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Dan wrote:
Best Economy Yet!

Best Bush Yet!

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glencar wrote:
Imagine how bad it'd be with a Dem/Dum!

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Joey wrote:


Dan ...........

You shall NOT be greeted this fall


www.thepolicetour.com

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Dan wrote:


Where you flying to?

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nankerphelge wrote:

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Zack wrote:
My brother in law writes this column for two papers in Vermont. This is his column for this Sunday.

Rutland Herald and Montpelier Times Argus
Sunday September 9th, 2007
Perspective Section

This Just In
By Barrie Dunsmore

George W. Bush: The Incredible President

The American vernacular of the past half century has been indelibly shaped by the advertising industry, particularly by what I call its adjective inflation. It’s not enough that a product be “good.” It would have to be “great,” then “spectacular.” Nowadays “awesome” has become a favorite. Somewhere along that road, the word “incredible”, more often than not came to be used as a synonym for “amazing.” But you can look it up- in Webster’s or the Oxford Dictionary - and the first definition you will find is “not to be believed.” It is that definition that I have in mind when I refer to President George W. Bush as “the incredible president.”

As I watched and listened to Mr. Bush during his latest stop-over in Iraq last week, it reminded me of another presidential trip to a war zone some forty years ago. As he was escalating the American involvement in the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson decided to visit the troops. Then as now, there were few places a president could safely go in a country at war. Johnson went to the American naval base at Cam Ranh Bay, far removed from Saigon - just as Bush went to a remote American air base in Al Anbar province, far away from Baghdad . The visits were notably similar. Each president praised his troops for their bravery and sacrifices and urged them on to victory. Both presidents were loudly cheered. In such a setting, what else could a soldier do?

But pictures of smiling troops, laughing it up with their president can be deceiving, as author Robert Caro wrote in “Means of Ascent” the third volume of his acclaimed biography of Lyndon Johnson. During the 1964 presidential campaign, Johnson promised over and over, “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” However, by the spring of 1965, Johnson made the fateful decision to do just that, although he did so secretly and “warned participants in a crucial meeting at the White House that there was to be no mention of the new strategy to the press.” It took two months to leak out. With that, in Caro’s words, “A new phrase –‘Credibility Gap’ – entered American political dialogue. It was printed in headlines, and on buttons, even on buttons pinned to flak jackets; men who had been sent to Vietnam on Lyndon Johnson’s orders went into action wearing a button –‘Ambushed at Credibility Gap’- that called their Commander-in-Chief a liar.”

The historian Michael Beschloss has also written about Johnson and Vietnam based on discoveries he made while reviewing LBJ’s White House tapes (which never received the attention of Richard Nixon’s but contain some juicy material.) Beschloss said recently, “When he was sending American boys and women to Vietnam and saying ‘Nail the coon skin on the wall’ and ‘America wins the war she fights,’ in private he was saying, ‘I don’t think we can win this war.’ and ‘I can’t think of anything worse than losing the war in Vietnam and I don’t see any way that we can win.’”

It was Johnson’s deep seated doubts that appear to set him apart from the current president, who in spite of all that has happened, apparently has no doubts at all about his war of choice. That said, considering the highly questionable and ever changing rationales for the Iraq war, the continuing bad judgments and mismanagement of the more than four years of occupation, the misrepresentations of what was going wrong and why – along with an almost flawless record of being consistently wrong in his predictions for Iraq - Bush’s “credibility gap” is probably greater than Johnson’s.

Just a small example of that gap. When the president met with reporters aboard Air Force One on the flight from Iraq to Australia , he was asked what he thought the impact of his surprise visit to Iraq might have on the upcoming Iraq debate in Congress. Mr. Bush said, apparently with a straight face, “I don’t think a presidential visit will cause people to vote one way or the other.” If you believed that, Mr. President, why on earth did you and virtually every top person in the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department, work for the past six weeks to make this deliberately dramatic and logistically very complicated trip happen? The honest answer would have been, ‘I would hope that my visit will help to make my administration’s case for extending the troop surge but I don’t know if it will or not.’ However this administration is so accustomed to fudging the truth that it appears incapable of giving an honest answer to even the simplest question- much less the hard ones. And it seems to me that this total lack of credibility has to be the context for the current debate about future policy in Iraq .

Using that context, let’s examine what appeared in the major media outlets to be the big story of the president’s Iraq visit - his suggestion that if the security situation in Iraq continues to improve “it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces.” Bush said this while on the ground in Iraq . When asked about it later on his flight to Australia , the president allowed that while no decisions have been made about troop withdrawal, because of improvements in Iraqi security he could now “speculate on the hypothetical.” Think about that phrase for a moment. What does it actually mean? In fact, it doesn’t matter - because the president has no intention of cutting back forces, at least not before next April when major U.S. Army troop rotations are scheduled. What the White House wanted with its hint of possible force reductions was precisely what it got – hopeful headlines that could alter the political dynamic in Washington .

As the Note, the ABC News on-line daily political analysis explained, “The President’s willingness to ‘speculate on the hypothetical’ is critical to his party’s chances of holding the White House. While Republican ‘08ers (presidential candidates) cannot afford to be closely identified with a protracted war from the standpoint of the general election, they also cannot afford to alienate the sizable bloc of GOP primary voters who still support President Bush. By raising the prospect of ‘fewer American forces’ in Iraq , President Bush makes it possible for Republican (candidates) to associate themselves more closely with change.” To support that analysis the Note continued, “(Republican presidential candidate Mitt) Romney occupied the new space given to him by the president by indicating for the first time that he thinks the U.S. can shift to a support role in Iraq at some point in 2008.”

In other words, President Bush’s hints of troop cuts were nothing more than a calculated tactical ploy directly tied to domestic American politics – and especially to improve his chances for congressional Republican support to continue his “surge” policy. That became even more obvious when two days after his stop in Iraq , senior Bush officials told the Associated Press that the president “is unlikely to order more than a symbolic cut in troops before the end of the year.”

And so, even when you think this president is saying something that most American’s eagerly want to hear – that more than a few of their fighting men and women might soon be coming home – he is incredible. Remember, that means he cannot be believed.

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Joey wrote:



I like this !!!!!!!!



Bushie43 is doing to the country what he did to the Texas Rangers and his Daddy's oil company ......running it RIGHT into the ground .

YIKES !!!!!


Developing .....................


Shiver ..................

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Dan wrote:
I read all 3 Caro books and none of them really deal with the presidency at all. That's supposed to be the 4th book, I am hoping it sees the light.

And does anyone really care about this debt stuff? At least those of us smart enough to not have kids?

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Joey wrote:
" And in just a few short weeks, the average atmposheric temperature will reach a point that a giant category TEN hurricane will develop and destroy us all.

So our national debt and other such measures of our economy will become essentially meaningless."

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nankerphelge wrote:
"Now listen close everybody, this is important and very, very complicated.

The trapping of greenhouse gasses within the Earth's atmosphere is leading to warmer ocean water, which in turn fuels bigger and badder hurricanes.

And in just a few short weeks, the average atmposheric temperature will reach a point that a giant category TEN hurricane will develop and destroy us all.

So our national debt and other such measures of our economy will become essentially meaningless."

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Martha wrote:
Joey,

Did you forget?

Today is our anniversary.....silly.

We met on this day last year, for a cuppa tea.

I am thinking of you.....:-)

and the rising debt...:-(

love and hugs,
Martha

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