With the second presidential debate over, it’s obvious that President Bush is beginning to feel the heat. The time has come to pay the piper and defend the administration’s record of the past four years, but it’s looking more and more like the Bush campaign will come up short.
What we saw Friday night was a desperate incumbent frantically clinging to the same old attacks that are not only distortions of the truth, but not working with the public. The American people are smarter than that. They know malarkey when they hear it.
In response to one of Bush’s unsubstantiated attacks, Kerry put it best when he said that, “it’s just not that simple.” This could not be truer; the Bush campaign wants you to think that it’s a simple case of voting yes or voting no, but it’s not surprising that it forgets the details of its accusation.
My personal favorite of the pseudo-flip-flops is the Bush campaign’s attempt to skew Kerry’s vote on the $87 billion supplemental funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It seemed like Bush kept hanging on to quoting Sen. Kerry when he said, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it”; unfortunately for the president, that claim is just not that simple.
What he failed to mention was the portion of that bill that called for a $20 billion blank check to the Bush administration to use however it saw fit, without any Congressional oversight, despite the Constitution’s clear statement that Congress has the power to control the U.S. Treasury. That money could have gone to our brave soldiers, Halliburton’s no-bid contracts, or Timbuktu for all we know. That doesn’t sound like a wise way to spend our hard-earned tax money.
Kerry did come back and admit that he had “made a mistake” in the way he talked about the $87 billion vote, but admitting to a mistake is something Bush could never do, even when he was asked to Friday night.
President Bush has lost his mind; he ignorantly pushes on with the same old rhetoric, coming across as bull-headed. If I had been in the debate hall Friday night, the question I would have asked Bush would have been, “Mr. President, you speak of your steadfast resolve to stay the course. But why would you stay the course if it was headed for a cliff?”
Luke Kosar can be contacted at l.kosar@umiami.edu.