The Orwellian mindset of the Bush Administration lives on.
According to Mary Matalin, George Bush “inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nations history.”
Ms. Matalin, who was President on September 11, 2001? It wasn’t George Bush’s predecessor.
Ms. Matalin, who was given a Presidential Daily Briefing on August 6, 2001 with the title “Bid Laden Determined to Strike Inside the United States”? It wasn’t George Bush’s predecessor.
Ms. Matalin, who was the President whose response to the Presidential Daily Briefing on August 6, 2001 was, “You’ve covered your ass, now”? It certainly wasn’t George Bush’s predecessor.
George Bush did inherit was a plan formulated by the Clinton administration to retaliate against al-Qaeda for the bombing of the USS Cole. Clinton did not implement this plan, because he did not want to saddle his successor with a foreign operation, as he had been saddled with Somalia from his predecessor.
George Bush also inherited counter-terrorism exports like Richard Clarke, who were then shunted aside because the Bush administration believed the threat to the United States was from ballistic missiles, not terrorism.
Bush inherited the tools to stop 9-11 from happening.
Bush frittered those tools away.
Matalin is not the first to assert that 9-11 didn’t happen on Bush’s watch. Former press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Dana Perino have both stated the same.
Saying, as Matalin does, that 9-11 was a problem that Bush inherited, does not make it true. The attempt at historical revisionism of Bush Administration officials on 9-11 needs to end.
You know, I wrote a paper about exactly how Orwellian the Bush White House was. It was supposed to be for a lit class, and turned into political science lickity-split.
There were definite Orwellian overtones to the Bush years.
This one takes me back — “Bush’s Orwellian Case for War.” I remember reading that at the time, back in ’03.
The term “reality-based community” was in response to something that a Bush administration official said to reporter Ron Suskind: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that realityjudiciously, as you willwe’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Presidents and their administrations have believed their own lies before, but Bush’s team took it to a whole new level. And, unfortunately, the media was complicit in that. I think the last decade would have turned out very differently had the media done its job and investigated, rather than just reporting and regurgitating the talking points of the day.