By now, anyone who follows politics and is able to think with a rational mind can clearly see the double standards in the reactions from Republicans to similar events which occurred under both George W. Bush and President Obama.
Lets start with BENGHAZI! The typical malleable Fox News viewer likely has the impression that nothing similar occurred under the Bush regime, probably because Fox conveniently didn’t bother to cover it extensively, or much less ever question the circumstances surrounding those events, or criticize the Bush administration for anything that they might have done wrong. They have a viewpoint to live up to, dammit, as well as a willfully ignorant audience to cater to.
But under Bush, there were 13 similar events that occurred when he was
Where were the congressional investigations into those attacks, especially given that in some of those attacks, there were sufficient warnings that American consulates were about to be attacked by foreign interests? We’re now on our 8th congressional investigation of what happened with Benghazi, because apparently the first 7 didn’t do enough to implicate President Obama or the likely next president if she runs, Hillary Clinton. Where were all the Republicans and right-wing media gasbags when these embassy and consulate attacks took place under President Bush?
Well, we know the answer to that. They were looking the other way, or were too busy trying to justify a clusterf*ck war being fought on false pretenses in Iraq. And they were fighting a culture war, trying to save Christmas from the millions and millions of Americans who are out to destroy it.
That brings us to the latest trumped up scandal: The swap of 5 Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo Bay for the release of American soldier Bowe Bergdahl, who had been held captive for 5 years in Afghanistan. In between obsessing over Bob Bergdahl’s Muslim-y beard, Fox News and other conservative outlets have been railing on President Obama for releasing 5 bad guys from Gitmo who may end up attacking U.S. interests again.
Well, here again we must take a hard turn away from the Fox News script and point out that while even President Obama acknowledged the released bad guys could indeed end up back on the battlefield against U.S. interests, there were just a few more bad guys released from Gitmo under Bush. A total of… wait for it… 532! And out of those 532, 171 of them were confirmed or suspected of having returned to the battlefield. Under President Obama, only 7 have met that description.
And according to the U.S. Intelligence Agency, that includes Ibrahim Sen, who was later arrested in Turkey charged as the leader of an active al Qaeda cell, and Abdullah Mahsud, whom Pakistan government officials accuse of directing a suicide attack in April 2007 that killed 31 people.
And further throwing a monkey wrench into the conservative media’s talking points is that another one of the bad guys released under Bush is suspected of having been involved in the Benghazi attack.
How’s that for irony?
Apparently, the Republican strategy consists of throwing as much mud as possible at Democrats and hoping enough of it sticks so they have a fighter’s chance of winning back the Senate and even the presidency in the coming elections. And to conveniently ignore their own transgressions, which occurred under a much greater scale on many fronts under the disastrous George W. Bush reign of terror.
H/T: Liberaland
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