Dishonest Leadership
Remember this jingle? “…we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” In other words, our leaders expected us to believe that Iraq had the bomb, but they didn’t plan to tell us that directly. Based on former presidential spokesman Scott McClellan’s accounts, the Bush administration used innuendo to describe the nuclear threat from Iraq.
If another country has a nuclear bomb which they intend to detonate inside the United States, then the president should warn the American people about that forthrightly. These words would be appropriate: “the United States government believes that country XYZ has an atomic weapon which they will soon use in an attack against us.”
Americans have no reason to oppose the president’s legitimate attempts to protect the country. But that’s not how things played out during the run up to the war in 2002 and 2003. Instead some pollster came up with a clever turn of words and Mr. Bush used them to toss us in the spin cycle.
October 7, 2002: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
January 28, 2003: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Insincerity is not appropriate when the elected president of the most powerful nation in the world sets out to identify the most serious threats known to mankind. Effective leaders recognize when candor is absolutely essential. It’s disheartening to realize that our president places partisan politics above all else, including the personal safety of American and Iraqi citizens.
George Bush, mushroom cloud, smoking gun
June 4th, 2008 at 5:53 am
This is really a very good article.
June 17th, 2008 at 4:43 am
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