Bush Seeks to Rally U.S. Troops in Iraq (Carefully choreographed,Prepped to answer)- outrageous

AP ^ | October 13, 2005 | TOM RAUM

[BigSkyFreeper]

LOL!! I forgot about THAT one!

[countrydummy]

Thanks!!!! I love Bush!

[DTogo]

I had to change the channel it was so bad. I appreciated the concept and thought to boost morale, but even Tony Snow said this morning that it just came across horribly, he wondered what the President's media people were thinking and that it was obvious both the President and troops seemed uncomfortable. I agree.

[Max7]

How many times has President Reagan turned over in his grave by now, having listened to the prognostications of his son? Just a rough guess will do.

[rwa265]

"This is a wonderful historical thing that his happening and I haven't heard much at all about it."

Haven't heard much about his October 6, 2005, speech, either.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/10/

Here's a good commentary about it from today's Post-Dispatch

POINT OF VIEW: Bush's monumental speech contained hard truths

10/13/2005 By Donald Meissner

Last week, President Bush delivered a monumental speech describing and defending the global war on terror, yet the news media greeted his remarks with a global yawn. A recent Associated Press poll found that Bush's approval rating equals the percentage of Americans who believe the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do: 39 percent. It's no wonder, given that the actual intellectual and ideological debate has been skewed or ignored by the major media outlets.

Would a major address by FDR justifying the war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have been ignored? What about LBJ rationalizing the carnage inVietnam? The world media and the process of delivering news have changed over the years, but ignoring the president's words in wartime is perilous to our nation.

President Bush described in great detail, with numerous empirical facts and vivid descriptions, the viciousness, tenacity and evil of our enemy. I recommend reading or watching the president's speech at the WhiteHouse.gov web site. For those of you whose antipathy for Dubya prevents doing so, here are a few important sentences from the speech that answer the most important question of this nascent millennium: Why are we at war?

- President Bush:

"Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism. . . . This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent political vision: the establishment, by terrorism and subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom. These extremists distort the idea of jihad into a call for terrorist murder against Christians and Jews and Hindus - and also against Muslims from other traditions, who they regard as heretics. . . . Islamic radicalism is more like a loose network with many branches than an army under a single command. Yet these operatives, fighting on scattered battlefields, share a similar ideology and vision for our world."

The president took pains to quote the words of Abu Musab al-Zaqawi, the beheader, the al-Qaida leader who moved from Afghanistan to Iraq immediately after 9/11 to establish a base and avoid the onslaught against the Taliban.

- President Bush:

"Our enemy is utterly committed. As Zarqawi has vowed, 'We will either achieve victory over the human race or we will pass to the eternal life.' And the civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history. Evil men, obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience, must be taken very seriously, and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply. Defeating the militant network is difficult because it thrives, like a parasite, on the suffering and frustration of others."

These accurate words will be discounted and discarded by the president's enemies. The familiar patois of the left - unfound WMD's, 9/11 was not Saddam's work, oil, Halliburton - are blown away by the certainty that Islamo-facists will continue their brutal attacks against the free world.

Hatred has no timetable or border; it flourishes in depraved minds around the world: from Bali to London to the Los Angeles airport, where in 2002 an Arab limo driver woke up on his birthday, loaded guns and packed extra magazines and then walked to the El Al ticket counter to kill Jews.

While we debate Supreme Court nominees and disaster relief efforts - liberally assigning blame and assuming ill motives - let's not take our eye off the ball. Our freedom - our very existence - is threatened by the true enemy who hails from far-flung lands and lives among us in our free, tolerant, pluralistic society. Read the president's speech. You might as well admit it: It's the truth.

(Donald Meissner founded and runs Donald Meissner Communications, an advertising and public relations firm in St. Louis County.)

[Former Military Chick]

I enjoy Monica, and frankly I do not set out to watch him I was channel surfing ...

[eyespysomething]

He has yet to stop spinning!

Reagan I'm sure loved his son, but I bet he did not understand him.

I just dislike him greatly.

[Yasotay]

My brother actually got President Clinton once to alter his schedule to talk to the families of some of his soldiers that were killed in a training accident. There was no staged photos and I understand it was a very good private meeting. Having said that President Bush does that about 100% better. That is where it appears President Bush is at his best. It seems that the troops and the Chain of Command love him. President Bush has done a better job of communicating with the troops then any other President in my life. Staged or not.

[Pirate21]

In his July 2005 letter to Zawqari, Bin Laden/Zawahiri stated, “...we are in a battle, and...more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. And...we are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of our Umma.”

It’s sad that our liberal media are aiding and abetting the enemy.

[jveritas]

Very sad indeed. My friend we must continue fighting the terrorists abroad and the liberals and their media whores domestically. We will fight until we achieve total victory and we will achieve total victory.

[Pirate21]

I loved how President Bush repeatedly referenced Communism in that speech. One could substitute "the left" for every iteration of "our new enemy" and "Islamic radicalism". The political leaders of the leftist movement (e.g., Boxer, Biden, Clinton, Kennedy, Lee, Pelosi) surely 'got it'; but unfortunately it probably went right over the heads of their gullible supporters.

Excerpts from President Bush's speech:

"Like the ideology of communism, Islamic radicalism is elitist, led by a self-appointed vanguard that presumes to speak for the Muslim masses. Bin Laden says his own role is to tell Muslims, quote, 'what is good for them and what is not.'"

"Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy teaches that innocent individuals can be sacrificed to serve a political vision."

"Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy pursues totalitarian aims. Its leaders pretend to be an aggrieved party, representing the powerless against imperial enemies. In truth they have endless ambitions of imperial domination, and they wish to make everyone powerless except themselves. Under their rule, they have banned books, and desecrated historical monuments, and brutalized women. They seek to end dissent in every form, and to control every aspect of life, and to rule the soul, itself."

"Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy is dismissive of free peoples, claiming that men and women who live in liberty are weak and decadent."

"And Islamic radicalism, like the ideology of communism, contains inherent contradictions that doom it to failure. By fearing freedom -- by distrusting human creativity, and punishing change, and limiting the contributions of half the population -- this ideology undermines the very qualities that make human progress possible, and human societies successful."

[WOSG]

What the MSM liars don't tell you is that Rummy has had *plenty* of *real* town halls with the men in uniform where the questions *were* wide-open.

The one time the MSM scored a 'coup' on that format was a journalist getting a grunt to ask a pointed questin about up-armoring of Humvees. What the MSM *never* reported was that most of those unscripted questions were of the form "hey, we are doing good work here, why isnt the media reporting our successes properly?"


I don't see anything wrong with what Bush did. It is transparent that the MSM has clear double-standards on Bush vs a Democrat doing the same thing.

[WOSG]

Thanks for posting the transcript.

[finnman69]

Ron Reagan is ballerina with the IQ of a gnat. All to typical of the talking heads on the idiot box.