Yeah, if he wanted to make a relevant analogy, he'd compare 9/11 is to Bush as the second weekend in October in Dallas is to Mack Brown.
I second the question from RocketMan Tex. Did y'all, Trader Jorge and bamaslammer and any other Repub posters, find it acceptable when Clinton mourned at OK City? As I recall though the Clinton 96 Campaign didn't use OK City in their ads but if they had would y'all have found that acceptable? On a related question if Clinton hadn't gone to OK City to publicly mourn would y'all have accused him of insensitivity?
Well the heroic firefighters resent their expolitaqtion by Bush. It is sort of like when Bush exploits the military which he was awol from. The man has no shame. **************** WASHINGTON, March 3 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The General President of the International Association of Fire Fighters, AFL-CIO (IAFF), Harold Schaitberger, issued the following statement today after President Bush unveiled new political ads that use images of fire fighters in September 11, 2001 attacks for political gain: -- As Bush Trades on Heroism of Fire Fighters, His Homeland Security Funding Cuts Hurt Fire Fighters and Communities -- "I'm disappointed but not surprised that the President would try to trade on the heroism of those fire fighters in the September 11 attacks. The use of 9/11 images are hypocrisy at its worst. Here's a President that initially opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and now uses its first anniversary as cause to promote his re-election. Here is a President that proposed two budgets with no funding for FIRE Act grants and still plays on the image of America's bravest. His advertisements are disgraceful link
The point is not really whether Bush is using 9-11 in his ads. It's that he's using 9-11 in his ads after opposing and stonewalling the 9-11 commission, opposing a Homeland Security Department, opposing funding for first responders, and using 9-11 to justify an unnecessary war that has wasted US blood, treasure, and prestige. To name a few. If his actions came even somewhat close to his rhetoric, I wouldn't begrudge his use of 9-11. After all it did happen and the weeks after were the highlight of his Presidency. But, to use it now, is cynical politics at its finest and beyond the pale.
Lemme see here guys, AFL-CIO, big Democrat contributors, duh!!!!! Of course they aren't going to like anything Bush does.
I have absolutely no problem with Bush running footage of himself in New York following Sept. 11, 2001. How he handled those attacks will be the single greatest issue of the November elections. But using "stock" footage of those horrible events is simply in poor taste. As long as Bush is in image, however, I don't see the problem.
This about sums it up... via Josh Marshall... _____________________ If you look at the TV ads the president just unveiled today, you quickly see a main -- probably the main -- theme of his reelection campaign: it's not my fault. Yes, there are all sort of bad things going on. The economy's been rough. The deficit is deepening. Job growth is barely registering. There's all sorts of chaos on the international stage. But it's not my fault. When I got here there was a recession already, which I didn't have anything to do with. That was Clinton's fault. And the same with all the corporate scandals. And then Osama bin Laden got involved and that wasn't my fault either. And that Iraq thing didn't completely work out. But that's the CIA's fault. So if there's anything that's bad now it's not because of anything I did. It's because of 9/11. And if it's not because of 9/11 then it was already broken when I got here. So don't blame me. Now, I think that does pretty much sum up what the president and the White House are telling the public. But it's important to draw back and recognize that up until this point that argument has largely worked. Now, however, I think people are beginning to question the argument. By most objective measures, economic and international indicators of national well-being have been fair to bad for most of George Bush's term of office. But for much of that time we were in either the immediate aftermath of 9/11, building up to war, or in the aftermath of war. If you were to plop down in late 1943, for instance, you could point to all sorts of negative signs -- rising deficits, crises abroad, etc. But Franklin Roosevelt would have said, quite plausibly, that we'd been attacked at Pearl Harbor, we were fighting a two front war across two oceans, and that things might well get worse before they got better. Now, I don't think that's a remotely reasonably analogy. But it is the argument the Bush White House has been making for some two years. And it's had a lot of success with it. Everything that's bad has been framed as fall-out from 9/11 or our response to 9/11. What we're seeing now is that these two things -- 9/11 and the current state of the country -- are coming unhinged in the public mind. If they stay unhinged, President Bush looks less like a 'war president' than a president who just won't take responsibility for anything that happens on his watch. Thus the new ads, the message of which might fairly be summed up as "It's midnight in America. But if the Democrats were in, the sun might never come up!" -- Josh Marshall
Here's a nice question: Why do certain people always seem to lose arguments, and why do others always win? The habitual losers here should think about that and re-evaluate some things.
i would accept no mention of 9/11 for political gain, if the dems would refrain from mentioning Vietnam for the same reason. the fact is, the presidents performance re 9/11 is central to his presidency, and therefor is a legitimate issue in the campaign. to expect bush to ignore 9/11 while his rivals criticize him for not capturing ossama is just silly.
I strongly encourage hacked up photoshop images of GWB in all sorts of fantastic scenarios... And I encourage them to appear in this thread.
