Bush Boner in Second Debate: Letting Iraq Weapons Inspectors Do Their Job Was ‘Naive and Dangerous’

Bush & Kerry in 2nd presidential debate (credit: Doug Mills/NYT)

I’m clearly a partisan regarding the presidential race so I’m not going to try to persuade you that John Kerry decimated George Bush tonight. It’s clear that Bush turned in a far better performance than he did the first time. But he still had a few amazingly idiotic things to say which most pundits and commentators haven’t noted yet. The quotations below are from the New York Times second presidential debate transcript.

First, in the debate about Iraq Kerry made his usual point that Bush “pulled the plug” on the inspectors before they really had a chance to get to the bottom of the question of Iraqi WMD (“If he’d let the inspectors do their job and go on, we wouldn’t have 10 times the numbers of forces in Iraq that we have in Afghanistan chasing Osama bin Laden.”). Bush’s retort was amazingly dumb and I hope someone in the mass media is going to call him on this one: “He keeps talking about let the inspectors do their job. It’s naive and dangerous to say that.”

What Bush is revealing plain and simple is his detestation of international diplomacy. He claims he wanted the inspections to work. But he couldn’t have cared less about them and this statement makes his contempt for the inspection regime clear as a bell.

Another questioner asked both Bush and Kerry to talk about what type of judge they would nominate to fill the next Supreme Court vacany. Bush’s answer seemed to emanate from somewhere between Neptune and Pluto:

Uh, let me give you a couple of examples I guess of the kind of person I wouldn’t pick…An…example [of someone I would not pick] would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges years ago said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights. That’s personal opinion. That’s not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we’re all – you know, it doesn’t say that. It doesn’t speak to the equality of America.

What’s ridiculous about this response? Let me count the ways. First, I’ve got a NEWS FLASH for you: George Bush announced in tonight’s debate that he wouldn’t nominate a judge to the Supreme Court who supports slavery! Wow, that’s a mind bender. George is really sticking his neck on the line with this one. Poor Roger Taney, the chief justice who decided the Dred Scott decision. He’ll never get to the Supreme Court in a Bush Administration.

Kevin Drum of Daily Kos has elucidated the arcane hard-right ideological allusion to abortion contained in Bush’s Dred Scott reference.

But even more egregiously, Bush completely misunderstands the Constitution. The Founding Fathers didn’t take a position on slavery one way or the other. But they did specify that an African-American slave was 3/5 of a person. This is turn magnified the political power of the South (by allocating the South additional House seats while denying those slaves the right to vote) and concomitantly strengthening the institution of slavery. While the Constitution doesn’t endorse slavery it takes a very sympathetic view of it. If I were a Bush handler I’d tell him to read Gary Morris’ Negro President: Jefferson & Slave Power which would educate Bush about his grievous ignorance of the very document he is sworn to uphold and protect: the U.S. Constitution.

Towards the end of the debate, a questioner asked what I thought was an interesting and slightly provocative question of Bush. This was Linda Grabel’s question:

Q President Bush, during the last four years, you have made thousands of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision, and what you did to correct it.

This is certainly a tricky question, but Bush’s reply at least to my mind was contemptuous, dismissive and downright non-responsive:

I have made a lot of decisions, and some of them little, like appointments to boards you’ve never heard of, and some of them big. And in a war, there’s a lot of — there’s a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say he shouldn’t of done that.

You shouldn’t have made that decision.” And I’ll take responsibility for ’em. I’m human.

He gets asked a simple question: “tell me about three mistakes you’ve made and what you did to fix them.” His answer: “I’ve made mistakes. I’m human. I take responsibility for them.” That’s an answer?? To me that’s an obfuscation.

Here’s where the contempt for the questioner comes in:

On the big questions, about whether or not we should have gone into Afghanistan, the big question about whether we should have removed somebody in Iraq, I’ll stand by those decisions because I think they’re right. It’s really what you’re — when they ask about the mistakes, that’s what they’re talking about. They’re trying to say, “Did you make a mistake going into Iraq?” And the answer is absolutely not. It’s a right decision.

When a candidate is asked a question publicly on the campaign trail, it’s completely inappropriate to dismiss the questioner and the question as having ulterior motives. Don’t tell your audience what the questioner “really meant to say.” Because then you’re reading into the question an intent you have no right to assume. Sure, Grabel may’ve had an ulterior motive. But it’s Bush’s job to answer the question and not suspect the questioner.

To me, this shows Bush’s utter contempt for those who don’t think the same way he does. For Pete’s sake, this woman is an undecided voter or at least that’s what the Gallup Organization (which chose the audience members) is telling us. Doesn’t he want to try to win her vote? He chose a strange way to do that, I’d say.

The New York Times editorial, Town Hall Debate, reflects as well on this same question that Bush was asked.