Ron Fournier: ‘Welcome to the Bush-Obama White House…’?
Ron Fournier, writing for the National Journal, is to be congratulated. In a world rife with specious “journalism” it isn’t just any, garden variety, “mainstream media” stooge that could manage to turn the worst, consecutive set of presidential scandals in American history, into an indictment … of a president that has been out of office for five years.
Fournier’s article, entitled “Welcome to the Bush-Obama White House: They’re Spying on Us” begins thusly: “Welcome to the era of Bush-Obama, a 16-year span of U.S. history that will be remembered for an unprecedented erosion of civil liberties and a disregard for transparency. On the war against a tactic — terrorism — and its insidious fallout, the United States could have skipped the 2008 election.”
It doesn’t seem possible but the article really does go downhill from there.
Fournier cites “a 16-year” reign of presidential terror, giving star billing to former president Bush. This spin is mind-boggling because, indisputably, all of the horror inventoried by Fournier is The Lyin’ King’s doing:
— Killing civilians and U.S. citizens via drone.
— Seizing telephone records at the Associated Press in violation of Justice Department guidelines.
— Accusing a respected FOX News reporter of engaging in a conspiracy to commit treason for doing his job.
Fournier adds that The Lyin’ King “is still detaining suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay”, despite promising to end the “ill-considered practice by President Bush.” Clearly, if Fournier gives Bush top billing he has to validate that casting decision somehow, doesn’t he?
Fournier wasn’t finished cataloguing the evils of the “Bush-Obama” era. He raged about the IRS scandals and the latest, inexcusable disgrace; nation-wide Verizon phone record retrieval. Fournier quotes the Washington Post: “the (current) NSA order could represent the broadest surveillance order known to have been issued…” True. “…It also would confirm long-standing suspicions of civil liberties advocates about the sweeping nature of U.S. surveillance through commercial carries under laws passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.” Um…nope, sorry.
In a breath-taking display of partisan wishful thinking, the Washington Post, as is so often the case, was wrong about that. Fournier hypothesized that the seizure of the telephone records of every American using Verizon services “appears to be a ‘rubber stamp,’ order, reissued every few months since 2001.” Surprise, surprise, Fournier was wrong, too. Desperate to justify giving President Bush the limelight in his article, Fournier breezily trotted out knee-jerk, liberal dogma to defend the current regime.
But this tar baby is entirely The Lyin’ King’s creation. President Bush, despite Fournier’s insistence, publicly and transparently sought wiretapping privileges solely against suspected terrorist calls coming in to the United States from foreign nationals abroad. Period. He wasn’t interested in Joe Citizen’s bowling date. Not so The Lyin’ King.
Bush was no conservative but he’s never had anything to do with what the current regime has perpetrated. MSM apparatchiks, print and broadcast, are falling all over themselves in the stampede to blame Bush for having initiated the attacks on our personal liberties. The party line is that everything the Imperial President is doing is legal.