OK. I’m not a fan of George Bush nor his administration — an understatement, if ever I’ve heard one — but I’m wondering if some of the sniping against him is getting a bit ridiculous. Now, granted, the sniping that Bill Clinton had to endure was in many ways worse, but aren’t we all getting tired of it?
Bush brings it upon himself in many ways, not the least of which is the way the spin meisters at the White House create and stage events to boost his popularity. Unfortunately, those events always invite criticism, some of it from the right as well as the left. Why can’t they just keep him quiet and in the background where he belongs? Or, maybe they’ve planned it all this way so that he can run as the underdog that everyone picks on?
Now this:
Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon-authorized newspaper of the U.S. military, is bucking for a court-martial.
Stars and Stripes is blowing the whistle on President Bush’s Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad, saying the cheering soldiers who met him were pre-screened and others showing up for a turkey dinner were turned away.
The newspaper, quoting two officials with the Army’s 1st Armored Division in an article last week, reported that “for security reasons, only those preselected got into the facility during Bush’s visit. . . . The soldiers who dined while the president visited were selected by their chain of command, and were notified a short time before the visit.”
The paper also published a letter to the editor from Sgt. Loren Russell, who wrote of the heroism of his soldiers and then added: “[I]magine their dismay when they walked 15 minutes to the Bob Hope Dining Facility, only to find that they were turned away from their evening meal because they were in the wrong unit. . . . They understand that President Bush ate there and that upgraded security was required. But why were only certain units turned away?”
It’s been two weeks since Bush made that secret trip to Iraq, but the flight itself continues to cause turbulence.
Air traffic controllers in Britain are seething over the flight, in which the president’s 747, falsely identified as a Gulfstream, traveled through British airspace. Prospect, the controllers union in the United Kingdom, says the flight broke international regulations, posed a potential safety threat and exposed a weakness in the air defense system that could be exploited by terrorists.
“The overriding concern is if the president’s men who did this can dupe air traffic control, what’s to stop a highly organized terrorist group from duping air traffic control?” asked David Luxton, Prospect’s national secretary. Luxton said the flight was in “breach” of regulations against filing false flight plans set by the International Civil Aviation Organization, which he said should apply to a military aircraft using civilian airspace.
Luxton said that by identifying itself as a Gulfstream V instead of the much larger 747, Air Force One could have put itself and other airplanes in danger. The Gulfstream can climb faster and maneuver more nimbly than a 747, which means controllers could have assumed the president’s plane was capable of a collision-avoiding maneuver that it couldn’t actually do. And the “wake vortex” of a 747, much larger than a Gulfstream’s, could jeopardize smaller planes that were told by unsuspecting controllers to follow in the mislabeled plane’s wake.
