George W. Bush: The Art of Ignorance

In George Bush's speech to a hand-picked crowd of GOP loyalists on Friday, he again disregarded everything John Kerry said in the debate and instead conjured up his own idea.

October 1,2004 Speech
Allentown, Pennsylvania

Bush: Last night, Senator Kerry only continued his pattern of confusing contradictions. After voting for the war, after saying my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision -- (applause) -- he now says it was all a mistake.

Here is what Kerry actually said at Friday's debate in his response to Jim Lehrers question: Are Americans now dying in Iraq for a mistake?

September 30,2004
1st Presidential Debate

Kerry: No, and they don't have to, providing we have the leadership that we put -- that I'm offering.

I believe that we have to win this.

The president and I have always agreed on that.

And from the beginning, I did vote to give the authority, because I thought Saddam Hussein was a threat, and I did accept that intelligence.

But I also laid out a very strict series of things we needed to do in order to proceed from a position of strength.

Then the president, in fact, promised them.

He went to Cincinnati and he gave a speech in which he said, "We will plan carefully. We will proceed cautiously. We will not make war inevitable. We will go with our allies."

He didn't do any of those things. They didn't do the planning.

They left the planning of the State Department in the State Department desks.

They avoided even the advice of their own general. General Shinsheki, the Army chief of staff, said you're going to need several hundred thousand troops. Instead of listening to him, they retired him.

The terrorism czar, who has worked for every president since Ronald Reagan, said, "Invading Iraq in response to 9/11 would be like Franklin Roosevelt invading Mexico in response to Pearl Harbor."

That's what we have here.

And what we need now is a president who understands how to bring these other countries together to recognize their stakes in this. They do have stakes in it. They've always had stakes in it.

The Arab countries have a stake in not having a civil war. The European countries have a stake in not having total disorder on their doorstep.

But this president hasn't even held the kind of statesman-like summits that pull people together and get them to invest in those states.

In fact, he's done the opposite. He pushed them away.

When the Secretary General Kofi Annan offered the United Nations, he said, "No, no, we'll go do this alone."

To save for Halliburton the spoils of the war, they actually issued a memorandum from the Defense Department saying, "If you weren't with us in the war, don't bother applying for any construction."

That's not a way to invite people.

Many people have said that George Bush looked like he was anywhere but the debate. I have to confess, I agree with them.

source: 9/30/04 Debate Transcript