1/28/09 - Update
Well, the republican strategy regarding the false statements that "there were no terrorist attacks under Bush", seems to have taken hold. After reading through comments after the State of the Union Address, I noticed several comments repeating the (obviously) false statements stated by Perino and Giuliani. My view of my fellow Americans has dropped a few notches...
1/8/09
Last week I saw a video where Dana Perino claimed that "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term" on Sean Hannity's Fox News Program. I attempted to pass this off as an honest slip up, and assumed that she meant that after 9/11, there wasn't another attack. Viewing the video, it really doesn't seem as though here sentence structure would allow for that, but I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt anyways.
Of course, regardless of whether she meant that we didn't have an attack after 9/11, her statement still isn't true. We actually had several during bush's term, including the Anthrax scare, where the deadly compound was sent through the postal system, and the shoe bomber, which is amazingly similar to the recent Christmas bombing attempt. In that situation, like the Christmas bomb attempt, airline security failed, and the bomb attempt was stopped by passengers on the plane.
It seemed like Perino's statement was just a single, moronic statement, and since it was on Fox News, didn't seem like this was anything out of the ordinary. However, I just came across an ABC News video, where Rudy Giuliani also claimed that there were no attacks under Bush (9/11, or any of the others). It's totally possible that these are just two isolated, moronic statements, but it also seems like it could be a pointed attempt to influence the non-thinking class of the US into overstating Bush's 'War on Terror' policy. It seems obvious to me that anyone can see through these statements, but at the same time, these tactics oddly have a way of working.
I must say that I find all of this more than a little disturbing.
