Bush on Meet the Press
The Center for American Progress has put up a report called “CLAIM vs. FACT: The President on Meet the Press,” which examines President Bush’s appearance on Meet the Press this morning. It begins with this statement:
“President Bush wouldn’t have agreed to an hour long network interview without a good reason and today he had one: in the span of a week he’s faced the dual challenges of a loss of credibility on the war in Iraq and his management of the economy.
“His statement this morning that he would cut the deficit in half is simply laughable. Analyses by independent organizations like Goldman Sachs, the Concord Coalition, the Committee for Economic Development, and Decision Economics all project deficits of about $5 trillion over the next decade, even assuming a return to strong growth.”
“The President’s statement that there is ‘good momentum’ on the job creation front is dishonest: while we are averaging 72,000 new private sector jobs created per month, at that pace, it would not be until May 2007 that this President would have created his first net job. President Bush is well on his way to having the worst job creation record since the Great Depression. His bragging today only served to reinforce his lack of credibility on managing the nation’s economy.
“And what the President referred to as a “word contest” regarding the threat from Iraq is, in fact, his attempt to change the rationale for going to war and rewrite the history of what has occurred. His argument today that Iraq had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction and pass them into the hands of shadowy terrorist networks is inconsistent with the intelligence provided to him.
President Bush sought to restore his credibility today and he clearly failed to do so.”
The report then goes on to take on Bush’s major assertions one at a time, and shows why all of them are false. It’s well worth a read, whether you watched the interview this morning or not.
[Note: If the link to the report should stop working, you should still be able to get to it by going to their archive page and picking February 8, 2004.]
