Did you Know There Were No Terrorist Attacks in the U.S. during George W. Bush’s Presidency? [View All]

[Time for change]

The stereotype of the Republican Party as the Party that protects us against external threats of violence is absolutely essential to the agenda and even the continued existence of the Republican Party. It is essential to their ability to feed the military industrial complex with their fraudulent wars, which they pawn off on the American people by leading them to believe that these wars are conducted for the purpose of keeping them safe. And it is essential to their electoral success because they have to have something going for them to weigh against the widely known fact that their economic policies favor the wealthy and are highly unfavorable to ordinary Americans.

So essential is the continuation of this stereotype that Republicans tell blatant lies about anything in order to support it, no matter how easily disproved the lies are. The most ridiculous of these lies is the contention that the most severe terrorist attack on U.S. soil in U.S. history (not to mention the worst invasion of the U.S. mainland in almost 200 years), the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington D.C., did not occur during the presidency of George W. Bush (President from January 2001 to January 2009). Here are some examples:

“We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” – Dana Perino, former Bush Press Secretary, November 24, 2009, on FOX “News”.

“I was there, we inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history.” – Mary Matalin, long time Republican Party political hack and member of the George W. Bush administration, December 27, 2009, on CNN.

“We had no domestic attacks under Bush” – Rudy Giuliani, Mayor of New York City during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City, January 9, 2009, on ABC’s “Good Morning America”.

“We were certainly safe between 2000 and 2008 – I don’t remember any terrorist attacks on American soil during that period of time.” – Eric Bolling, FOX “News” host, July 14, 2011, on FOX “News”.


How are they able to get away with this nonsense?

They are able to get away with these lies for the same reason that they’re able to get away with all their other lies. They know that they will not be called on their lies by the “mainstream” corporate owned news media, through which they spew so many of their lies.

For example, in response to Giuliani’s whopper, “We had no domestic attacks under Bush”, the ABC talking head George Stephanopoulos just sat their and didn’t utter a word of correction. Later, in response to widespread outrage about the incident from progressives, he was forced to apologize:

All of you who have pointed out that I should have pressed him on that misstatement in the moment are right… My mistake, my responsibility.

Some might give him credit for at least apologizing. I don’t give him much credit for that. His inaction was at best a case of supreme incompetence for a presumed journalist, and Stephanopoulos’ past actions leave little doubt that the omission was intentional. In offering his apology he really had no choice. The reaction against his act of supreme incompetence (to give him the benefit of the doubt) was loud enough that refusing to apology would have lost him and ABC a great amount of credibility. The apology was too little, too late.

The Republican Party and the corporate media that supports them operate on the principle that if something is said often enough, people will believe it. Not everyone will believe it. But enough people will believe it, or at least believe that the lies are merely innocent mistakes, to make them highly worthwhile from a political standpoint.


Claiming what they “obviously” meant

Still, one should wonder how, even with a complicit puppet corporate news media, why highly prominent people such as Rudy Giuliani are willing to risk their reputations by spewing such obvious lies. With regard to the September 11 attacks, they have a neat little fallback position in case someone calls them on their lies: They simply imply or outright claim that they really didn’t mean to imply what they said. They obviously meant something else. This is what Rudy Giuliani said when he was called on his whopper about there being no domestic attacks during the Bush administration:

I usually say we had no domestic attacks, no major domestic attack under President Bush since Sept. 11… I did omit the words 'since Sept. 11.' I apologize for that.

He had to admit the mistake and apologize because, like Stephanopoulos, he had to maintain some credibility. Still, the implication of his apology statement, it seems to me, was that he had merely made a minor mistake – that is, there is just a minor difference between a president having no terrorist attacks on his watch and having the most severe terrorist attack in U.S. history on his watch.

But if you work for FOX “News”, you don’t even have to apologize because…. well, FOX “News” doesn’t have any credibility with minimally intelligent people to maintain. This is what Eric Bolling said when he was called on his statement that he didn’t “remember any terrorist attacks on American soil” from 2001 to 2008:

Yesterday, I misspoke when saying that there were no US terror attacks during the Bush years. Obviously, I meant in the aftermath of 9/11, but that is when the radical liberal left pounced on us…. thank you liberals for reminding me how petty you can be.

Oh yes, he obviously meant to say “in the aftermath of 9/11”. Why is that so “obvious”? Clearly, his implication is that the fact that the 9/11 attacks occurred on Bush’s watch is of little or no importance. The fact that the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil in U.S. history occurred on Bush’s watch is of little or no importance because…. well, because everyone knows that Republican presidents keep us safe. The 9/11 attacks themselves don’t count because if they did count, that would contradict and ruin the stereotype that Republicans need to get elected and make their wars. But then, as Bolling says, only petty radical liberal leftists would think that it is important to correct the lie that the 9/11 attacks did not in fact occur on the watch of a Republican president.

Anyhow, even if the 9/11 attacks aren’t counted, it still is not true that terrorist attacks didn’t occur on Bush’s watch. There were the 2001 Anthrax attacks against Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy and several news outlets. There was the 2002 shooting by Hesham Mohamed Hadayet at Los Angeles International Airport, which killed two people and wounded four. There was the shooting spree by John Allen Muhammad and his accomplice. And there was the 2006 incident, in which Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar drove an SUV into nine pedestrians at the University of North Carolina.


The truth

Today’s Republican Party lies with abandon because they know that the “mainstream” corporate media is behind them all the way and will not call them on their lies unless they are forced to. Through their lies and distortions of history they managed to turn the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history into enough of a political plus to get the worst president in U.S. history re-elected to a second term.

Perhaps the most damaging lie Republicans tell today is that FDR’s New Deal didn’t work or, even worse, that it prolonged the Great Depression. Right wingers hate the New Deal because it mostly benefits ordinary Americans and greatly enlarged the U.S. middle class, thereby substantially narrowing the income and wealth gap between the wealthy and the rest of us. That lie can be easily exposed in many ways, perhaps most obviously by looking at unemployment/job creation and GDP during FDR’s presidency. First, consider the unemployment rate, shown in this chart:



Unemployment rate stood at nearly 22% when FDR took office. It declined steadily during his presidency, so that by 1939 it was about 16% – not good, but quite an improvement. Consider how that translated into job creation. During the 80-year period from 1929-2009, Hoover’s presidency was the only one during which jobs were actually lost – though George W. Bush’s two terms came mighty close to zero job growth, and Obama’s first term is still in the red as of this time. Job growth during this 80-year period exceeded 4% during only two of the twenty presidential terms – FDR’s first term (5.3%) and his third term (5.1%). Overall, job creation during the FDR presidencies was the most impressive of all presidents we have had since.

Our Gross Domestic Product, hitting bottom at about the time Roosevelt was sworn into office, soon began a long recovery, as seen in the graph below:



This graph begins at approximately the time of the Stock Market Crash of 1929. You can see that GDP plummeted steeply following the Crash, during a period when Herbert Hoover was President. Hoover was a noted practitioner of laissez-faire economics, which means that he was adamantly opposed to government intervention to end the Depression – and indeed, he steadfastly avoided government intervention, no matter how bad things got.

FDR took office in March 1933. You can see from the graph that the steep slide in GDP was arrested in 1933, and began a steady rise in 1934, so that by 1940 it had nearly reached pre-Crash levels. All of this happened before we entered World War II.

But now we are rapidly heading in the opposite direction, as the Republican Party, with the full support of the corporate media, as well as many Democrats who have been co-opted by the promise of money from wealthy interests, has convinced enough Americans to make a difference that what is good for the wealthy is good for everyone else. Consequently, money that could be used to create jobs, provide life-saving support for the most vulnerable Americans, and educate our youth is instead being squandered with tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals and corporations. The result is rising poverty, a shrinking middle class, and the largest income gap in U.S. history. The American people must learn to see through the right wing lies and propaganda hurled at them before these processes can be reversed.