George W. Bush was the victim of a concentrated effort by Democrats and their allies in the press to discredit and distort virtually everything he did, Fox News anchor John Gibson tells Newsmax.TV.
Now, he says, that same loose-with-the truth “noise machine” is targeting GOP star Sara Palin and the conservative tea party movement.
The author of: “How the Left Swiftboated America: The Liberal Media Conspiracy to Make You Think George Bush Was the Worst President in History,” offers a resounding rebuttal to such Swiftboat charges as: The Iraq War was the biggest foreign policy blunder of all recorded time; Bush stole the 2000 election, made war on civil rights, tortured innocent goatherds and proved America’s racism during Hurricane Katrina.
The host of Fox News’s “The Big Story” maintains that Obama ran for president and won on the left’s exhaustive catalog of lies about Bush. Now, Obama and the left continue to use the same modus operandi to Swiftboat the Republican opposition, Gibson tells Newsmax.TV's Kathleen Walter.
“Palin is the biggest target right now,” Gibson says. “The Republican Party has been called the party of the old Confederacy, and Palin is made out to be a fool.”
“You know the Daily Kos — that far left-wing Web site — one of their people said: Remember that what the public remembers is what we repeat; that was a technique: just repeat, repeat and repeat until people believe,” charges Gibson.
Gibson thinks that whole media landscape has undergone a dramatic change in the era of the Swiftboat phenomenon. Remember that the term evolved as a verb back when presidential candidate John Kerry suffered at the hands of a clan of former Vietnam War-Mekong Delta U.S. Navy Swiftboaters.
Kerry had skippered a Swiftboat and won a Silver Star along the way, but returned home to testify on Capitol Hill about alleged war crimes being perpetrated by U.S. troops in that southeast Asian country.
“It is unbelievable to me that the New York Times and NBC News decided because of the existence of Fox news, because of the existence of Newsmax and others that they had to go abandoned their objectivity — their long-held objectivity — as news organizations."
Nowadays, Gibson surmises that perhaps the Times and others fear they have gone too far. “Maybe they put too many chips on the Obama table and they want to pull some back, and you see a little bit of the new criticism of him coming from the left — Richard Cohen — you couldn’t get a bigger left-wing columnist for the Washington Post criticizing Obama over his terror policies.”
In the middle of all this media intrigue, of course, is Obamacare. Gibson sees this red hot controversy as yet another player in the Swiftboat hodgepodge of misrepresentation. “It’s not Republicans who stood in the way of Obamacare passing, it was Democrats… They like to blame the Republicans, but they can’t get their own side together.”
Gibson, the author of previous titles, “Hating America” and “The War on Christmas,” has faith that the American people will wise up to reality, putting Obamacare and Bush's true legacy into perspective.
“Historians will look back and say, you know, it was a good thing to regime-change Saddam Hussein — that was a smart thing to do — and thank God there was somebody there who would persevere with the effort, wouldn’t quit early, wouldn’t declare the war lost, and wouldn’t come marching home waving a flat white flag,” he predicts.
Gibson ends his book on the upbeat, forecasting the day when “ordinary Americans” revolt against the “politics of distraction” and the “swiftboating lies of the left.”
When Walter asked Gibson whether he would put Bush on a list of “great” presidents, the commentator waffled, suggesting that Bush would have a tough time overcoming the Iraq War albatross, but he was for sure the right man at the right time and could hang tough.
“[Y]ou don’t put a good face on the on the worst days of the war, but the point about the Bush presidency was that he figured out early on that he had to persevere and we had to succeed at that war…”
In his new book, Gibson systematically shows that Bush’s performance was much better than most people now believe.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.