Text 4203, 105 rader
Skriven 2004-10-29 13:55:00 av Alan Hess
Ärende: Bush puts foot in mouth
===============================
George Bush just about said he is not the person we'd want as Commander in
Chief.  Though he thought he was referring to John Kerry (with regard to the
missing explosives), he actually described himself.
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Boston.com 

The Boston Globe
SCOT LEHIGH
Bush's aversion to facts

By Scot Lehigh  |  October 29, 2004

DURING A recent trip to Florida, I talked to a voter who had come to see
President Bush at a rally in the Broward County community of Sunrise. She
backed Bush because he was a strong leader in a time of terrorism, she
explained.

"He is the right guy for the times," she said, adding that the war in Iraq "is
something that has to be done."

Did she have any second thoughts about the war, given that no operational ties
between Saddam and Al Qaeda have been revealed and that no weapons of mass
destruction have been found?

Didn't we find some of those weapons, she asked?

No, she was told, there have been none of the WMD stockpiles whose existence
the administration claimed to be certain of.

That didn't seem to faze her.

"Well, there was something fishy going on over there," she said.

She was, in other words, content to take this administration at its word that
the war it waged was a necessary one. In a way, that's not surprising. The
president insists that Iraq is a fundamental part of the war on terror -- and,
despite the 9/11 commission's conclusion that there was no "collaborative
relationship," Vice President Cheney in particular has continued to suggest
significant ties between the deposed Iraqi regime and Al Qaeda.

Now, it's one thing to have voters whose decisions are based on instinct rather
than evidence.

But it's something quite different when the administration itself isn't
concerned with the facts.

And yet, that's become a painfully obvious failing of this president. In the
run-up to the war, as has become apparent, the administration looked for
intelligence to bolster its preconceptions about Iraq, ignored that which did
not, and, too impatient to wait for more investigation, essentially refused to
take no WMD for an answer.

In his reelection campaign, George W. Bush has made the claim that he would
have invaded Iraq knowing neither ties to Al Qaeda nor WMD would be found. Even
by the lenient standards of political campaigns, that is an extraordinary
statement. It suggests that the president was either misleading the nation back
in 2002 and early 2003 about his reasons for going to war or that he is
hoodwinking voters as he seeks reelection.

And earlier this month, when Charles Duelfer, the chief weapons inspector,
issued a report saying that Saddam had destroyed his WMDs after the 1991 Gulf
War and that Iraq's capacity to produce them had actually decayed, the
president still insisted his invasion decision was the right one, noting that
Duelfer also said Saddam hoped to reconstitute his WMD programs if he could
slip free of UN sanctions. Further, Bush said, Saddam "could have passed [WMD]
knowledge on to our terrorist enemies."

We've seen the same disdain for the truth, the facts, or just basic common
sense on any number of other fronts. The president, for example, said his large
tax-cut package wouldn't throw the budget into deficit. Then, when the budget
began hemorrhaging red ink, the administration blamed the huge deficits on the
economic slump, and said the tax cuts were a necessary economic remedy, despite
their clear slant toward upper earners, who are anything but efficient pump
primers. The recession contributed to the deficit, certainly -- but the
Congressional Budget Office has said that two-thirds of the 2004 deficit comes
because of Bush's top-heavy tax cuts.

Meanwhile, it's hard to think of an administration so at odds with science. The
Bush team, after all, has suppressed its own EPA's conclusions about global
warming. And in an October report that echoed broad concerns in the scientific
community, the Union of Concerned Scientists asserted that "the scope and scale
of the manipulation, suppression, and misrepresentation of science by the Bush
administration is unprecedented."

Abandon facts and evidence, and all a president has to guide him is ideology,
instinct, or faith. Indeed, in an eyebrow-raising story in the Oct. 17 New York
Times Magazine, Ron Suskind reports that this president increasingly relies on
gut instinct and religious faith, rather than the reality of the secular world.

But it's imperative for any president that the facts be paramount.

As Bush himself said on Wednesday: "A political candidate who jumps to
conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your
commander in chief."

His comment was directed at John Kerry. And yet, it's hard to put the case
against George W. Bush's mode of governance much more succinctly than that.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com. 
+ Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
 

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