Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Bush's Photo-op Heroism
The always great William Saletan of Slate exposes Bush's "heroism" that we heard about last night at the convention:
Giuliani compared Bush to Winston Churchill. I don't think Churchill would have flown from base-to-base on Sept. 11 "getting out of harm's way". Churchill would have demanded to be flown back to Washington to face the enemy head on.
Update: Matthew Yglesias says Rudy should not be lecturing us about National Security:
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The only moment of physical bravery any of last night's speakers could find in Bush's life was his secret trip to Iraq. "As I think about his leadership," Kerik recalled, "I think of the courage it took for our commander in chief to land on an airstrip in the dark of night, a world away, to be with our troops on Thanksgiving."
Thanksgiving? You mean, six months after we captured the airport and Bush declared victory?
And isn't "the dark of night" normally a term we use to describe the preferred arrival and departure time of people who aren't exactly overflowing with courage?
Or is Kerik pointing out the difficulty of landing a plane in the dark? Is he unaware, perhaps, that Bush wasn't flying the plane? That once again, as in Vietnam, somebody else was doing the hard part and Bush was along for the ride? That Air Force One has more security systems than any other vehicle on Earth? That Bush went to Baghdad to "be with" the troops in the same way he went to New York to "be with" the firefighters? That waiting for a safe time and place to "be with" people who have braved unsafe places at unsafe times is the difference between heroism and a photo op?
Giuliani compared Bush to Winston Churchill. I don't think Churchill would have flown from base-to-base on Sept. 11 "getting out of harm's way". Churchill would have demanded to be flown back to Washington to face the enemy head on.
Update: Matthew Yglesias says Rudy should not be lecturing us about National Security:
He's never served in the military (or held a civilian job that entailed working with the military). He's never held a job dealing with foreign affairs. He's never held a job dealing with intelligence. Indeed, the closest he gets is time spent as a federal prosecutor working against the Mafia, precisely the law-enforcement model of counterterrorism that the nation has abandoned and that the Bush administration likes to accuse Democrats of being in thrall to. Nor does he have any experience with the problem of post-conflict stabilization, the area in which George W. Bush's policies have most clearly fallen short. The Coalition Provisional Authority even brought Bernard Kerik, Giuliani's favorite police commissioner, to Baghdad to try to help out with security. It didn't work very well. Kerik, like Giuliani, was given a speaking role on Monday evening.
After the 1993 bombing attack on the World Trade Center, Giuliani decided that the city needed an emergency-management-command center and so he had one built -- in the World Trade Center. Critics suggested that locating the facility in a building that was likely to come under attack wasn't a very good idea.
