Bush Stoops on the Stump

By Matthew Rothschild

You know Bush is getting desperate when he whips out the tattered terrorist card.

But that’s what he is doing repeatedly on the campaign trail these days.

Take a look at the campaign speech which he gave in Georgia and in Texas on October 30, and you’ll see the sleazy distortions and the sly innuendos.

Calculatedly, he mischaracterizes the position of his opponents.

On the question of his illegal NSA spying policy, he says: “I believe that if Al Qaeda or an Al Qaeda associate is making a phone call from outside the United States to inside the United States, we need to know why in order to be able to protect you.”

False implication: Democrats don’t want to know why; Democrats don’t want to protect you.

Most Democrats in the House, he says, voted against allowing the NSA to “continue to monitor terrorist communications.”

But it’s not about continuing to monitor terrorist communications or not. It’s about following the law. The Democrats, and other opponents of the Bush’s illegal spying, want the government to monitor these calls, so long as it is done legally.

They simply want him to get a warrant, as required by law. And that law, by the way, allows him a 72-hour grace period to wiretap and then retroactively get a warrant. But Bush wants unilateral, unchecked power. Anyone who opposes that, he insinuates, doesn’t want to protect Americans.