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Promoted by DHinMI]
President George W. Bush raised nearly half a million dollars for Representatives Jim Gerlach and Mike Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania last Wednesday at a $1000-per-ticket fund-raiser. Here is what he said.
A battlefront in the war on terror is, of course, Iraq. And people in our country are unsettled because of the war, and I understand that. I fully understand why people in America are disquieted about what they're seeing on their TV screens. There's a concern about whether or not we can win. There's no doubt in my mind we will win...
The enemy cannot defeat us on the battlefield, but what they can do is put horrible images on our TV screens.
It is not what we are seeing on our TV screens that disquiets us.
BushWatch is a feature of The Next Hurrah. Read parts 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Three years ago this month, we saw the President make a tailhook landing on an aircraft carrier before a sign that read, "Mission Accomplished." We did not see the nearly 2,500 US military coffins returned home since then. We did not see prisoners being tortured and killed at Abu Ghraib. And we did not see the methodical slaughter of 24 Iraqi civilians including a 3-year-old girl and a 76-year-old man shot in their homes, killings that Republican Representative John Kline called "not an accident... an atrocity." Worst of all, we have not seen the US command, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, held accountable. That disquiets us.
Last fall, Hurricane Katrina brought horrible images to our TV screens. We saw people behave like animals. We saw dead humans fill the streets. We saw desperation and poverty unfit for this country -- for any country. But what we didn't see was worse. We didn't see a President in command. We didn't see a President prepared to lead. We saw a President eating birthday cake with Senator John McCain as water flowed over the New Orleans levees, a President who went to bed ignoring Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco's request for federal assistance, and a President play guitar with country star Mark Wills in San Diego the day after the levees breached and as 36,000 evacuees in the New Orleans Superdome ran out of food and water. That was disquieting.
This month, we turned on our TVs and we saw the President of the United States in the Oval Office, the setting from which he addressed us after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the Iraq invasion of March 19, 2003, and we saw him present a plan for a $2-billion wall to stop Mexicans entering the US illegally. But we didn't see the President two days later, at the funeral for Army 1st Sergeant Carlos Saenz and Army Staff Sergeant David Veverka. Saenz was born in Mexico. Veverka was born in Pennsylvania. They both went to fight for the US, and were killed one day apart in Iraq, and they were laid in the ground the same Wednesday afternoon in Arlington National Cemetery. The President was not there. He was not there for the funerals of at least 15 other troops of Mexican descent killed in Iraq. He has not been there for the funerals of any other troops from Pennsylvania. He has not been there for any funerals, at all.
There are horrible images on our TV screens, but that is not what disquiets us.
It is the horrible scenes in real life. It is the needless death, brutal torture, and cold-blooded massacres in Iraq. It is the poverty, desperation, and suffering in New Orleans. It is the empty spaces and unending grieving that those deaths bring at home. That is what makes us unsettled. That is what makes us concerned.
And it is a President who goes on vacation but not into service. A President who goes to photo-ops and not to a city that is dying. A President who goes to half-million-dollar fundraisers but not to funerals.
That is what makes us mad as hell.
