Oh wait. My bad. She actually intended to slam Michael J. Fox when she said it was easy to manipulate people with emotion (via Think Progress):
In an interview on C-Span, First Lady Laura Bush was asked about Michael J Fox’s advocacy for candidates who support embryonic stem cell research. Mrs. Bush responded that it was wrong for Fox and others to suggest that increased support for embryonic stem cell research could lead to cures for Alzheimer’s and other diseases.
She concluded with a thinly veiled critique of Fox: “It’s always easy to manipulate people’s feelings, especially when you are talking about diseases that are so difficult.”
Well, you can understand my confusion, I hope. After all, her husband and other Republicans have been literally manipulating people’s emotions for years:
(cont.)
On Iraq and the War on Terror:
June, 2005: [Karl Rove] “Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.” Conservatives, he said, “saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war.”
October 30, 2006: President Bush said terrorists will win if Democrats win …
September, 2004: [Dick Cheney] “It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States,” Cheney told about 350 supporters at a town-hall meeting in this Iowa city.
September 22, 2002: [Condoleezza Rice] “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
October 7, 2002: [President Bush] “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
September 10, 2006: [Cheney] said U.S. allies in Afghanistan and Iraq “have doubts” the United States will finish the job there. “And those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we’ve had in the United States,” he said. “Suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists.”
October 30, 2006: [President Bush]You see, the enemy has clearly stated they want us to retreat. They want to topple moderate governments. They want their extremism to become the philosophy of a governing structure that stretches from Indonesia to Spain. It’s called a caliphate. That’s what they’ve said. Imagine a Middle East in which violent forms of extremists compete for power, moderate governments are overturned, oil-rich states are controlled by the radicals who will use the energy to create blackmail for the United States, and in the midst a country with a nuclear weapon that can’t stand us — 30 years from now, if that were to happen, people will look back and they’ll say, what happened to that generation in 2006; how come they couldn’t see the impending danger; how come they couldn’t see the threat?
August 21, 2006: “If we withdraw [from Iraq] before the job is done, the enemy will follow us here,” Bush said …
On Gays:
October 28, 2006: The ad [by Republican nominee for Arkansas Attorney General, Gunner DeLay] says that, “Only one candidate is openly supporting the gay agenda in favor of same-sex civil unions — Dustin McDaniel [the Democratic nominee].”
Oct. 25, 2006: An embattled Indiana congressman [John Hostettler] has launched a new campaign ad that warns a vote for his Democratic opponent could trigger a shift in House leadership and advance a “homosexual agenda.”
October 30, 2006: “For decades, activist judges have tried to redefine America by court order,” Bush said Monday while campaigning in the backwoods of Georgia. “Just this last week in New Jersey, another activist court issued a ruling that raises doubt about the institution of marriage. We believe marriage is a union between a man and a woman, and should be defended.”
On Taxes:
October, 2006 [House Republican Whip Roy Blunt] “Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats want the president’s tax-relief measures to expire, raising taxes on millions of Americans.”
October, 2006: [President Bush] “Raising taxes is what the Democrats want to do, make no mistake about it,” he said. “If they take over the Senate, they will run up your taxes.”
And that’s a small sample my friends, a very small sample. So forgive me for thinking Laura was finally fessing up to the fact that her husband, his advisors and Republican officials have been the principal manipulators of our emotions. In a weak moment I made the mistake of assuming she actually cared about the lies and the fear inducing rhetoric her husband and his fellow travelers in the Republican Party have been spreading across our political landscape for the last 6 years. Trust me, it won’t happen again.