Pyperkub
5222
After the disaster that was Dick Cheney, I’m all for keeping other Nixon administration folks away from power.
How can republicans keep a straight face and say Bush kept us safe? Whether you think Bush could have done more to prevent 9/11 is a matter of opinion. How well you think Bush dealt with post 9/11 is a matter of opinion. That Bush did not keep us safe during his time as president is not a matter of opinion, it is a fact.
Timex
5224
Blaming Bush for 9/11 is patently absurd. Period.
Nesrie
5225
True, but it’s strange that the Republicans keep talking about how unsafe we’d been under a Democratic president when the last catastrophic terrorist attack happened under the watch of a Republican. I don’t blame Bush for that, of course; the record is the record though.
magnet
5226
Claiming “Bush kept us safe” is like claiming “Bush stopped Katrina from making landfall”.
No, he didn’t. Maybe nobody could have done it, but Bush couldn’t do it either.
Murbella
5227
I happen to personally agree with you on this. Although i do feel he handled it extremely poorly after the event.
None the less, whether you feel Bush is at fault for 9/11 or not does not change the fact that he did not stop 9/11, and thus by definition he did not keep us safe.
Murbella
5228
Yes, i was watching Lil’ Bush talk about his brother keeping us safe when i made that post. I also saw Rubio make the moronic comment about how he was glad Bush was in the white house and not al gore. How much worse could it have been with Al Gore as president? Would he have attacked a random country in response or something?
Isn’t that what we wound up doing under the actual circumstances?
Or did I just make the same joke as you, but way more obvious and poorly?
He was making the same joke.
But nobody on the side of that primary would agree, except maybe Trump, and people are far more concerned with him acting irrationally aggressive than any other candidate, considering his overly sensitive reaction to Megan Kelly or anyone else who simply asks him to better explain what he’s talking about, let alone challenges him. We’re extremely lucky that Al Gore wasn’t President for any period of time, both during and after 9/11, and that’s certainly the close to universal view of anyone voting for GOP nominee, and Bush remains very popular among the military who served in the resulting conflicts as well, and presumably their families and friends as a result, and SC is a state with a lot of them.
Trump’s game-plan has always been about sucking the media oxygen away from the other candidates, and that plan has been faltering of late: Rubio’s travails and Cruz’s rise and the infighting between the other candidates has become more interesting to the journalists and the country at large than Trump’s stump speeches.
Given that, he’s trying again to say something outlandish to get the media to focus on him again; to force the other candidates to talk about him again; and most especially to staunch the awful (to him) trend of the other candidates fighting each other and ignoring HIM.
So this is his play: commit the ultimate Republican sin of insulting the only GOP president of the last quarter century that got two full terms in office. Bush 43 is not a revered figure among day-to-day Republicans - the man left office under a cloud of economic and foreign-policy failure and the current crop of candidates (even his brother!) all agree that his signature policy (Iraq) was a mistake. GOP politicians don’t tend criticize him openly in the same way that Democrat politicians don’t tend to criticize Carter openly, but that doesn’t mean that the South Carolina voters revere him as a living god or something.
This is another opportunity for Trump to “say what everyone is thinking anyway”, or maybe to “tell it like it is”. Trump’s problem is that the statement isn’t really outlandish enough to compare to his other stuff. He’s beginning to be the little boy who cried wolf.
I agree that trump acts overly aggressive in debates/speeches, but…
=>I think he is the only republican candidate who admits 9/11 happened while Bush was president
=>I think he is the only republican candidate who admits Iraq was a mistake (I am not even talking about whether bush and friends did or should have known)
I just find it shameless that candidates for president of the united states would keep on repeating something that is objectively not true.
I view it as about as outlandish as Jeb saying his brother “kept us safe.” A President should try to keep his country safe, but it’s impossible to actually do so in an imperfect world. I agree that his Iraq policy was awful and I certainly suspect there was some lying going on, but I learned Hanlon’s Razor a long time ago. I strongly suspect instead that people were lying to him, and he didn’t know any better.
Of course, saying “My brother tried to keep America safe, and I think he did the best job he was able to with his limited cranial capacity and lack of adequate information” isn’t exactly a great sound bite.
Still, Trump may win yet another news cycle, this time over a dead SCOTUS judge. Time will tell if upsetting some Republicans was worth it. If anything, it struck me as a move to help him in the general election and he’s obviously just not there, yet.
Not 100%. The outgoing Clinton administration indicated that AQ was a (the? ) major security threat and the Bush Administration definitely downplayed it if not outright ignored it - even after 9/11 they really couldn’t comprehend that they (and 9/11) weren’t ultimately a state actor’s maneuvering and were fixated upon Iran as the key player.
That said, I don’t hold them responsible for it, but their decision-making afterwards was dreadful., IMHO.
You need to remember that the base Trump is playing to are specifically the ones who felt betrayed by Bush 43. If they were happy with Bush, he wouldn’t be a candidate.
Almost as absurd as blaming Hillary for Benghazi. I’m still pretty convinced that if Gore had been in office the GOP would’ve done their best to rip the country in half instead of seeing it come together like we did. Impeachment would’ve been thrown out there.
Let’s not forget this is what we had in office:
The worst SecDef ever surrounded by ideologue-ish advisors advising one of the worst presidents in American history. This team’s reaction to 9/11 killed more Americans than the actual attack, permanently wounded more by several orders of magnitude, and all we got out of it was one big fat bill.
/gop if gore had been president that memo from the democratic sec of defense would be unintelligible gibberish covered by drool. we sure dodged a bullet there!
So Trump is a secret weapon of the Democrats, a trojan horse, just better disguised?
KevinC
5239
I feel for them as they were doing their duty, but at least the Americans killed were either volunteer military forces or hired mercenaries. It’s the number of Iraqi citizens killed or displaced that is what really upsets me, and the stories of birth defects caused by the use of depleted uranium rounds is just awful.
I’m no geopolitical expert, but in my opinion if you want to stop terrorists from attacking America, invading an unrelated country thousands of miles away and destroying homes, lives, and families of civilians living there is probably not the best way to go. I mean, in some fantasy universe where the Chinese invaded the western US and occupied it do to some IRA attack in Shanghai, I don’t think it’d be terribly hard to recruit me if those same foreign forces (inadvertently) killed my child and destroyed my neighborhood. “Bush kept us safe”, indeed.
Also, great, I’m on a NSA watchlist now, aren’t I.
I hope you aren’t planning to board an airplane any time soon.
Miramon
5241
Pity Rumsfeld & co. couldn’t grasp this simple notion when it mattered. Or perhaps they did, and decided it would be to their political advantage to suffer more and worse attacks and to put the country on a war footing to secure power…
