Bush Stoops on the Stump
By Matthew Rothschild

You know Bush is getting desperate when he whips out the tattered terrorist card.

But that’s what he is doing repeatedly on the campaign trail these days.

Take a look at the campaign speech which he gave in Georgia and in Texas on October 30, and you’ll see the sleazy distortions and the sly innuendos.

Calculatedly, he mischaracterizes the position of his opponents.

On the question of his illegal NSA spying policy, he says: “I believe that if Al Qaeda or an Al Qaeda associate is making a phone call from outside the United States to inside the United States, we need to know why in order to be able to protect you.”

False implication: Democrats don’t want to know why; Democrats don’t want to protect you.

Most Democrats in the House, he says, voted against allowing the NSA to “continue to monitor terrorist communications.”

But it’s not about continuing to monitor terrorist communications or not. It’s about following the law. The Democrats, and other opponents of the Bush’s illegal spying, want the government to monitor these calls, so long as it is done legally.

They simply want him to get a warrant, as required by law. And that law, by the way, allows him a 72-hour grace period to wiretap and then retroactively get a warrant. But Bush wants unilateral, unchecked power. Anyone who opposes that, he insinuates, doesn’t want to protect Americans.

Bush similarly distorts the views of Democrats who voted against thenew Military Commissions Act. This un-American law allows the President to lock up any noncitizen for life without trial and allows the President himself to decide what is torture and what is not.

Bush says anyone who voted against it doesn’t even want the CIA to detain or question terrorists.

“When it came to vote on whether or not to allow the CIA to continue its program to detain and question captured terrorists, more than 80 percent of the House Democrats voted against it,” he said.

But that’s not the point. Everyone wants the United States to detain and question them. The question is whether the CIA can torture them.

Bush and Cheney approve of waterboarding and other torture techniques.

And they now have the authority to order up some more.

Bush also said the Democrats don’t even want to put terrorists on trial, when he knows that’s not the issue. The issue is whether those trials will meet minimal judicial standards, which they don’t, since they allow in secret evidence and evidence obtained by the very techniques of torture that Bush and Cheney so vehemently defend.

Here is Bush’s avalanche of lies:

“When it comes to listening to the terrorists, what’s the Democrats’ answer? It’s just say no. When it come to detaining terrorists, what is the Democrats’ answer Just say no. When it comes to questioning terrorists, what’s the Democrats’ answer? Just say no. When it comes to trying terrorists, what’s the Democrats’ answer. Just say no.”

On the Iraq War, Bush distills his distortions to one sentence: “The Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win, and America loses.”

Leaving aside the fact that the Iraq War is a recruiting call and a training ground for terrorists, as even the CIA admits, for Bush to imply that the Democrats intend for the terrorists to win and America to lose is about as low as Bush has gone yet.

He tries to issue a disclaimer when he adds, “I’m not saying that these Democrats are unpatriotic. I’m just saying they’re wrong.” But he knows full well that the audience will get the message that Democrats coddle terrorists, and he knows full well that the rightwing talk radio hosts he’s been feting will make the “unpatriotic” slur for him.

There is no low Bush will not stoop to.