Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Bush to Reporters: Lighten Up
As seen at today's Best of the Web, this remarkable anecdote from Holly Bailey, writing in Newsweek:
Wow.I Have Had My Differences With Members of the Press. But it's Nothing That Burying them Under Tons of Earth Won't Solve
Does President Bush have it in for the press corps? Touring a Caterpillar factory in Peoria, Ill., the Commander in Chief got behind the wheel of a giant tractor and played chicken with a few wayward reporters. Wearing a pair of stylish safety glasses--at least more stylish than most safety glasses--Bush got a mini-tour of the factory before delivering remarks on the economy. "I would suggest moving back," Bush said as he climbed into the cab of a massive D-10 tractor. "I'm about to crank this sucker up." As the engine roared to life, White House staffers tried to steer the press corps to safety, but when the tractor lurched forward, they too were forced to scramble for safety."Get out of the way!" a news photographer yelled. "I think he might run us over!" said another. White House aides tried to herd the reporters the right way without getting run over themselves. Even the Secret Service got involved, as one agent began yelling at reporters to get clear of the tractor. Watching the chaos below, Bush looked out the tractor's window and laughed, steering the massive machine into the spot where most of the press corps had been positioned. The episode lasted about a minute, and Bush was still laughing when he pulled to a stop. He gave reporters a thumbs-up. "If you've never driven a D-10, it's the coolest experience," Bush said afterward. Yeah, almost as much fun as seeing your life flash before your eyes.
Perhaps I'm misjudging the poor woman. But I have a feeling that Mr. Bush's predecessor would not have gotten this treatment; he would have been called "playful", or "carefree", or some such. He certainly would not have received a totally-unfounded accusation involving "burying [people] under tons of earth".
Honestly, I don't think the President was feeling homicidal. I suspect he was just experiencing what many men occasionally do -- hey look, there's a really cool big machine, let's fire it up and drive it around a bit! (In the process, he was also disproving the accusation that used to be standard about him -- that he's "all hat and no cowboy". Clearly, the man doesn't mind getting his hands dirty.)
I mean, have a look at the Wikipedia photo, which Ms. Bailey helpfully links. Doesn't that look like fun?
And frankly... given what the press, Newsweek included, has been writing about him these past six years, I'm glad to hear that he still has a sense of humor.
Of course, if Ms. Bailey finds the Presidential beat too nerve-wracking for her, she could always ask for a transfer. For example, she could cover Dick Cheney's hunting expeditions.
Monday, January 29, 2007
I Support President Bush
It seems to me that I hear those four words far too infrequently these days. For a nation at war, that's just not right.
I support President Bush. Period. No qualifications, no "if only he would...", no "except for" pet peeves.
President Bush is the Commander in Chief of the United States armed forces. Those forces are fighting a war on our behalf, the outcome of which will determine the course of Western civilization for decades to come -- perhaps even centuries to come. If we don't want Islamic sha'aria imposed upon us, if we don't want to have to worry about daily Islamofascist terror attacks at our local supermarkets, then we need to support the President who is fighting these things.
Do I agree with the President on everything? Hell, no! I still cringe every time he says "nucular". "Intelligent design", I firmly believe, is a singularly bad idea. I still don't know what on Earth Bush was thinking with the UAE ports deal, and I'm relieved that the issue was taken out of his hands. The ever-growing Federal Government, which has grown tremendously on Bush's watch, truly alarms me. The list goes on.
But when your very survival is at stake, other issues become secondary. This is not the time to debate a higher minimum wage; rather, we should ensure the long-term survival of a country that can afford such things. And debating the merits of legalized gay marriage seems irrelevant, when we're fighting a war against an ideology that prefers its homosexuals dead.
Orson Scott Card, as is his wont, puts the matter quite well:
I'm a Democrat -- a Scoop Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Joseph Leiberman Democrat. The kind that believes freedom is worth fighting for -- both our freedom of other people's as well.Indeed. We are now hearing, more and more, from both sides of the aisle, about "symbolic resolutions" to express disapproval of President Bush's management of the war, and of our national security. This is the equivalent of a passenger trying to wrestle the controls away from the driver. (Perhaps the passenger is a better driver; perhaps the current crisis could be handled better. But you don't switch drivers in the middle of a crisis, and you don't joggle his elbow; you help as much as you can, and then you stay out of his way.)
The kind that places the interest of the American people and, yes, of the world at large over the temporary political advantage that can be derived from attacking a President in wartime.
So when I watch Democratic leaders completely ignore the security interests of the United States in order to engage in cheap sloganeering ("bring our boys home!") and demagoguery, I am filled with shame and rage.
Are they really so completely ignorant of history that they do not realize the golden opportunity we have, and the disastrous consequences of not seizing it?
. . .
The Left always wants someone to "do something," but never wants to do anything that works. And never wants to admit that President George W. Bush has ever done anything right.
Well, he has; and the Democrats right now are doing something dangerously wrong. Every word they say strengthens and encourages our enemies, while discouraging and weakening our friends and allies in the Middle East. They are the best weapon Al Qaeda and the murderous Iranian and Syrian governments have against us. Every time they open their mouths in their misleading and deceptive attacks on Bush and demands for unilateral withdrawal from Iraq, they are helping ensure the future deaths of Americans and others, at home and abroad.
As Card points out, publicly challenging the President on his wartime leadership is not just speech; it actively emboldens our enemies. Our soldiers in the field are demoralized by knowing that their Congress does not support them or their mission -- and the terrorists see that demoralization, and are encouraged by it. This can, and will, result in the deaths of more American troops.
I can only wonder how our elected representatives, with their impassioned speeches against the President's new plan -- while presenting no reasonable alternative of their own -- would respond, if they only knew that their words made the deaths of Americans more likely, not less, as a direct consequence.
As a result, I have signed the pledge. And I want to declare, now more than ever, unequivocally and without reservation --
I support President Bush.
Do you?
Labels: GWB, U.S. politics
Friday, November 03, 2006
Another "Bush Administration Failure"
And this is a big one -- when the Bush Administration made thousands of Saddam's documents available online, they included some detailed plans for building nuclear weapons.
You know, the Iraqi nuclear weapons that were never a threat to us...
I wouldn't have thought that I'd see both statements in the same article. But here it is, courtesy of news.com:
Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to "leverage the Internet" to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.Admittedly, this is very carefully-worded, so that it doesn't look like it's arguing against itself. But think about it for a moment. The complaints have been loud and unceasing, against the Bush Administration, that we invaded Iraq solely to find WMD (which is untrue), that we didn't find any WMD there (also untrue), that therefore there could not have been any WMD to find (which is a strange claim to make, about a country the size of California, with room to hide all sorts of things)... and that, therefore, Iraq was never a threat to us to begin with, and should never have been invaded.
But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq's secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.
. . .
The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.
. . .
The government had received earlier warnings about the contents of the Web site. Last spring, after the site began posting old Iraqi documents about chemical weapons, United Nations arms-control officials in New York won the withdrawal of a report that gave information on how to make tabun and sarin, nerve agents that kill by causing respiratory failure.The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative publications and politicians, who said that the nation's spy agencies had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March 2003 invasion. With the public increasingly skeptical about the rationale and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees argued that wide analysis and translation of the documents--most of them in Arabic--would reinvigorate the search for clues that Hussein had resumed his unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion. American search teams never found such evidence.
Except that, even if you manage to swallow all that, now we're also hearing criticism of the Bush Administration for mistakenly publishing documents -- Iraqi documents -- that give detailed instructions on preparing tabun, sarin, and rudimentary nuclear weapons. (Sounds like justification to me. Were we supposed to wait until after the weapons were built? Are we expected to believe that Saddam had the blueprints, but never planned to use them... except, maybe, as wallpaper?)
For that matter, some people claim --see the article above -- that the invasion of Iraq is only justified if we can prove that Saddam restarted his WMD development programs after 1991, while UN sanctions were in place. But does that really make sense, now that we know he had blueprints like these sitting on the shelf? The man, and his regime, were a ticking time bomb; all that was in doubt was when the bomb might go off, and whether it was possible to stop him in time.
Don't get me wrong, I definitely think it was a mistake, and a big one, to let these documents out into the open. An understandable mistake, perhaps, given the tremendous volume of the documents -- but still a terrible mistake. (After all, if the CIA doesn't have enough people to vet all those documents, then they should have fixed that problem, long ago. Analyzing top-secret documents is their job, not ours. If the CIA doesn't have enough agents in the field, and doesn't have enough analysts at home, then we really do have to wonder what they do for a living.)
Nonetheless, it makes no sense to criticize the Bush Administration for not finding WMDs, and then to criticize them again for publishing the blueprints of the nonexistent WMDs. Why, that makes about as much sense as criticizing the Administration for permitting North Korea to go nuclear... while at the same time criticizing the Administration for daring to contemplate an attack against Iran before it goes nuclear. (Nobody would say that in the same article, would they?)
UPDATE: Dadmanly has more. And Smash points out that, for once, the New York Times should be applauded for blowing the whistle. I agree.
Labels: GWB, Iraq, journalism, NYT, WMD
