reality, the facts are quite different. The strategy of escalating the war came from the West Wing, not the Iraqi leadership or Bush’s generals:
[A Washington Post story Wednesday] made it abundantly clear that adding U.S. troops was not an idea that emerged from the American commanders — nor, for that matter, from the Iraqis.
And, as it turns out, two stories in this morning’s New York Times add to the evidence: “A narrative pieced together from interviews with participants and from public testimony suggests that through much of the process, generals who had been on the ground in Iraq during the past year had favored that the new strategy begin with a substantially smaller force than the one that President Bush announced to the nation on Wednesday night. In the end, it was Mr. Bush who appeared to drive his commanders along to the conclusion that more troops were needed.”
Not only were the Iraqis not involved in creating the plan, they are not happy about it, according to another Times report:
So, not surprisingly: “Iraq’s Shiite-led government offered only a grudging endorsement on Thursday of President Bush’s proposal to deploy more than 20,000 additional troops in an effort to curb sectarian violence and regain control of Baghdad. The tepid response immediately raised questions about whether the government would make a good-faith effort to prosecute the new war plan.”
Where was the White House press corps on this? Didn’t anyone in that elite corps of journalists know the facts about the origins of the escalation?
Or maybe the president lies so often, they’re inured to it.
Here we have one branch of the Traditional Media reporting the true facts on the ground only to have the elite crew in the White House press corps ignore it when the president lies about these same facts to the very uniformed military personnel he intends to send into harm’s way.
This article must have struck a nerve. We have troll here very busily trying to change the subject away from the fact that the Commander and Chief of the United States stood before his troops and relayed to them a set of facts that were untrue.
There are so few members of the cult of Bush Lovers left that we should feel honored to have one here demonstrating his or her skills at the patented Rove/Limbagh “spin ‘n smear” tap-dancing two-step.
About WMD: We had all better hope Bush was lying when he said Saddam had the weapons in 2002. If Bush was not lying — if he truly believed Saddam had chemical and biological weapons waiting on the skeleton crew he sent to invade in 2002, then he is beyond incompetent, and should be tried for gross dereliction of duty.
But he was lying — he knew the weapons weren’t there. He “fixed” the intelligence around his rationale for war. Remember that the UN inspectors in the late 1990s had accounted for 95% of the weapons, all of which had been destroyed. Bush, Cheney and Rice certainly knew that Iraq had no (zero) nuclear capaiblities when they warned us about “smoking guns being mushroom clouds.” They were lying. There was not a shred of credible evidence anywhere that Iraq had nuclear capabilities.
(Imagine for a moment what would have happened if Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter had invaded a country based on bad intel. The Traditional Media would have savaged them, for starters. Impeachment would have been a certainty. And rightly so. When our presidents make monumental mistakes — and none has made ghastlier mistakes than Bush — they should be held acountable in every possible way.)
Bush’s main motivation in invading Iraq was his personal, aristocratic desire to be a “wartime president” because being at war would give him carte blanche to consolidate the security state (and thereby enrich his cohorts in the oligarchy). He also knew being a war president would help him get reelected in 2004. Beyond that, it’s likely he hadn’t given much thought to how to “win” in Iraq. He intended for us to be there for the next 50 years so the deaths of thousands of people and the expenditures of billions of dollars in the short term were just nuisances along the way of his personal path to glory. Next stop: Mount Rushmore.
Bush doesn’t give a whit for the U.S. military. He is a sociopath who sends people to die for no other reason that to further his own personal and political goals.
Look at his own military service, such as it was. He was given a cushy slot in the “Champagne” team of Texas Air National Guard that had zero chance of being sent to Vietnam. He was often undisciplined and unruly, was apparently drunk all the time (probably telling fart jokes) and chasing after what he so eloquently called “pussy.” There is a rumor he damaged a fighter jet on landing by missing the runway because he was hungover or still high on coke. He got a girl pregnant (but Daddy paid for the abortion). Also was apparenlty busted for cocaine but got off with a slap on the wrist — did some comunity service time in Houston. He was transferred to Alabama so he could work on a Republican senate campaign, and made such a loutish impression that the local women called him “the Texas Souffle” — all puffed up but nothing but air inside. Finally, he failed repeatedly to show up for the new mandatory drug tests required of all fighter pilots, but was saved from a dishonorable discharge by his father’s connections. There has been a sizable cash reward available for many years to anyone who can verify that George W. Bush completed his TANG tour of duty but not one person has come forward.
The loss of support for Bush and the GOP has been reported in Military Times and elsewhere:
The fact is, Bush’s escalation has been in the works since last fall. All of the photo-ops of Bush “conferring” with his advisers, the Iraq Study Group, the meeting with Dem leaders after the election, it was all a show — a gag. None of it mattered because escalation is Bush’s only choice. His legacy is at stake. If he can quell the violence there for the last six months he’s in office, he can declare a false victory, go home to Crawford and work on his abs.
He’ll leave it to the next president to handle it when Iraq explodes again — and to the writers of history books to determine whether he was the Worst President Ever, or merely the second to worst under James Buchanan.
Contrary to your belief, I am not a Bush lover – he has been a large disappointment to me personally.
HEY P 2 OIL and HALIBURTON are the two good reason he has just personal gains! on his mind not counting the vendetta of hussin threatening his dad! THAT NO GOOD PIECE OF SHIT TOO! YOU MUST BE A REPUG——WAKE UP AND SMELL THE ROSES AND GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF SHIT!