“KNOWINGLY BULL—-ING US THE WHOLE TIME”….Phil Carter reminds me today about a recent ABC News interview with President Bush that I forgot to blog about last week. Martha Raddatz asked Bush why, during the spiraling violence in Iraq in the summer of 2006, he kept insisting publicly that things were going well:
BUSH: Well, yes. I think we — and I wanted — that’s as much trying to bolster the spirits of the people in the field as well as — look, you can’t have the commander in chief say to a bunch of kids who are sacrificing either, “It’s not worth it,” or, “You’re losing.” I mean, what does that do for morale?
I was in Iraq during this time in 2006….We knew the ground truth. Being deceived by our senior political leaders certainly didn’t change that, nor did it help morale at all. If anything, it hurt morale by undermining confidence in the chain of command. Put bluntly, if you can’t trust your generals and political leaders to tell you and your families the truth, how can you trust them at all?
It’s disappointing to hear now, two years after the fact, that the president was knowingly bull—-ing us the whole time. And that he justified such dishonesty in the name of supporting the troops and protecting their morale. That’s an insult to America’s men and women in uniform (and their families), who deserve to be told the truth by their political leaders about what’s going on. It’s also an insult to us, as voters, who deserve the truth so we can make the right decisions in the voting booth.
We deserve to be told the truth by our political leaders? Such a quaint notion.
