Pick the dummy

By: Ronald Kessler

The media widely portrayed President Bush and his key appointees as a bunch of dummies. Yet reviewing the Obama administration’s record, you have to wonder who is the dummy.

Since Obama took office:

Eric Holder Jr., his attorney general, said he opposes Arizona’s illegal immigration legislation but has not read the new law.

Janet Napolitano, his secretary of Homeland Security, said she also opposes the immigration law but has not read it.

Holder said he decided to reopen the question of prosecuting CIA interrogators without having read the memos by Justice Department career prosecutors who analyzed the cases and concluded that no criminal violations occurred.

Obama decided to close the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay without having any idea where the prisoners would go.

Holder decided to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in U.S. District Court in New York without asking the police or the FBI whether that would jeopardize the safety of New Yorkers.

While admitting he did not know “all the facts,” Obama said Cambridge police acted “stupidly” when Sgt. James Crowley, a white police officer, arrested Henry Louis Gates, a black Harvard professor who was being obstreperous when Crowley was investigating a report of a possible break-in.

Holder testified that he believes the CIA’s enhanced interrogation methods such as waterboarding constitute “torture,” but he said he had not read classified reports that describe what those techniques entail.

Neither Obama nor his cabinet officers are dummies, but if Bush or one of his appointees had been involved in any of these decisions without knowing the facts, the press would have pursued the story as relentlessly as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pursued the Watergate scandal.

From the way he walked to the way he talked, Bush was the butt of constant derision by the press. Every action he took to protect America was portrayed as a sinister plot.

Bush’s pronunciation of “nuclear” was cause for constant tittering in the media. In fact, pronouncing the word NOO-kyoo-ler is a Southern rendering similar to Jimmy Carter’s NOOK-ee-yuh. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary lists the way Bush pronounced nuclear as an alternate, even including that version in an audio clip on its website.

But the media were instrumental in getting Obama elected, and when he and his appointees seem to have no idea what they are talking about, they give them a pass.

Let me see . . . One is a chain smoker and the other doesn't smoke at all . . . One is born again and one doesn't attend church except for photo ops . . . One lowered our taxes and one is raising our taxes while tripling our debt . . . One kept us safe, while one has put us in more jeopardy than ever before . . . Hmmm, tough choice.


Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com.