W gave an interview recently and it was depicted widely as being a criticism of Donald Trump.
Former President George W. Bush seemed to criticize President Donald Trump in an interview with the Today Show Monday morning, saying the news media and freedom of religion are crucial to American democracy. There should also be an investigation into the alleged Russian hacking into the U.S. election, Bush said.
Those are all issues that Trump has dealt with in his first month in office. He has called the Russia story “fake news,” a distraction and even fabrication by the press, despite the fact that the CIA said in December Russia interfered with U.S. elections; he’s been hostile toward the news media, which culminated in his announcement last weekend that he’d boycott the White House Correspondents Dinner, a traditional event showing goodwill between the press and the president; and his administration has been revising an executive order that would temporarily ban visitors and immigrants from seven majority-Muslim nations.
Even Ace agreed with the line of thinking.
Eh, kind of annoying.
And Fox News jumped in:
Former President George W. Bush offered what appeared to be a thinly veiled critique of his Republican successor on Monday, as he defended the importance of the media and immigration policies that are “welcoming.”
I don’t agree. I think that wily Bush really agreed with Trump, but couched his words carefully to make it sound like he was being critical.
For instance, Yahoo quoted Bush as saying
“We need the media to hold people like me to account,”
But what he actually said was:
“We need an independent media to hold people like me to account.”
We need an independent media. Yes, we do need an independent media, but that is not what we have now. We have “journalists” in collusion with democrat administrations, “journalists” who leak debate questions, “journalists” who gushed over obama, and “journalists” who tingled when obama spoke. We have “journalists” who forget obama declared war on them but continued to bow at his feet.
That’s not very independent. W added:
“One of the things I spent a lot of time doing was trying to convince a person — like Vladimir Putin, for example — to accept the notion of an independent press. It’s kind of hard to tell others to have an independent free press when we’re not willing to have one ourselves,”
He recognizes the problem.
Matt Lauer did his best to try to goad W into attacking Trump, but Bush stayed above the fray.
What else did W say? About immigration:
“I am for an immigration policy that’s welcoming and upholds the law.”
That, in a nutshell, is Trump’s plan.
Then IBT, via Yahoo, goes on to infer that Trump plans to suppress the practice of religion:
After the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, Bush famously denounced the extremists while defending the right of Muslims to worship freely in the U.S., a statement that has been referenced to contrast Trump’s immigration policies and rhetoric about Muslims. Sixteen years after the 9/11 attacks, Bush echoed his original sentiment in the interview with Lauer.
“It’s important for all of us to recognize one or our great strengths is for people to be able to be able to worship the way they want to… a bedrock of our nation is the right to worship freely,” Bush said.
And that is 100% false.
An independent press would publish what W said and let you decide what he meant. Instead, they publish snippets, at times editing the quotes, and then they tell you what they think he meant. But we don’t have an independent press. I think W and Trump are very much on the same page. Once again W outsmarts the media.
And so I agree with W. We do need an independent press. It is indispensable. I look forward to the day. And we should have an immigration policy that is welcoming.
And lawful.
Thanks, Glenn