fat Wing nut fails fact check
“ Our recent election joins the select ranks of epochal American presidential elections alongside: 1796, 1860, 1932 and 1980. In 1796, George Washington voluntarily stepped aside and ushered in true constitutional republicanism (or, as it is casually called, democracy.) 1860 elected Lincoln and ensured the Republic while ending slavery. The year 1932 entered America into the modern age and for better and worse ended the limited role for government in our lives. The year 1980 ended the FDR era and started us on our current uncertain path back to our abiding first principles and values.
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... What makes this an epochal election is what it says about the American public. After Nov. 2, the world now knows that Americans intend to stand and fight. ”
A mere two months and history has already passed judgment on Bush's narrow re-election? His supposed greatness is now secure for all time? Such are the delusions of grandeur found on the right. There's just one small detail Blankley and his ilk are forgetting -- reality.
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| Osama bin Laden wanted John Kerry to win. | Once again, Fat Tony reverberates a baseless, disgraceful right-wing turkey. Leaving aside that al Qaeda represents a theocratic, socially reactionary, right-wing ideology, there can be no doubt that Kerry would have been, as Bill O’Reilly said, a “good terror warrior.” Bush has not been the effective terror fighter he portrays himself as: bin Laden escaped; al Qaeda regrouped; and the US is caught in a quagmire in Iraq. Some terrorism analysts even suggested bin Laden hoped for the Bush win. After all, according to London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Iraq war has “has swollen the ranks of al-Qaida and ‘galvanised its will.’” Michael Scheuer, the former CIA agent who led the hunt for bin Laden for several years even opined that, “I'm very sure they [al Qaeda] can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now.” |
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The “bad” things that have happened in Iraq aren’t so bad (and aren’t Bush’s fault). "The flow of events since major hostilities were completed in Iraq in the spring of 2003 makes the public support for Mr. Bush all the more impressive. The news had been remorselessly bad for Mr. Bush: from the alleged ransacking of the Baghdad museums, to the rise of the insurrection, to the report by Dr. David Kay that there were no WMDs in Iraq, to the prison scandal (and its willful over-reporting by the media), to the beheadings, to the growing effectiveness and lethality of the Iraqi bombings, to the growing number of American fatalities, amputations and other serious casualties — the news has been much worse than was generally expected." |
Blankley lays out recent history without even hinting that the Administration holds a great deal of blame for Iraq’s predicament. One need only read James Fallows’ acclaimed Atlantic Monthly article “Blind Into Baghdad” or the myriad of reports from such respected, mainstream think tanks as the Center on Strategic and International Studies or the International Crisis Group to see how the Administration’s incompetence has bungled and exacerbated the situation since the beginning. The “alleged” ransacking of the museums indeed did happen (even Paul Bremer has criticized the Administration for not putting enough troops on the ground to prevent widespread looting). As for Abu Ghraib -- which was a much graver PR disaster for America abroad than for Bush, who shirked responsibility -- when will the right-wing come to terms with reality and stop blaming their travesties on the media? |
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The economy is not so bad and the media is liberal and biased. "Hollywood, Manhattan publishing, network television and the mainline media then willfully distorted the news while it sneered at and mocked the president." |
Blankley claims that the public’s “judgment” that the economy was not producing enough jobs threatened Bush. It damn well should have! Not everyone has a comfy job as a Washington pundit like Fat Tony. Did Hollywood and the mainstream media really “distort” that Bush was the first president since Herbert Hoover to see a net loss in jobs? And when exactly did the news shows “sneer” at Bush? During the three week orgy of Swift Boat coverage? |
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The American people chose a Winston Churchill over a Neville Chamberlain. "But as of now, every poll of every other country shows their publics looking for excuses to avoid confronting terrorism. "... The American public had every excuse to cut and run. Had they elected Mr. Kerry, the world would have correctly judged it a repudiation of Mr. Bush's aggressive war strategy. But the American public stuck. And in so doing they have created a world-historic event." |
While it’s very nice of British ex-pat Tony Blankley to speak so warmly of Americans, as with so many commentators his desire to deliver a rousing speech fit for a Jerry Bruckheimer movie collides with the facts. As the Program on International Policy Attitudes demonstrated, the majority of Bush supporters believed completely false assertions about the war; 72% thought Saddam possessed WMD, while 75% claimed that Saddam’s Iraq maintained close ties to al Qaeda. This was the result of a subtle, massive propaganda war launched by the Administration and it’s lapdogs in the right-wing media. In fact, John Kerry vowed repeatedly to "hunt down and kill" the terrorists where they hide, and to rebuild Iraq with fresh credibility. Bush, on the other hand, preferred to look for terrorists in Iraq, where they weren't located, because it was an easier course to wage traditional war against a nation rather than a shadowy group dispersed across the globe. |
A mere two months and history has already passed judgment on Bush's narrow re-election? His supposed greatness is now secure for all time? Such are the delusions of grandeur found on the right. There's just one small detail Blankley and his ilk are forgetting -- reality.
Blankley wants us to think that the election was a choice between "confronting terrorism" or "cutting and running." The fact is, not matter how the conservatives managed to paint him otherwise, Kerry ran as a hawk who promised to "hunt down and kill" the terrorists and to see through our obligation to Iraq. The only ones talking about "cutting and running" were in the White House, according to conservative insider Bob Novak.
Today's right wing can't seem to take responsibility for anything they do. Despite their "catastrophic success" in enacting retrograde and harmful policies at home and around the world, they always find someone else to pin the blame on when things go wrong. Blankley, for all his pompous tall talk, is no exception.
All the bad news coming from Iraq didn't just happen to coincide with Bush's term of office -- "the flow of events." Bush made it happen. He took us to war on false pretenses, thus guaranteeing our failure in winning the hearts and minds of the nation we conquered. His closest legal buddy told him torture was OK -- but he says Abu Ghraib is the fault of a few rotten eggs. He promotes an aggressive policy of income redistribution to the rich rather than expanding jobs and opportunities -- but economic bad news is "distorted."
The American people did not choose a hero in November. No, a narrow, nervous majority chose to live in the fantasy world they knew rather than face the reality they'd been shielded from for four years under Rove, Blankley, and all the other right-wing mythmakers in the media and in the administration.
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