Hydrablog

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/us/politics/29bush.html
September 29, 2006
Bush Attacks Democrats Over Iraq and Terror
By JIM RUTENBERG [bush] [white house] [with fewer than 50 days until the November 7th election, albeit a midterm one, Bush goes political on Iraq] [note comes just 18 days after he called for national unity on Iraq and gsave] [see noted at end where I quote some of Bush September 11th speech] [so little time, so much desperation] [*********]
BIRMINGHAM, Ala., Sept. 28 — President Bush took on the Democrats on Thursday with some of his most pointed language yet this campaign year, telegraphing the start of the last, intensive phase of the election season for the White House.
Speaking to a crowd of more than 2,000 supporters in this Bush-friendly Southern city, the president took Democrats to task for their criticism of the Iraq war, for their votes this week against legislation creating military tribunals to try terrorism suspects and for what he called misleading descriptions of the latest National Intelligence Estimate on global terrorism.
“Five years after 9/11, the worst attack on the American homeland in our history, the Democrats offer nothing but criticism and obstruction and endless second-guessing,” Mr. Bush said at a fund-raising event for Gov. Bob Riley. “The party of F.D.R. and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run.” [*********] [note how he uses the part of FDR and Truman below in his September 11th speech—quite differently] [*************]
The National Intelligence Estimate, completed in April and reflecting a consensus of 16 American intelligence agencies, concluded among other things that the Iraq war had become a “cause célèbre” for Islamic extremists. But other sections in the estimate say terrorists would be demoralized by defeat in Iraq, and Mr. Bush declared that “some in the other party have been quoting selectively from the document for partisan political gain.”
“The Democrats are using the N.I.E. to mislead the American people and justify their policy of withdrawal from Iraq,” the president said. “The American people need to know what withdrawal from Iraq would mean. By withdrawing from Iraq before the job is done, we would be doing exactly what the extremists and terrorists want.” [*********]
Mr. Bush has been honing his offensive against Democrats for weeks as his political team seeks to shift the election-year focus from a debate about him and the unpopular war to one about terrorism in general, his party’s efforts to combat it and what he describes as the opposition’s promotion of defeatism and retreat.
But until now he had left the sort of hard-charging talk that he used here to his political strategist Karl Rove, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Republican national chairman, Ken Mehlman. [*************]
Minutes after the speech, during which he received several standing ovations, the Democrats hit back.
The administration has “gone from shock and awe to an American public shocked at how awful the situation in Iraq is,” Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement sent by e-mail to reporters. “Rather than heed the warnings in the N.I.E., President Bush politicized [*******] this discussion, and the Republican Congress has stood on the sidelines.”
In his criticism, Mr. Bush also singled out members of the Democratic leadership. Referring to “a senior Democrat in Congress” without mentioning her by name, he recalled a recent comment in which Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said: “The president says that fighting them there makes it less likely we’ll have to fight them here. The opposite is true.”
The president pointed to Ms. Harman’s remark as an example of how “some in Washington, some decent people, patriotic people,” think that “we should not be on the offensive in this war on terror.”
“History,” he said, “tells us that logic is false.”
Through a spokesman, Ms. Harman said Thursday evening, “If the president reads his own intelligence, he will see that his failed strategy in Iraq is making the terrorist threat more dangerous.”
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
[*****] [Note: the following is among what the president said in his September 11 speech to commemorate the 5-year anniversary. Tonight it will have been 18 days since the president said these things. It’s truly amazing how politicicied it’s become. It’s clearly not all the administration’s fault. However, how can the president so brazenly invoke political cravenness so soon after he uttered the following? “Across the broader Middle East, the extremists are fighting to prevent such a future. Yet America has confronted evil before, and we have defeated it -- sometimes at the cost of thousands of good men in a single battle. When Franklin Roosevelt vowed to defeat two enemies across two oceans, he could not have foreseen D-Day and Iwo Jima -- but he would not have been surprised at the outcome. When Harry Truman promised American support for free peoples resisting Soviet aggression, he could not have foreseen the rise of the Berlin Wall -- but he would not have been surprised to see it brought down. Throughout our history, America has seen liberty challenged, and every time, we have seen liberty triumph with sacrifice and determination.” . . . . Then a couple paragraphs later “Winning this war will require the determined efforts of a unified country, and we must put aside our differences and work together to meet the test that history has given us. We will defeat our enemies. We will protect our people. And we will lead the 21st century into a shining age of human liberty.”] [****************]