The Bush Betrayal: Chapter 8

We continue coverage of this awesome book with another small sample:

        Chapter Title: Spending as Caring
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Bush often ripped U.S. foreign aid for being wasteful and just plain unnecessary - until he became President. Bovard tells of yet more Republican-led criticism of Bush's policies. During Bush's gifting periods to the IMF and World Bank, he often claimed that funding the IMF and World Bank would help these dubious organizations to get poverty-stricken countries out of debt, and would thus keep those countries from producing terrorists. There are a couple of problems with this theory, but let's let our distinguished Republican colleague do his work:

Bush's portrayal of foreign aid as a silver bullet against terrorism was scoffed at by Sen. Christoper Bond (R-Mo.): "The premise that inadequate U.S. aid was the cause of the terrorist attacks is absolutely wrong. The terrorist hijackers were mostly from Saudi Arabia, one of the richest countries per captia in the Middle East. Others came from Egypt, one of the largest recipients of U.S. aid."³⁵ Regardless of whether foreign aid actually thwarts terrorism, Bush benefits from linking the two issues in his speeches.

Here's the kicker - even if you think you're paying attention really closely - it still might not matter. They'll still manage to slip some stuff by you - maybe even a lot. It's one of the problems with watching Fox News. Even if you are incredibly diligent in looking for their angles, they can still slip some stuff by you by being selective about which facts they present. And, of course, many of Fox's 'facts' are either just opinion, distortions, 'oversights', or outright lies.

Link to original article (and Chapter 1 - Introduction) here.

Link to previous chapter.

Chapter 9.