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For Bush, It's Game Time
Washington Post ^ | 02/08/04 | George F. Will

Posted on 02/07/2004 2:37:19 PM PST by Pokey78

After this winter of his discontent, the president needs spring training. He is far from midseason form, and his accumulating errors are undermining the premise of his reelection campaign, which is: Wartime demands hard choices and sacrifices, and a president who is steady, measured and believable.

Rhetorical carelessness and overreaching began before the war, when various administration officials ignored Mark Twain's warning that the difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning bug and lightning. It would have been much better if the president and others, speaking about Iraqi weapons, had said "we believe" rather than "we know."

After the war, in May, on Polish television, President Bush said, "We found the weapons of mass destruction. You know, we found biological laboratories." No, we did not. "So what's the difference?" said the president in December about the failure to find WMDs, because "if [Saddam Hussein] were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger." Such casualness, which would be alarming in any president, is especially so in one whose vaulting foreign policy ambitions have turned his first term into Woodrow Wilson's third term, devoted to planting democracy and "universal values" in hitherto inhospitable places.

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...


TOPICS: Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: bush43; georgefwill

1 posted on 02/07/2004 2:37:19 PM PST by Pokey78
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To: Pokey78
I just built this set of links:

__________________________________________________________________________________________

!

Some serious reading:

PRESIDENT CLINTON VIDEO, December 16, 1998 Sadaam has nuclear arms, poison gas/bio weapons.

Statement of Senator John D. Rockefeller IV - On the Iraq Resolution - October 10, 2002

Remarks of Senator John Kerry on Iraq | October 09, 2002 |

Larry Elder: Were we misled? (about Iraq's WMD)

2 posted on 02/07/2004 2:46:31 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach (The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States - and war is what they got!!!!)
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To: Pokey78
Wow, what a great column! There is truth to what he said. Lucky for us the Dems are being so goofy and blindly striking out at Bush with stupid insults and old charges like the AWOL thing. All this is just boob bait for the Bush haters. Serious independent voters ignore it and probably don't think either Bush or Kerry look that good right now. So Bush has a chance to knuckle down and get back on track which he needs to do.
3 posted on 02/07/2004 3:00:37 PM PST by DestroytheDemocrats
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To: Pokey78
But if the president is to win a second term, and if it is to be worth winning, he must begin again to speak plainly and accurately, not just less foolishly than the make-believe Bryans.

Nicely done. A stinging critique of the Bush Administration's most serious flaws.

4 posted on 02/07/2004 3:34:02 PM PST by Huck (Where there's smoke, there's mirrors.)
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To: GraniteStateConservative
check this column out
5 posted on 02/07/2004 3:34:29 PM PST by Huck (Where there's smoke, there's mirrors.)
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To: Pokey78
Leave it to George Will to write a column based on reality and not emotion.

Is the white house staff blind or arrogant that they can't see Dubya's shortcomings?

6 posted on 02/07/2004 4:09:35 PM PST by varon
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To: Pokey78
This president's certitude that $400 billion "is enough to meet our commitments" for 10 years under the new Medicare prescription drug entitlement was followed by a one-third upward revision of the estimate.

Demonstrating....?

It is surreal for a Republican president to submit a budget to a Republican-controlled Congress and have Republican legislators vow to remove the "waste" that he has included and that they have hitherto funded.

GWB has done great harm to the principles and perception of the Republican Party

Two post-1945 elections -- one a landslide, one a cliffhanger -- produced dramatic spending surges. Lyndon Johnson's 1964 rout of Barry Goldwater created in Congress the first liberal legislating majority since 1938. Pent-up liberal demands produced, among much else, Medicare. There is no such obvious explanation for the spending surge since 2000, other than the possibility that deficits are one way "compassionate conservatism" defines itself.

GWB has been an enormous disappointment.

7 posted on 02/07/2004 4:10:16 PM PST by RJCogburn ("Ya shot him in the lip ?".......Emmitt Quincy)
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To: Pokey78
Wartime demands hard choices and sacrifices, and a president who is steady, measured and believable.

Will has read my mind.





Californians: click on image for more info

8 posted on 02/07/2004 5:42:26 PM PST by hotpotato
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To: hotpotato
bump
9 posted on 02/07/2004 7:35:45 PM PST by foreverfree
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To: Pokey78
In the last year of Bush's second term, or of John Kerry's first...

Sobering thought.

10 posted on 02/07/2004 8:45:14 PM PST by Prodigal Son
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To: Huck
Thanks. It's spot on. Carelessness is the perfect way to describe it.
11 posted on 02/08/2004 6:18:06 PM PST by GraniteStateConservative ("You can dip a pecan in gold, but it's still a pecan"-- Deep Thoughts by JC Watts)
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To: RJCogburn
One party tax and spends. The other just spends. What a choice, eh?
12 posted on 02/08/2004 6:19:35 PM PST by GraniteStateConservative ("You can dip a pecan in gold, but it's still a pecan"-- Deep Thoughts by JC Watts)
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To: GraniteStateConservative
I thought so too. And this after a recent column where Will tried to sell GWB's big gubmint as "stong government." He eulogized limited government and fiscal restraint.
13 posted on 02/08/2004 6:29:18 PM PST by Huck (Where there's smoke, there's mirrors.)
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To: GraniteStateConservative
If George Will is worried then we all better start worrying. Losing the Whitehouse would be bad but not half as bad as losing the Senate and House.
14 posted on 02/08/2004 6:30:22 PM PST by linn37 (Have you hugged your Phlebotomist today?)
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