http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...29/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_mission_accomplished_2 disingenuous: dis·in·gen·u·ous adj. Not straightforward or candid; insincere or calculating: “an ambitious, disingenuous, philistine, and hypocritical operator, who... exemplified... the most disagreeable traits of his time” (David Cannadine). Pretending to be unaware or unsophisticated; faux-naïf. Usage Problem. Unaware or uninformed; naive.
So stating the fact that the troops who were returning from Iraq put a sign saying 'Mission Accomplished' because they happened to accomplish their mission is considered to be 'blaming the troops'? Man, the Bush-haters are really reaching now.
Fact: The sign was put up by Bush's personnel... although they claim that the sign was requested by troops (still passing the buck)... Either way, the man is either disingenuous or a damned fool... I say both, but you can make up your own mind as to which one of the two. PS. That sign was f***ing huge, was I suppose to read it and glean something from it???
1. He's their boss. A boss should stick up for his employees more than what he's doing here. 2. Of course the Bush team controls what the messages are around him when he talks, even if it wasn't their idea in the first place. To say "well gee, I had nothing to do with it" is terribly disingenuous.
As much as Rove controls every aspect of things at Bush's public appearances (note the corporate-style on-message backdrops at speeches), there is NO WAY that banner makes it up there without the at least tacit (if not explicit) approval of the White House.
I think that was the Norah O'Donnell question, right? OK, she's hot as hell, but still she got fooled by the Bushies' memory hole trick. She talked about the end of "major combat operations." The POTUS said in that speech that is was the end of "combat operations," but when soldiers kept dying, the heirs of Winston Smith changed the official White House website so that it read "major combat operation." Later a battle got going in the blogosphere about what the POTUS really said, when the anti-Bushie "major" people won a decisive victory by linking to the Google cache/archive. This also exposed the astonishing mendacity and cynicism of the Bushies. (Hey, Karl, have the evil libruls EVER done anything that cynical?) Now, the Winstons have put some kind of script into the White House website that disables any Google searches from finding anything there with "Iraq." You can still search from the White House website that way, just not from Google. But now, if the Bushies make statements that become inoperative, they can throw the doubleplus badthink down the memory hole and get away with it. There won't be any Google record of the original statement. No, I'm not making this up. I can give you links if I you don't trust me. But it's gonna cost you. You're gonna have to admit your man's operation is evil and not worthy of your support. And Norah O'Donnell is dead to me now as a serious reporter.
I can confirm that what Dave says about whitehouse.gov blocking Google from cacheing results about Iraq. It's all true.
What a failure of a human being, let alone a professional and political man. Whatever happened to conservative notions of personal responsibility, of "The Buck Stops Here?" For Bush, the Buck stops anywhere but here. (now waiting for that first-grade-level response saying that Clinton was worse, as if that makes Bush's shittiness better...)
Superdave, even though I already thought that the mission was evil and not worthy of my support (although I did have a pre-war blip in good reason, thanks in part to the persuasive Christopher Hitchens), I'd love to see those links. Could you post them?
http://www.thememoryhole.org/pol/iraq-combat/iraq-combat-dos.htm Thank you all very much. Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans: Majorcombat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country. I think you meant to say they changed the headline, and not the speech itself, from "combat operations" to "major combat operations," which was pretty idiotic considering that it opened them up to criticism.
http://gojomo.blogspot.com/#106732065514107786 http://www.2600.com/news/view/article/1803 http://www.bway.net/~keith/whrobots/whresp.html Apparently everything is almost back to normal, and from what I see on these links the file change wasn't as nefarious as you make it out to be(but, I do have a bias of course )
Actually, an intrepid reporter would try to find the sign and see if there was a "Made in China" label on it. Anybody remember the press conference in front of the boxes with all the fake labels attached? This administration has a pathological fear of showing things as they really are. That in itself is reason enough for a moderate like myself to want them deposed - doubleplus fast.
what?!? so they disabled the searches, got caught doing so and then switched it back - is there a manner in which any of that isn't nefarious?
What do I get out of it? I'm trying to get to the point that I can just write stuff and people trust me and not ask for links.
SD, I think your avatar looks more and more like Palestine. Back on topic, Bush did say the "mission has been accomplished." But he said it in June. http://www2.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/06/05/qatar.bush/ Wow, we lefties are sure stooping low. The month of the pres' quote is wrong. And that photo op with the big banner? Our cynicism continues to alter our collective perceptions. That banner had nothing to do with W. Just a random banner placed behind a president after he emerges from his tailhook landing to give a nationally televised speech on the end of MAJOR combat in Iraq. I now believe Bush did fly that plane. Or was it pigs flying? Does it matter?
From my first link: http://gojomo.blogspot.com/#106732065514107786 "In fact, I work for the Internet Archive on web crawling technology, and just 5 days ago I was relayed word, via email, that the White House webmaster wanted us to extensively crawl their site [...] But awkwardness does not imply scheming, and there was no hint of sinister intent in their expressed wishes. Instead, we were told "we could scoop everything up, no problem" -- a genuine desire to have whitehouse.gov material archived, on a topic-neutral basis.[...] So rather than squinting to see something sinister here, I'd suggest giving the whitehouse.gov team the benefit of the doubt. From what I've seen, they want their site crawled, archived, and searchable -- and their robots.txt should eventually stabilize to confirm that fact." And from the second: http://www.2600.com/news/view/article/1803 "It is of course open to speculation as to whether the original blocking of the content in question was malicious or an honest mistake. Certainly anyone who maintains a large website has made some sort of technical mistake at least once, and the promptness with which the error was fixed after it was pointed out suggests that the White House had no interest in keeping it in place. The White House, as an entity responsible to the citizenry and an entity that has generated a lot of criticism over its handling of the situation in Iraq, ought to take special care to avoid similar mistakes in the future. Nonetheless, we are pleased to learn that, at least this time, the issue seems to have been resolved promptly. " So, apparently the White House is so inept at being Orwellian that they allow the Internet Archive to search through their entire site, while at the same time they deliberately try to block pages on Iraq so Google can't cache it. Riiiiight. As things go, this is rather tame. But, 2600 does say it "is open to spectulation." ::shrug:::