Republican Lie of the Day
At the rate they are going, this post may become lie of the hour or minute. Indeed, I cannot think of a time during the last year when a Republican of any standing has told the truth.
The winner today: Mary Matalin.
“I was there [in the Bush White House]. We inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history. And President Bush dealt with it. And within a year of his presidency at this comparable time, unemployment was at 5 percent. And we were creating jobs.”
She said this yesterday on CNN’s State of the Union with John King. She was complaining about President Obama always mentioning the inconvenient fact that Bush saddled Obama with an economic crisis and two wars. Republicans in general (given Senator Olympia Snowe’s comment over the weekend that we cannot ever “dredge up history”) do not like their record being looked at, for it reveals their ideas to be bankrupt and their actions to be either criminal or folly.
However, in her complaining about her party’s record of failure being brought up time and again by President Obama, she brazenly lied. Technically speaking, President Bush did not inherit a recession from President Clinton. The 2001 recession began in March 2001, when President Bush had been on the job for two full months. Now, the Dot Com bubble bust was already underway when Bush took office, which was to blame for the 2001 recession, so I will let that lie slide since you can argue that President Clinton passed on a recession to Bush.
But “Bush inherited an attack?” How does one inherit a terrorist attack? 9/11 took place a full nine months into Bush’s term. President-elect Bush and his transition team and national security team ignored repeated warnings from President Clinton and Richard Clarke about the danger Bin Laden posed to the United States. Indeed, Clinton informed Bush et al about their success in preventing the planned Millenium attacks in 2000, but that he was convinced Bin Laden and Al Queda would try again. What was President-elect Bush’s response to this warning and advice? Bush said he disagreed and thought Iraq would pose a much more dangerous threat to America than Bin Laden.
If Bush had followed Clinton’s advice, and kept up the focus and pressure on Bin Laden and Al Queda, perhaps 9/11 would have never happened. But it did, and it was Bush’s fault we endured the loss of 3,000 Americans.
You fucking Republicans want to politicize national security, fine. We can do that. You want to play game, fine. Your death toll is higher than ours.
One of Bush’s stance that bothered me a lot during the early months of the recession was that he was denying we were in a recession.
Now, I know that part of the President’s job is to be up beat, to present a brave front, however, behind the scenes the Bush Administration’s work was only lengthening that recession, not shortening it.
In the unlikely event that Obama gets a second term, will anything going on THEN be his fault, or will it all still be the fault of George W. Bush?
I don’t know Observer, you blamed everything that occurred during Bush’s term on Clinton. If we play by your rules, we get to blame everything on Bush. It is only fair.
Nemski it wasn’t just Bush denying the recession, it was a years long effort by right wing news and pundits claiming the economy was “great” and then a denial of recession when it was obvious we were already in one. It was an eight year long parade of lies. Today is no different with endless Republican “Issues” that last a week and disappear.
Comment by Observer on 28 December 2009 at 10:07 am:
In the unlikely event that Obama gets a second term, will anything going on THEN be his fault, or will it all still be the fault of George W. Bush?
If you read here enough it’s shaping up to be Congress’s at this point…
“In the unlikely event that Obama gets a second term…”
This alone is a lie. As Charles Krauthammer noted a couple of months ago, Obama has a better-than-even shot at a second term because you can’t beat something with nothing. Obama has disappointed many supporters and independents, but only when compared with some ideal. Put him up against a real person, and that person will have flaws that will make Obama look good by comparison.
If Republicans are seriously going to campaign on the return of the pre-existing condition they will lose. Even a Mitt Romney or John Thune is not going to be able to sell that.
Republicans won’t own up to the fact that Bush was a terrible president. He had two recessions, the one that started in March 2001 and the one that started in December 2007, which was almost a Depression. We had the biggest terrorist attack on American soil in history and we fought two wars. That’s not a great record.
As far as “unlikely” second term for Obama – that sounds like Republican wishful thinking.
Even Reagan’s re-election was in some doubt until the jobs started to come back. In 1982 there was a lot of talk of a one-term Presidency. Same will probably be true for Obama. He may yet regret not using the stimulus to create jobs more directly.
If Republicans are seriously going to campaign on the return of the pre-existing condition they will lose.
They aren’t. They are going to campaign against the individual mandate. And HCR deficits (CBO scoring won’t matter to them in the least).
Pandora, the Republican base sees “Senate passes Health Care Reform” and thinks we just passed socialized health care. Republicans will be running against a government takeover of health care, while we are crying that we can’t even get a public option.
Pandora, the Republican base sees
I meant UI. Sorry, long thread.
Will everybody wake up for a minute or two and listen to yourselves. While our country is going down the toilet all I continue to hear is Democrats that, Republican this. Both partys have left the American citizens in the dust and no longer feel that we are relevant to their own party agendas. We have the worlds largest defense budget, I know how everyone feels safe. We talk about dollars in terms of trillions, not that large of a number really, I guess. We give out all this money, what money, to these failed companies that continue to fail. Hope you have taken stock in all the miraculous new jobs that everyone has now. What unemployment? The Federal Reserve must be reserved about their business for we wouldn’t want to alarm all the who knows who shady people they are forced to deal with. Oh yeah and the middle east, let’s change one area of our world that has been at each others throats since the beginning of time by giving them some of our fine men and women in our military. I’m proud of and love our folks in the military and am tired of seeing them being used for lies given to us.
Ted Olson is teaming up with David Boies to fight for the rights of gay people to get married in every state. Surely he has some standing and I would assume most people here would agree with him on this one.