| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Harry Hope" |
| Date: |
05 Nov 2003 11:13:02 PM |
| Object: |
Bush ignores deaths of our troops, but has time for endless fundraisers. |
From The New York Times, 11/6/03:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/06/opinion/06DOWD.html
Death Be not Loud
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
Who can blame poor President Bush?
Look at his terrible dilemma.
There are those who say the chief executive should have come out of
his Texas ranch house and articulated and assuaged the sorrow and
outrage and anxiety the nation was feeling on Sunday after the
deadliest day in Iraq in seven months.
An attack on a Chinook helicopter had killed 15 American soldiers, 13
men and 2 women, and wounded 21.
There are those who say Mr. Bush should have emulated Rudy Giuliani's
empathetic leadership after 9/11, or Dad's in the first gulf war, and
attended some of the funerals of the 379 Americans killed in Iraq.
Or one.
Maybe the one for Specialist Darryl Dent, the 21-year-old National
Guard officer from Washington who died outside Baghdad in late August
when a bomb struck his truck while he was delivering mail to troops.
His funeral was held at a Baptist church three miles from the White
House.
But let's look at it from the president's point of view: if he grieves
more publicly or concretely, if he addresses every instance of bad
news, like the hideous specter of Iraqis' celebrating the downing of
the Chinook, he will simply remind people of what's going on in Iraq.
So it's understandable why, going into his re-election campaign, Mr.
Bush wouldn't want to underscore that young Americans keep getting
whacked over there, and we don't know who is doing it or how to stop
it.
The White House is cleverly trying to distance Mr. Bush from the messy
problem of flesh-and-blood soldiers with real names dying nearly every
day, while linking him to the heroic task of fighting global terror.
It's better to keep it vague, to talk about the "important cause" and
the "brave defenders" of liberty.
If he gets more explicit, or allows the flag-draped coffins of fallen
heroes to be photographed coming home, it will just remind people that
the administration said this would be easy, and it's teeth-grindingly
hard.
And that the administration vowed to get Osama and Saddam and W.M.D.,
and hasn't.
And that the Bush team that hyped the presence of Al Qaeda in Iraq has
now created an Al Qaeda presence in Iraq.
And that there was no decent plan for the occupation or for financing
one, no plan for rotating or supporting troops stretched too thin to
guard ammunition caches or police a fractious society, and no plan for
getting out.
As the White House points out, Mr. Bush cannot fairly pick and choose
which memorial services to go to, or which deaths to speak of.
"If a helicopter were hit an hour later, after he came out and spoke,
should he come out again?" Dan Bartlett, the White House
communications director, told The Times's Elisabeth Bumiller,
explaining Mr. Bush's silence after the Chinook crash.
The public, he added, "wants the commander in chief to have proper
perspective, and keep his eye on the big picture and the ball."
The ball for fall is fund-raising.
President Bush has been going full throttle since summer, spending
several days a week flying around the country, hitting up rich
Republicans for $2,000 checks.
He has raised $90 million so far out of the $175 million he plans to
spend on a primary campaign in which he has no opponent.
At fund-raisers, Mr. Bush prefers to talk about the uptick in the
economy, not the downtick in Iraq.
On Monday, arriving for a fund-raiser in Birmingham, he was upbeat,
not somber.
As Mike Allen of The Washington Post reported in his pool report, "The
president, who gave his usual salute as he stepped off Marine One,
appeared to start the day in a fabulous mood. . . . An Alabama
reporter who was under the wing shouted, `How long will U.S. troops be
in Iraq?' The president gave him an unappreciative look."
Raising $1.8 million at lunch, he stuck to the line that "we are
aggressively striking the terrorists in Iraq, defeating them there so
we will not have to face them in our own country."
He didn't want to depress the donors by mentioning the big news story,
the loss of 15 American soldiers, or sour the mood by conceding the
obvious, that the swelling horde of terrorists fighting us there will
not prevent terrorists from coming after us here.
Maybe we should all be like President Bush and not read the papers so
we don't get worn down either.
Perhaps the solution to Mr. Bush's quandary is to coordinate his
schedule so he can go to cities where he can attend both fund-raisers
and funerals.
The law of averages suggests it shouldn't be hard.
______________________________________________________
From The New York Times, 9/27/99
http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/092799wh-gop-bush.html
Ex-Lawmaker Says He Helped Bush Join the Guard in Vietnam War
From The New York Times, 9/28/99:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/092899wh-gop-bush.html
Texan Questioned on Role in Helping Bush Join National Guard
http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=216
While Americans were dying in Vietnam and demonstrating in America,
our hawkish President did neither.
Harry
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