Friday, September 02, 2005
AP: "Rhetoric Doesn't Match Reality"
Can it get more damning than this?
WASHINGTON, (AP) --But Ron Fournier is far from done with this Herculean effort of calling a spade a spade.
The Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes. The economy is booming. Anybody who leaks a CIA agent's identity will be fired. Add another piece of White House rhetoric that doesn't match the public's view of reality: Help is on the way, Gulf Coast.
As New Orleans descended into anarchy, President Bush and his emergency-response team congratulated each other for jobs well done and spoke of water, food and troops pouring into the ravaged city. Television pictures told a different story.
It was worse when he was wrong. In one interview, Bush said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." In fact, many experts predicted a major storm would bust New Orleans' flood-control barriers.Read the whole thing. It's a master stroke of explaining why Bush's response to Katrina has been so frustrating.
One reason the public relations effort backfired on Bush is that Americans have seen it before.
On Iraq alone, the rhetoric has repeatedly fallen far short of reality. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. The mission wasn't accomplished in May 2003. Most allies avoided the hard work of his "coalition of the willing." And dozens of U.S. soldiers have died since Vice President Dick Cheney declared that insurgents were in their "last throes."
Comments:
You're right the rhetoric doesn't match the reality. For some in the administration this is an evil attempt to spin. For others, (including the president) I think, assertion is as good as fact. They want it to be so, they say it's so, so it must be so. I don't think Dubya wants Iraq to be the hash it is, I don't think he wants dead black people floating in flooded streets of N.O., and I really think he does want American kids to get a decent education. The problem is that he can't seem to face up to failure, so he pretends it isn't happening. He sticks in the same rut, blinkers on, refusing the see the consequences of an ill-conceived or ill-executed policy, saying 'job done'. And no one, NO ONE, in the White House will interrupt his cosy fantasy with the facts.
Post a Comment
