The Sleazy and Despicable Bush-Halliburton Administration
Commentary ~ September 10, 2004: Al Gore slammed
Vice President Dick Cheney this week for saying "the wrong
choice" by voters could result in another terrorist attack,
calling it "a sleazy and despicable effort to blackmail voters
with fear."
Al Gore is right. This administration has been sleazy
and despicable since day one.
Repeated referring to the "failed record"
of the “Bush-Halliburton administration,” Gore told
the United Steelworkers of America that Bush and Cheney are “going
back to the ugliest page in the Republican playbook: fear,"
he said. "They're not even really trying to convince you to
vote for George Bush. Their only hope, they've decided, is to try
and make you too afraid to vote for John Kerry. It's the lowest
sort of politics imaginable. It is not worthy of a presidential
candidate."
Speaking in Pittsburgh, Gore also hammered Bush over
Labor Department statistics showing the country has a net loss of
913,000 jobs since he took office.
"It takes real work doing the wrong things in
order to counter the natural momentum of the U.S. economy,"
Gore said. "But this president is now, along with Herbert Hoover,
the only one to end up giving our country a net loss of jobs"
since the Great Depression.
Other Democrats, including Kerry and running mate
John Edwards, also condemned Cheney's statement, with Kerry saying
that Bush and Cheney were playing politics with the war on terror
in a "shameful and irresponsible" effort to scare voters
into re-electing them.
Unlike
Senator John Kerry, Bush never went to Vietnam. According to reports
in the Associated Press and other sources, Bush had asked to be
able to transfer temporarily from the Texas Guard to an Alabama
base during that time so he could work on the Senate campaign of
a family friend. Reports differ on how long he was actually in Alabama,
but he claims he returned to his Texas unit after the November 1972
election. Many Americans are questioning whether Bush even showed
up for his temporary Guard duty.
Bush has thus far declined to discuss the issue,
because he is too busy trying to come up with an excuse for his
absence from military duty with the recently-released records that
claim he was AWOL. CBS News reported this week on four memos from
the personal file of Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who died 20 years
ago. The memos said that Mr. Bush had disobeyed a direct order to
go for a physical in 1972 and that Colonel Killian had felt pressure
to "sugarcoat'' Mr. Bush's record.
Unlike
Senator John Kerry, Bush never went to Vietnam. According to reports
in the Associated Press and other sources, Bush had asked to be
able to transfer temporarily from the Texas Guard to an Alabama
base during that time so he could work on the Senate campaign of
a family friend. Reports differ on how long he was actually in Alabama,
but he claims he returned to his Texas unit after the November 1972
election. Many Americans are questioning whether Bush even showed
up for his temporary Guard duty.