WaPo op-eds take on Bush [View All]

[grytpype]

Bush: Safely in Denial
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45365-2004Jul12.html
By Richard Cohen

Excerpt:

When it comes to telling you right to your face that black is white, maybe no one compares with George W. Bush. Last week, for example, he responded to yet another report that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction by saying that it didn't matter. "Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons, I believe we were right to go into Iraq," Bush said. "America is safer today because we did."

"America is safer today because we did." The statement is worth repeating because it ranks up there with the insistence that the sour East of Berlin out-dazzled the West. Just the day before, in fact, senior administration officials were saying that Osama bin Laden and his top guys were planning a terrorist attack in the United States sometime before the November presidential election. How's that for safer?


Who's Got the Wrong Values Now?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45366-2004Jul12.html
By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Excerpt:

It's notable that in a week when the major reasons the administration offered for the war in Iraq were undercut by a Senate intelligence committee report, our presidential candidates devoted themselves to talk about "values."

The idea that our country fought a war on false premises is astonishing -- and it has a lot to do with the "values" of this administration.

President Bush's government was unrelenting in trying to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein posed an immediate threat to us, that he had scary weapons, that he was tied to al Qaeda and thus to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It is wholly inadequate to shuck all this off on the CIA. The president was determined to scare the hell out of the country and make the case for war by whatever means necessary.