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Let’s look at the words and the actual results!
He dared dress up in a Top Gun outfit for an unnecessary jet flight to a U.S. aircraft carrier on May 1 2003 to declare victory over Iraq! The USS Abraham Lincoln emblazoned the sign “Mission Accomplished”. This had to give hope to all of our U.S. soldiers that they would soon be back in the warm embrace of their loving families.
Anyone who has had a child die in Iraq, after the poseur proclaimed “Bring em on”, has the deepest sympathies of everyone in the country. As does every family who has had a child making disparaging comments regarding both 43 and Rumsfeld over their ever elongating deployment in the Iraq guerilla warfare hell-hole.
Senator Kerry, among other Democrats, wanted Bush to wait until we had international support for this war. Both Senators Kennedy and Byrd pleaded for a second Congressional resolution because the U.N. Inspectors should have been allowed to complete its work. Senator Graham voted against the Congressional Iraqi Resolution because his correct prognosis was that our involvement in Iraq would detract from the resources we could utilize in the fight against terrorism.
If we had achieved a worldwide coalition then we wouldn’t be paying such a huge price--most importantly in the close quarter’s assassinations of our most precious resource, our young men and women, and in the tremendous financial cost of this occupation.
Losing lives for a questionable war, such as Iraq, is horrible. That is not the only war in his “everlasting war against terrorism” which is going atrociously.
43 frequently struts and proudly proclaims that he has driven out the Taliban and al-Qaeda from Afghanistan. In an Afghan News Network story of July 21, 2003 titled,”US-led forces kill up to 24 people who attacked a coalition convoy”, this quote, “Some 19 months after the fall of the hardline Taliban regime, an 11,500 strong US-led coalition is pursuing members of the militia and its al-Qaeda allies who continue to launch attacks, mainly in the southeastern border region”, doesn’t correspond to that allegation.
Let’s look at some domestic policies. In these matters are voters are paying the price in reduced services being provided by the U.S. government.
43 said he was making us more secure from terrorist threats. "The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism," Rand Beers, a former special assistant to the president, told the Washington Post in an interview published June 16th 2003.
After working at the National Security Council for 35 years, under presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton, Beers, 60, had been the main counter-terrorism advisor from August until his resignation in March of 2003.
Did you know that Senate Democrats are demanding that more homeland security money be added to the president's supplemental war budget? Democratic leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said on April 1, 2003 that the president's $74.7 billion dollar supplemental budget request doesn't spend enough on homeland security, including beefed-up safety measures at chemical plants.
"This supplemental budget fails to reflect the reality of the home front," said Daschle. "States, cities and towns remain extremely vulnerable to terrorist attack and are ill-equipped to deal with this challenge."
"When it comes to this administration and homeland security, we don't need any more rhetoric, we don't need any more photo ops; we need more dollars," said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
43 said he would never touch the “Social Security lockbox”. In a USA TODAY article of February 05, 2002 “Social Security lockbox is no more” by Jonathan Weisman, this quote, “The Social Security lockbox hasn't just been picked. It's been obliterated. President Bush's budget request for fiscal year 2003 projects that $999 billion of surplus Social Security taxes will be diverted to other government programs through 2007, a diversion that politicians from both parties had vowed to avoid.”
43 said that his 2 tax cuts, the latest being labeled the “Jobs and Growth Reconciliation Tax Act of 2003” would reduce the unemployment rolls and strengthen the economy!
This part of Paul Krugman’s article of May 9th, 2003 “Into the Sunset” addresses the deceitful job creation aspect of this tax cut #2 in this quote, “Finally, as in 2001, we're being told that this tax cut will create lots of jobs. But why should we believe that? It's hard to find an independent economist who thinks that the Bush proposal would create the 1.4 million jobs claimed by the administration …….And bear in mind that Bush-style tax cuts now have a track record. Of the 2.1 million jobs lost over the past two years, 1.7 million vanished after the passage of the 2001 tax cut.”
I read another, May 27, 2003, article by Paul Krugman, "Stating the Obvious". If his thesis is correct then the current economic structure of the U.S. is being challenged by 43's administration. Krugman writes, ""The lunatics are now in charge of the asylum." So wrote the normally staid Financial Times, traditionally the voice of solid British business opinion, when surveying last week's tax bill. Indeed, the legislation is doubly absurd: the gimmicks used to make an $800-billion-plus tax cut carry an official price tag of only $320 billion are a joke, yet the cost without the gimmicks is so large that the nation can't possibly afford it while keeping its other promises".
That sounds bad, but Krugman predicts a destruction of the U.S. economy so thorough that the "social safety net built up over the past 70 years" vanishes. He hypothesizes that this is a calculated strategy. He attributes this dishonorable plan to laziness by moderates and liberals and further states, "But the people now running America aren't conservatives: they're radicals who want to do away with the social and economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are concocting may give them the excuse they need. The Financial Times, it seems, now understands what's going on, but when will the public wake up?"
The federal debt, measured against the size of the overall economy, is just about to reach the size it was before the huge buildup of debt in the 1980s, according to the Concord Coalition, a budget watchdog organization.
43 said he would he would “Leave No Child Behind”, but the bill he wanted passed in this arena would have so vastly underfunded the U.S. education system that every child would be at a disadvantage!
I’ve found a few easily discernible patterns here. When Bush left Texas the children in his state ranked next to last in nationwide testing, and the state’s budget was vastly in debt because he gave a tax cut to his contributors. A leopard can’t change his stripes and any voter who didn’t expend due diligence in casting a vote for 43 got what they asked for when they voted him in!
Bob Connors
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