Posted on 05/09/2003 10:22:23 PM PDT by GOPcapitalist
From the dawn of their species, White House press secretaries have sought to cast their boss in a positive light. Perhaps not since Ron Zeigler made inoperative statements on behalf of Richard Nixon, however, has a press secretary exhibited such a brazen and cavalier disregard for the facts.
Before President Bush rode a Navy jet onto the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, press secretary Ari Fleischer informed the world, inaccurately, that the carrier would be hundreds of miles offshore. That distance over water, Fleischer suggested, would be too long for the president to safely make the hop in a slower, cheaper helicopter with limited range.
As President Bush flew on Air Force One from Washington toward California for his rendezvous with the Navy Viking jet, Fleischer claimed, implausibly, that he had no idea how far offshore the carrier was steaming and could not get the answer.
At the time Bush landed on the carrier and prepared to address the nation, the ship was less than 40 miles from shore. White House officials advised the press and television networks, falsely, that the carrier was about 100 miles offshore. The officials knew the truth, because they manipulated the television camera angles for fear the coastline might be visible.
Later, when late-night comedians began to ridicule the president's exploits in naval aviation, and some reporters and commentators questioned the cost and prudence of the exercise, Fleischer said the distance never mattered, that the president wanted to take the jet no matter what. As usual, Fleischer did not satisfactorily explain why he and his associates repeatedly misled the public earlier.
President Bush is commander in chief and has the power to visit military units and commandeer warplanes as he pleases. Bush says he enjoyed the carrier experience, was glad he made the trip and had no regrets.
Given the president's confidence and ease with his decision, what motive would the president's aides have to misrepresent the facts?
Perhaps Fleischer and other aides spin stories out of a sense of duty and a belief that the unadorned facts do not serve this administration well. Perhaps they do so out of habit, a habit they find hard to break.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
Liars.
You might see coastal lights at night at 40 miles out.
Not 40 miles offshore in bright daylight.
The cost of flying the Viking was no more than the cost of a helicopter because the Viking had to be flown back to the ship anyway.
I'm afraid these poor liberals are making fools of themselves. They think the rest of the country is as ignorant about military matters as they are. They're stirring this thing up, the TV keeps playing over and over and over again the wonderful pictures of the President in the flight suit, and there are 5,000 men and women who just got off that ship telling the stories to their friends and families. That truth will spread like wildfire and the dems will just look more stupid to the middle.
Karl Rove couldn't have dreamed of anything this good. As a matter of fact, he might just be the one who whispered this "brilliant idea" to the poor dumb dems.
I'm encouraged by this newspaper's sudden concern for our troops and their being reunited with their families without delay. I wonder what their reaction was to the previous president closing down a whole airport for a couple of hours while he got an expensive haircut?
A cursory search of the net leads me to a formula for calculating to distance to the horizon across water as:
1.17 times the square root of your height of eye = Distance to the horizon in nautical miles
Let us assume that the flight deck on a carrier is 100ft. and let us also assume that there is some object on the shoreline that measures 500 ft. Using the formula above we could calculate that the shoreline object distance to be :
x = 1.17 * sqrt(100+500)
x = 1.17 * 24.50
x = 28.66 nautical miles
Conversely, using 40 miles we can calculate the minimum height of an object on shore that can be seen from the flight deck as such:
40 = 1.17 * sqrt(x-100)
40/1.17 = sqrt(x-100)/1.17
(34.19)^2 = (sqrt(x-100) )^2
1168.82168 = x-100
1068.82168 = x
Therefore, the object on on shore would need to be 1069ft tall in order to be seen from 40 miles out.
I don't know the terrain of the shoreline in the area where the carrier was located so can anyone tell me if there could be objects or terrain features of that height in the area? or is my math wrong?
It is a thing of pristine beauty to watch the Leftists spit venom over Bush's carrier speech. This is even more satisfying than hearing an ex-girlfriend complain that my beautiful wife only buys her shoes at a discount store, as in, whining about a minor detail only reminds people of the smallness of the whiner in question as well as the impressiveness of the one being attacked.
I remember that.
Yeah, this paper is a lying Democrat Party organ which doesn't even care to disguise its sympathies. How'd you like that sneaky crack near the end where the editors remark that Bush can "commandeer warplanes as he pleases"? LOL, I bet these sick scumbags at the Houston Chronicle just worship that cow Molly Ivins.
Regards,
LH
Probably so. They run her screeds as an "online exclusive." A few years ago somebody found out and publicized that the Chronicle had donated several thousand dollars annually to Houston Planned Parenthood in their disclosure reports. A few of us looked again out of curiosity a month or two ago, and sure enough they're still doing it. There are media outlets all over the country with blatant political biases, but not many of them are so brazen about it that they openly donate money to left wing political interest groups. The Houston Chronicle is one such paper.
He held a letter of agreement to hold them to their word.
Funny that they talk of presidential press secretaries lying. Joe Lockhart said that Clinton would have been crucified by conservatives "if" he'd ever done such a thing. He did. Time and time again. There are photos of him on the deck of the USS Roosevelt in uniform. Well, he didn't fly a plane but that's because as "smart" as he is, he doesn't know how.
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