Go Here and then discuss. I am very inclined to believe that it is real but way too lazy to look up all the sources. It seems that if Bush comes to visit any of your places of work, healthcare, or housing that soon you will have your funding cut to nothing. Special note to self, never invite Bush over to my work. I know that the link is partison (duh!) but it is drastically changing things that seem important to me.
It’s a partisan smear pf the sort that could have been used against any of the past Presidents as well. While I think the basic charges of mealy-mouthed campaign rhetoric are true, this type of selective spin isn’t the way (IMO) to go about fighting it.
no fan of Bush here, but this is a bunch of sound bites puporting to be correlated. And they may very well be, but it sure smells fishy by someone that wants to believe the worst in our current president
Yeah, that was about my opinion when I looked at it. I am not a Bush fan by any means but spreading this kind of campaign leaves me with a pretty nasty taste in my mouth. When I read through it, I was thinking look they have pretty little cite links next to it to back up the assertations. I was wrong, they were just underlined text.
I believe every word of it.
I’m sure a page could be made showing every president and the campaign promises they didn’t keep. I dislike Bush, but that page does little to make me dislike him more.
That page is from the United States House of Representatives. I would certainly hope that House Democrats are not so low as to smear without some basis in fact.
Interestingly enough, that page omits one of the most famous of Bush’s hit-and-run incidents, at Youth Opportunities in Portland, Oregon in January, 2002. There, Bush applauded the center and announced his support for job training programs like YO. Three weeks later his budget proposal cut their funding.
The House page does mention that Bush’s '04 budget proposal eliminates all YO grants.
I really doubt the truthfullness of the House of Representatives since it is filled with politicians. Is there a webpage that has similar findings of Bush’s successes compared to his rhetoric?
I saw this page when it was talked about in an earlier thread but I didn’t realize then that it was on the official House Appropriations Committee’s web pages. Maybe I’m just naive but is this the appropriate place for such crass politiking? I mean it’s got “.gov” in the address, could we have some decorum possibly? (i know -> time to wake up)
A lot of this is true (some of it is a stretch): I can remember being surprised myself: having seen the photo-ops and heard the speeches, and then seen the budget . I don’t think the cuts are bad (ethanol subsidies are a waste, IMHO): but I don’t look too highly on all his flag-hugging, New Yorker at heart, first-responders are heroes around Sept. 11 after seeing what a ultimately meager interest he had as far as money went.
This is hardly a Bush innovation, however. It has to do with how the national press works today: they almost never research facts and juxtapose them with the claims of speeches and press releases, they only report attention grabbing sound bites. So it makes a lot of sense to promise big things out loud, regardless of whether you deliver, because the failure of something to happen is rarely a compelling story (this just in: Nothing happened!). Same thing with funding bills: makes a lot of sense to pass an inflated bill, which gets press, and then quietly defund half of it later, which often doesn’t.
Heh. Sorry, I just follow the lyin’-ass politicians. I would be impressed if someone could actually provide such a resource that could be considered by most people to be impartial.
However, I can note that the Dem Appropriations page there contains a large number of contradictions and near-misses. For example, the section on fiscal responsibility takes Bush to task for saying he’s a budget hawk and then submitting a budget with a $300B deficit… but the whole rest of the darned page is about Bush cutting funding to all these federal programs! So which is it?
“I’m sure a page could be made showing every president and the campaign promises they didn’t keep”
The thing is that with Bush it goes beyond campaign promises and extends to promises made as President.
In fact he appears to have done it again recently. He promised a UN vote regardless of whether the US had the votes. Now the administration seems to be backing down from this.
Plus the Bush administration has been highly dishonest when it comes to selling their big policy proposals whether it’s tax cuts or Iraq. There is the same pattern of constantly changing rationales, half-truths and a few outright falsehoods.
Overall it’s not a pretty picture and IMO the media has not been hard enough on Bush. They seemed much more interested in Clinton’s personal dishonesty compared to Bush’s policy dishonesty when one would have thought the opposite would be more appropriate…
Diogenes the Cynic:
Ah, selectively cynical. How revealing.
I already knew about the Head Start and Border Patrol funding. Interesting website, strange about the .gov thing. I guess those two together made me read it with a bit less skeptacism than I normaly give websites.
There’s a few things that I can attest are true –
First Responders - Bush says his FY03 budget included $3.5 billion in “new” funding is misleading, for he just combined several programs under a new title. He proposed no new money last year. He did refuse in 8/02 to designate $150 million in 1st responder funding as “emergency spending,” so none of it was spent. This was included in a much larger package of homeland security funding that Bush refused to designate as an emergency.
Port security - true, but Bush didn’t “veto” the $39 million in spending, he refused to designate the money as an emergency, meaning that none of it was spent.
Veterans - it is true that the VA has made a decision that ‘priority 8’ vets will no longer be able to enter the VA health care system - those already in the system are grandfathered in. Priority 8 veterans don’t have service-connected disabilities and they are not destitute. The VA cut off their eligibility for health care because, with more veterans getting older, the VA’s health care system is too small/underfunded to take care of all of them.
I can’t speak as to the other assertions.