The Best They Can Do?

The Best They Can Do? - The Democrats must be getting desperate. They're attacking last week's carrier landing, now.

New Jersey Democrat representative Bob Menendez just finished facing off with New York Republican Peter King on the Today show.

The Dems are trying to string a series of strawmen together into a case against the President.

1. Flying an S3 Viking rather than a helicopter is grandstanding. But - alleluiah - Katie Couric responded "Don't presidents always look for photo ops?"
2. Flying the Viking was wasteful. Almost indistinguishable from flying a helicopter over that sort of distance all in all, Rep. King noted. He's probably right - the S3 has two small jet engines which were running for about fifteen minutes. Marine One also has two engines, and they'd have been running 30-45 minutes to get to the carrier.
3. Flying in was less safe. Unless there was a problem. You can't eject from a helicopter. And President Bush is the only president in history who's been trained to eject from an airplane.
4. It delayed the ship from returning home. That's still very much up to debate; according to Rep. King, the Lincoln was running ahead of schedule on her homeward run, and was going to have to kill some time before docking anyway. In the meantime, had the President opted to give his speech aboard the Lincoln after docking, it would have delayed the crew's disembarkation for hours, caused endless hassles for the families waiting on the waterfront (Secret Service searches of the ship, waterfront and audience, the closing of highways for the presidential motorcade and so on) and the time for the speech itself. No, I'd suspect that the shipboard speech saved time, all in all.

Let's hope this is the best they can do.

Posted by Mitch at May 8, 2003 07:27 AM