Even as he said he would not directly criticize his successor, President Bush told a business crowd in Erie, Pa., on Wednesday some things that sounded critical, including:
– “I know it’s going to be the private sector that leads this country out of the current economic times we’re in.”
– “I’ll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don’t believe that — persuasion isn’t going to work. Therapy isn’t going to cause terrorists to change their mind.”
– “I worry about encouraging the government to replace the private sector when it comes to providing insurance for health care.”
– “When I look in the mirror, I say, ‘He did not sell his soul for short-term politics.’”
And when asked whether President Obama’s policies were “socialist,” Bush said: “We’ll see.”
“Defeating the public option should be a top priority for the GOP this year,” former Bush adviser Karl Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Otherwise, our nation will be changed in damaging ways almost impossible to reverse.” Rove contends that “if Democrats enact a public-option health-insurance program, America is on the way to becoming a European-style welfare state.”
But commentator Joe Conason argues that Medicare has been much better at controlling costs than private insurance, has much lower administrative costs, and has higher patient satisfaction. He asked: “If the private sector is truly the efficient solution to our costly, wasteful and unfair health care system, then why are they so frightened of a public plan?”
Some Americans are willing to overlook or justify the torture of terrorism detainees. But what if we torture the wrong person? President Bush said in 2002 that Abu Zubaydah was “al-Qaida’s chief of operations.” The CIA held him in a secret prison and waterboarded him 83 times. But officials eventually determined that Zubaydah, though a “fixer” for radical Muslim ideologues, was not a member of al-Qaida and not one of its leaders. According to a transcript of Zubaydah’s hearing that was released this week, he said that officials told him, “Sorry, we discover that you are not No. 3, not a partner, not even a fighter.”
In 2007, the Canadian government agreed to pay $9 million to a Canadian engineer who was seized by U.S. officials and taken to Syria, where he was tortured before officials realized they had the wrong man.
The latest SurveyUSA poll, co-sponsored by KWCH, Channel 12, of 453 likely GOP primary voters showed little change since April in what’s essentially a tie for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate next year — Rep. Jerry Moran of Hays with 40 percent, Rep. Todd Tiahrt (in photo) of Goddard with 38 percent and 22 percent undecided. The numbers to watch as the campaign progresses are those out of northeast Kansas, where neither congressman has a home-field advantage. In April, Moran led Tiahrt there 43 to 20 percent; now, Moran leads by just 8 percentage points.
