Don't you just love it? Buchanan gets accused of skewing facts by those who offer nothing more than their own implausible views of history.
You can arguably disagree to the purpose of the banner by just ignoring why the people that put if up said they put it up.
It's politics, so those people may not be telling the whole truth. Bush's press people could have purposely put him in front of the banner even if it wasn't the intent of the people who put the banner up.
That's still focusing on details without looking at the whole picture.
The banner said mission accomplished, and the speech talked about the end of major combat opperations in Iraq.
However, he also said in his speech that the fighting was far from over.
Buchanan purposely takes a banner in the background, not even Bush's own words, out of the context of the speech he gave, and uses that to make it sound like Bush said that the war was over after 3 weeks.
That's a dishonest portrayal of someone he disagrees with.
Buchanan has ever right to disagree with Bush. He probably even has a few good points. However if he can't criticize him honestly and with integrity, I don't have much respect for him, and his words better have a lot of merrit on their own, because he's detracting from their credibility with his delivery.
Do his words have merrit? Well, it's basically a lot of pessimistic ranting and armchair quarterbacking without any real solutions.
It's the criticize the solutions of others and say we should solve our problems by doing nothing attitude that just lets problems grow.
He could have just said I'm an isolationist and my solution is to close our borders and ignore the rest of the world as possible. It would have been a lot more honest.
I would think that the purpose of making a political comment is to sway those that disagree with you. His comments are just badmouthing those he disagrees with while not being entirely forthright while doing so.
That makes for a nice rallying cry for the Bush bashers, but it's not likely to convince anyone to change their views, and it is likely to lose him the respect of those that don't agree with him.
It's awfully hard to change someone's view on things once you lose their respect.