Buck Doesn't Stop With President Bush

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

http://www.channelcincinnati.com/helenthomas/2614741/detail.html

WASHINGTON -- Though President Bush is not a student of history, he surely has heard of Harry Truman's famous declaration: "The buck stops here."

That slogan was enshrined in a desk-top sign in Truman's Oval Office. I thought of it while watching all of the buck-passing that has become a White House ritual lately, especially in the sticky fallout from the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.

There have been presidents who have taken blame for a catastrophe, bad judgment or a plan gone wrong.

In the case of the Iraq attack, President Bush may yet own up to his mistake in leading the nation to war on the basis of false advertising about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq as haven of Sept. 11 terrorists.

That rhetoric in the rush to war has turned out to be a bunch of hooey.

But until that day of reckoning, the buck-passing is picking up speed.

For example, it looks like the Central Intelligence Agency is going to be the scapegoat for the discredited information concerning Saddam Hussein's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

No such weapons have been found, despite the pre-war insistence by Bush and others in his administration that Saddam had hoards of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
<snip>

This headline is all over the place! More and more people are beginning to notice!

[jbfam4]

1. great article

Thanks for posting this. I like Helen't last line:

If the Iraqi resistance continues and American casualties mount, voters next year may assign blame. The ballot box has the last word in stopping buck-passing

[kodi]

2. hell no! the buck stops in halibuton's pocket

.

[samsingh]

3. i'm offended

by the use of the word President beside Bush

[lovedems]

9. hee-hee-hee, me too! n/t

[DUreader]

4. The pathetic thing is that W* was a student of history

so I recently read anyway. I am not positive.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

5. I took a 4 quarters of Biology, but you wouldn't want me operating

on you! <Grin>

[Lisa]

6. but I suspect he flunked it, so he had to repeat it ...

Your memory is right!

Actually, he did major in history at Yale. He did better in those courses than in economics, poli sci, or "American Studies". But I don't think he really learned to analyze events ... he has a pretty good short-term memory for facts, which likely got him through the exams.


http://americanpolitics.com/bushtranscript.html

[Malva Zebrina]

8. He was just playing a game

that is the way of these frat boys. There is something anathema about actually studying and actually being involved at a deep level with these intellectual pursuits. You are there simply to get the piece of paper and your daddy will pay for it.

There is no way in hell that Bush personifies a person who actually received any degrees from any higher institution of learning at all. Please Harvard and please Yale--do not admit you gave this idiot a degree. He is totally a stupid.

[dArKeR]

7. Is Washington playing the blame game on Iraq? IOL

'Bush is responsible for putting those planners - Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, former head of the Defence Policy Board, among others - into positions of power.'

http://democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=103&topic_id=19786

[0rganism]

10. Shouldn't this be in the "editorials" forum?

Not that it's exceptionally easy to separate the news from the slant in this day of journalistic decay, but I think HT is speaking from a personalized and subjective viewpoint here.

[TahitiNut]

11. Yes. Moving it.