As an instructor of History and Researcher, I have always been guided by the principle that: “The primary duty, responsibility of a Historian is to pursue the truth.” Boy am I ever in trouble in this post!
BUSH LIES, PEOPLE DIE
TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES
It has been often said that: “The truth will set you free.” In the case of George W. Bush, the truth will see him Impeached, Imprisoned or sent to the gallows!
THE LIES/DIE BODY COUNT:
Iraq
Sickening new on-the-ground research reveals that at “least” 655,000 Iraqis have died since the 2003 US-led invasion… people who would otherwise be alive today…who didn’t die of natural causes!
THE WORLD IS BURNING, THE SHIP IS SINKING, THE PEOPLE ARE DANCING, YET THE BAND STILL PLAYS ON. Nero comes to mind and we know what shape his mind was in at the moment!
In the Bush administration "the negation of truth is systematic, habitual, and instinctual. Dishonest accounting, willful scientific illiteracy, bowdlerized federal fact sheets, payola paid to putative journalists, 'news' networks run by right-wing cohorts, think tanks devoted to propaganda rather than thought, the purging of intelligence gatherers and experts throughout the bureaucracy whose findings might refute the party line -- this is the machinery of mendacity.
The point here is not the hypocrisy involved, though that is egregious. The point is the downgrading of truth and honesty from principles with universal meaning to partisan weapons to be sheathed or drawn as necessary. It is no wonder that the Bush administration feels no compunction to honor the truth or seek it; it conceives truth as a tactic, valuable only insofar as it is useful against one's enemies.
More generally, “Climate of Denial” could serve as a title for the political times we live in.
On issue after issue, this administration and this Congress continue to pursue policies that cannot stand the test of honest debate, and require a rewriting of basic facts.
The dangers to the country are evident in myriad policy debacles: the illegal, expensive, and unnecessary war we were led into under false pretenses; the “reform” of Social Security based on the unfounded assertion that the program is in “crisis” (and pursued by ideologues pretending their goal is not to end it entirely); the economy plundered by fiscal improvidence; the budget busted by grand theft billed as tax relief.
Its products are not the cherry-tree lies of embarrassed schoolboys covering up their misdemeanors, but the arrogance of a political ascendancy that considers the manipulation of truth an essential tool.
There’s no embarrassment in it. The same partisans who clucked loudly during their impeachment of President Clinton about the need for a government so transparent that the most private details of a president’s personal life should be open to inspection have wrapped such a dense cloak of secrecy around the current president that even the roster of his administration’s meetings is withheld from the citizenry, under the expressed claim that the White House can’t do what needs doing if the American people are allowed to know what that is.
When the crisis at the core of our nation’s political decline is a direct attack on the truth, the institution that should take the lead in confronting and correcting that danger is the press.
PRESIDENT BUSH IS A LIAR. There, I said it, but most of the mainstream media won't. Liberal pundits Michael Kinsley, Paul Krugman and Richard Cohen have addressed the issue on the Op-Ed pages, but almost all news pages and network broadcasts pretend not to notice.
In the one significant effort by a national daily to deal with Bush's consistent pattern of mendacity, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank could not bring himself (or was not allowed) to utter the crucial words.
Instead, readers were treated to such complicated linguistic circumlocutions as: Bush's statements represented "embroidering key assertions" and were clearly "dubious, if not wrong." The President's "rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy," he has "taken some liberties," "omitted qualifiers" and "simply outpace[d] the facts." BUT "BUSH LIED"? NEVER.
This is a media that has learned to speak in “BUSHIT” as well as the White House.
"When interviewed by Tim Russert, Vice President Cheney asserted that Iraq was "the heart of the base" for the 9/11 terrorists and went on from there with a series of half-truths and outright deceptions about almost every topic broached, including his supposed lack of current "financial interest in Halliburton ."
Mr. Cheney, a master of the above-reproach dead pan, just kept going, effortlessly mowing right through any objections by the host. The vice president was banking, as Dr. Dean did on "This Week," on a cultural environment in which fiction and nonfiction have become so scrambled and can be so easily manipulated by politicians and show-biz impresarios alike that credibility itself has become a devalued, if not archaic, news value.
This is why the big national mystery was why did almost 70 percent of Americans believe in Mr. Cheney's fictional insinuation that Saddam Hussein had some hand in 9/11? Is not so hard to crack. As low as the administration's credibility may be, it is still trusted more than the media trying to correct the fictions the White House plants in the national consciousness."
BUSH LIES so often and in so many different ways that I've never had the patience nor the time to keep a total list of them. That would be a full time job for a real obsessive compulsive personality, and given the fact that when the time comes for the lies to come home to roost in an Impeachment proceeding, that there will be huge numbers of computer operative set loose on “The Great Gathering”, it is hardly worth my time.
However, when I write something and include the generalization that Bush lies, some reader will write back and say, "Oh, yeah? What did he lie about? I don't believe it."
What follows, then, in this post, is a more or less informal listing and exploration of just some of the lies he typically tells, starting from 2/01. Now, of course, we all know that Rove lies, Lott lies, Cheney lies, etc. You find most people believe that all politicians are liars by trade and nature.
But the difference between those liars and Bush is that the Resident tells us that he is telling the truth when he is lying. Hence, he will tell us what he is going to do, like get his proposed tax cut from the surplus, then try to get his proposed tax cut from military and Medicare funds, instead.
Or, once he has actually begun a program, tell us lies about how or why the program has begun. Or tell a closed-door Dem meeting something and then swear up and down the next day that he didn't say it. Or saying, "Yes, Mam" and meaning "No, Mam." Or having a spinner say the opposite the next day. Or, or...you get the idea.
Some Bush backers claim he's not a liar; he's just not very bright and doesn't remember things very well. That may be true, but we're sure Bush would not allow such an excuse in his "responsibility era."
WE'RE SURE BUSH WOULD AGREE THAT IF HE'S THAT DUMB, HE SHOULDN'T BE PRESIDENT.
Other Bush backers claim that some of his lies are "technically correct" or "tailored to fit the audience," or some such circumlocution.
What they're talking about are lies of omission rather than lies of commission.
In lies of omission it's what they imply, not what they say. For example, one evening Bush told Congress and the American people that he was putting a "lock box" on Social Security.
Now, it's very clear that Bush wanted us to feel secure in the belief that he was protecting all of our Social Security funds for the future. No question, right?
Yet, the very next day when his budget book was released, we learned that Bush told a lie of omission. What he didn't tell Congress and the American people is that he would later take from $.6 to $1 trillion out of that "lock box" to cover his tax cuts.
No doubt, BUSH LIED. He wanted folks to believe something that he knew was not true. Of course, politicians do this all the time. It's second nature.
In sum, the thing that really bothers us about Bush's lies is that he is also a hypocrite and pretends he's above lying. As a liar, he reinforces our assumptions about politicians. As a hypocrite, he reinforces our assumptions about his character.
But let’s take a look at some of the more famous/notorious lines/lies!
Bush: ‘We’ve Never Been Stay The Course’. WHAT???
During an interview today on ABC’s This Week, President Bush tried to distance himself from what has been his core strategy in Iraq Iraq
Bush responded, “We’ve never been stay the course, George!’ Watch it:
Bush is wrong:
BUSH: We will stay the course. [8/30/06]
BUSH: We will stay the course, we will complete the job in
BUSH: We will stay the course until the job is done, Steve. And the temptation is to try to get the President or somebody to put a timetable on the definition of getting the job done. We’re just going to stay the course. [12/15/03]
BUSH: And my message today to those in
BUSH: And that’s why we’re going to stay the course in
BUSH: And so we’ve got tough action in
Like any skilled craftsman, former Press Secretary Fleischer, had a variety of techniques at his disposal. The first is the one he used to such great effect at Ways and Means: He cuts off the question with a blunt, factual assertion. Sometimes the assertion is an outright lie; sometimes it's on the edge. But in either case the intent is to deceive--to define a legitimate question as based on false premises and, therefore, illegitimate.
Fleischer did this so well, in part because of his breathtaking audacity: Rather than tell a little fib--i.e., attacking the facts most open to interpretation in a reporter's query--he often told a big one, challenging the question in a way the reporter could not possibly anticipate.
Then there was his delivery: Fleischer radiated boundless certainty, recounting even his wildest fibs in the matter-of-fact, slightly patronizing tone you would use to explain, say, the changing of the seasons to a child.
He neither under-emoted (which would appear robotic) nor over emoted (which would appear defensive) but seemed at all times so natural that one wondered if somehow he had convinced himself of his own untruths.
GEORGE W. BUSH IS A LIAR. He has lied large and small, directly and by omission. His
He maintained that Saddam Hussein possessed "a massive stockpile" of unconventional weapons and was directly "dealing" with Al Qaeda--two suppositions unsupported then (or now) by the available evidence.
He said the International Atomic Energy Agency had produced a report in 1998 noting that
Bush asserted that
And two days before launching the war, Bush said, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the
Yet former deputy CIA director Richard Kerr, who was conducting a review of the prewar intelligence, had said that intelligence was full of qualifiers and caveats, and based on circumstantial and inferential evidence. That is, it was not no-doubt stuff. And after the major fighting was done, Bush declared, "WE FOUND THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION."
But he could only point to two tractor-trailers that the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded were mobile bioweapons labs. Other experts--including the DIA's own engineering experts--disagreed with this finding.
But Bush's truth-defying crusade for war did not mark a shift for him. Throughout his campaign for the presidency and his years in the White House, Bush has mugged the truth in many other areas to advance his agenda.
Lying has been one of the essential tools of his presidency. To call the forty-third President of the
While politicians are often derided as liars, this charge should be particularly stinging for Bush.
During the campaign of 2000, he pitched himself as a candidate who could "restore" honor and integrity to an Oval Office stained by the misdeeds and falsehoods of his predecessor. To brand Bush a liar is to negate what he and his supporters declared was his most basic and most important qualification for the job.
But Let’s Move Along!
Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.”
State of the Union Address –
“
had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable
of delivering chemical agents.”
State of the Union Address –
“We have also discovered through intelligence
that
State of the Union Address –
"Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people
now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaida."
State of the Union Address –
"Our intelligence sources tell us that he (Saddam) has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."
State of the Union Address –
"Satellite photographs reveal that
Bush speech to the nation –
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from
State of the Union Address –
Time has exposed everyone of those Bush utterances as LIES!
A good place to start singing “The Liars Chorus” about the "father of all lies" is called 911 and what his bastard son called the "weapons of mass destruction" that led us into the Iraqi war and the subsequent mass slaughter of THOUSANDS of Iraqi citizens
Now nearly 3,200 of our soldiers have given the last full measure of devotion to their country. Tens of thousands more will return home with wounds that last a lifetime. And yet still, every day, we send our sons and daughters, our friends and neighbors to go fight in the crossfire of someone else's civil war.
ARE YOU LISTENING
September 11
As Americans and others yearned to make sense of the evil attacks of September 11, Bush elected to share with the public a deceptively simplistic explanation of this catastrophe.
Repeatedly, he said that the
This was shallow analysis, a comic-book interpretation of the event that covered up complexities and denied Americans information crucial for developing a full understanding of the attacks.
In the view Bush furnished, Osama bin Laden was a would-be conqueror of the world, a man motivated solely by irrational evil, who killed for the purpose of destroying freedom.
But as the State Department's own terrorism experts--as well as nongovernmental experts--noted, bin Laden was motivated by a specific geostrategic and theological aim: to chase the United States out of the Middle East in order to ease the way for a fundamentalist takeover of the region.
Peter Bergen, a former CNN producer and the first journalist to arrange a television interview with bin Laden, observes in his book Holy War, Inc., "What [bin Laden] condemns the United States for is simple: its policies in the Middle East." Rather than acknowledge the realities of bin Laden's war on
In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush was disingenuous on other fronts. Days after the attack, he asserted, "No one could have conceivably imagined suicide bombers burrowing into our society and then emerging all in the same day to fly their aircraft--fly US aircraft--into buildings full of innocent people."
His aides echoed this sentiment for months. They were wrong.
Such a scenario had been imagined and feared by terrorism experts. Plots of this sort had previously been uncovered and thwarted by security services in other nations--in operations known to US officials.
According to the 9/11 inquiry conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees, the
Fourteen months after the attack, Bush said, "We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of September the 11th." But his actions belied this rhetoric.
His White House refused to turn over information to the intelligence committees about a pre-9/11 intelligence briefing he had had seen, and the Bush Administration would not allow the committees to tell the public what intelligence warnings Bush had received before September 11.
I DON’T KNOW WHETHER TO SCREAM OR CRY!
More famously, Bush would not declassify the twenty-seven-page portion of the committees' final report that concerned connections between the 9/11 hijackers and
BUT THAT WAS NOT TRUE.
The Administration did not move--and has not moved--quickly to address gaping security concerns, including vulnerabilities at chemical plants and ports and a huge shortfall in resources for first responders [see Corn, "Homeland Insecurity," September 22].
When Bush wondered what to do about September 11 an ultra-right lobby group was there to tell him, writes Robert Manne.
It is gradually became transparent that the endlessly repeated claim used to justify the invasion of Iraq - that Saddam Hussein possessed a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction - was false, A LIE, AND PEOPLE DIED, AND DIED, AND DIED!
The 200 most plausible sites for the storage of such weapons had been inspected. Many of the most senior military, intelligence and scientific figures in the regime had been captured and interrogated. Yet not one weapon of mass destruction was found!
The spurious justification constitutes, in my opinion, one of the greatest foreign policy scandals involving Western governments since 1945.
It is surely imperative for all those who care about democracy - whether or not they supported the war - to try to discover an explanation for the deception and the true causes of what has occurred.
One important moment on the road that led to the invasion of
This lobby group represented almost all the most powerful figures associated with the defense and foreign policy wing of American neo-conservatism: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and William Kristol. I have already dealt with that bunch in an earlier post!
The PNAC neocons were all former hard line Cold Warriors and muscular nutty internationalists, who supported the foreign policy of Ronald Reagan with enthusiasm.
All were equally contemptuous of the fundamental liberalism of Jimmy Carter and the status quo real politic of Henry Kissinger.
All, moreover, regarded the arrival of the era of
All supported a serious increase in
The PNAC neocons were also unconditional supporters of
All were extremely hostile to
Although some members of the PNAC supported John McCain and not George Bush for the Republican presidential candidacy in 2000, it was the selection of Cheney as Bush's running mate which provided the neocons with what turned out to be their historic opportunity.
With Cheney's support, 10 of the 18 signatories of the PNAC letter to
THE NEOCONS MADE LITTLE SERIOUS POLICY HEADWAY IN THE FIRST MONTHS OF THE BUSH PRESIDENCY, BUT THEN SEPTEMBER 11 OCCURRED.
In an article in Commentary in February last year, the neo-conservative godfather Norman Podhoretz captured the new situation rather well: "One hears that Bush, who entered the White House without a clear sense of what he wanted to do there, now feels there was a purpose behind his election all along; as a born-again Christian, it is said, he believes he was chosen by God to eradicate the evil of terrorism from the world."
It did not require the presence of the neocons in the administration to convince Bush to go to war with
After September 11 Bush was a President in search of a missionary grand strategy for fighting global terrorism and radical Islam. The neocons were the only group inside his administration with a ready blueprint which answered to his mood. He had held a self- coronation in his own mind.
He was now King George of the
The first significant Neocon victory was Bush's announcement concerning the existence of an axis of evil, comprising
Their even more substantial achievement, however, was as the architects of the new revolutionary
With this new strategic doctrine the victory of the neocons seemed complete.
It was not quite so. The neocons hoped for a
After a short political struggle for the mind of the President, the combined alliance of Tony Blair, Colin Powell at the Department of State and old Republican hawks like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft prevailed. Bush agreed to take his case for war on
Although the true purpose of the neocons' planned war against
Fighting wars to bring about regime change is in breach of international law. Such an argument could not be mounted at the UN.
In order to put the case for war, unambiguous evidence of
To achieve greater certainty Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz created, inside the Pentagon, a new body called the Office of Special Plans, under the leadership of a Neocon ex-Cold Warrior, Abram Shulsky.
As Seymour Hersh has argued in an article in The New Yorker, it was through uncritical acceptance or even manipulation of intelligence supplied by Iraqi defectors that the Office of Special Plans was able to deliver the concrete evidence concerning Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that the case for war required.
Hersh was right, it was on the basis of this kind of highly politicized intelligence that Bush, Blair and Howard claimed to know for certain that Saddam had amassed a vast arsenal of chemical and biological weapons which were ready for use; that the production of such weapons was increasing in tempo; that it was almost certain that within a short few years Saddam would be in possession of nuclear weapons as well.
IT NOW KNOWN FACT THAT EVERY PART OF THIS ASSESSMENT WAS FALSE.
The conclusion seems inescapable. The Anglophone democracies invaded Iraq on the basis of a LIE.
But the terrible roadway to a Fascist-like state not start with
Bush has been lying throughout the presidency. He claimed he had not gotten to know disgraced Enron chief Ken Lay until after the 1994
In June 2001, Bush said, "We're not going to deploy a [missile defense] system that doesn't work."
But then he ordered the deployment of a system that was not yet operational. (A June 2003 General Accounting Office study noted, "Testing to date has provided only limited data for determining whether the system will work as intended.")
His White House claimed that it was necessary to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to "secure
Speaking for his boss, Fleischer in 2002 said, "the President does, of course, believe that younger workers...are going to receive no money for their Social Security taxes." No money?
That was not so. A projected crunch will hit in four decades or so. But even when this happens, the system will be able to pay an estimated 70 percent of benefits--which is somewhat more than "no money."
When Bush in August 2001 announced he would permit federal funding of stem-cell research only for projects that used existing stem-cell lines--in a move to placate social conservatives, who opposed this sort of research--he said that there were sixty existing lines, and he asserted that his decision "allows us to explore the promise and potential of stem-cell research."
Yet at the time--according to scientific experts in the field and various media reports--there were closer to ten available lines, not nearly enough to support a promising research effort.
Does Bush believe his own untruths/ LIES?
Did he truly consider a WMD-loaded Saddam Hussein an imminent threat to the
Did he really think the average middle-class taxpayer would receive $1,083 from his second tax-cut plan? Or did he realize this was a fuzzy number cooked up to make the package seem a better deal than it was for middle- and low-income workers?
Did he believe there were enough stem-cell lines to support robust research? Or did he know he had exaggerated the number of lines in order to avoid a politically tough decision?
It's hard to tell without being inside of Bush’s head…a frightening thought!
Bush's public statements do suggest he is a binary thinker who views the world in black-and-white terms. You're either for freedom or against it. With the
He's impatient with nuances. Asked in 1999 to name something he wasn't good at, Bush replied, "Sitting down and reading a 500-page book on public policy or philosophy or something."
Bush likes life to be clear-cut. And perhaps that causes him to either bend the truth or see (and promote) a bent version of reality. I’m being kind.
Observers can debate whether Bush considers his embellishments and misrepresentations to be the honest-to-God truth or whether he cynically hurls falsehoods to con the public. But believer or deceiver--the result is the same.
With his misrepresentations and false assertions, Bush has dramatically changed the nation and the world.
Relying on deceptions, he turned the
Using lies, he pushed through tax cuts that will profoundly reshape the US budget for years to come, most likely insuring a long stretch of deficits that will make it difficult, perhaps impossible, for the federal government to fund existing programs or contemplate new ones.
Does Bush lie more than his predecessors, more than his political opponents? That is irrelevant.
He is guiding the nation during difficult and perhaps perilous times, in which a credible President is much in need.
Prosperity or economic decline? War or peace? Security or fear? This country has a lot to deal with.
Lies from the White House poison the debates that must occur if Americans are going to confront and overcome the challenges of this century at home and abroad.
Presidential lying, in fact, threatens the country.
To render informed and wise choices about the crucial and complicated controversies of the day, people need truthful information. The President is generally in a position to define and dominate a debate more than other political players. And a lie from the White House--or a fib or a misrepresentation or a fudged number--can go a long way toward distorting the national discussion.
Bush campaigned for the presidency as the fellow who would bring honesty back to the White House.
During his first full day on the job, while swearing in his White House staff, he reminded his cadre, "On a mantelpiece in this great house is inscribed the prayer of John Adams, that only the wise and honest may rule under this roof." But
There has been no restoration of integrity. Bush's promise was a lie. The future of the
The list of his misrepresentations, though, is far longer than the lengthy list of dubious statements Bush employed--and keeps on employing--to justify his invasion and occupation of
Here then is a partial--a quite partial--account of the other generic lies of George W. Bush.
Bush: "We got one [a hate crime law] in
It's going to be hard to punish them any worse after they get put to death....
We're happy with our laws on our books." I think I’m going to be sick!
Fact: "The three were convicted under
"The original
Bush: bragged that in
Fact: "As governor he fought to unsuccessfully to limit access to the program. He would have limited its coverage to children with family incomes up to 150 percent of the poverty level, though federal law permitted up to 200 percent. The practical effect of Bush's efforts would have been to exclude 200,000 of the 500,000 possible enrollees."
Bush: said he favored "equal" rights for gays and lesbians, but not "special" rights.
Fact: "Bush has supported a
"Bush supports hate crime protections for other minorities!
So Bush doesn't believe that gays should have the same 'special' rights in this regard as blacks, Jews, Wiccans and others.
Employment discrimination? Again, Bush supports those rights for other Americans, but not gays.
Military service? Bush again supports the right to military service for all qualified people--as long as they don't tell anyone they're gay.
Marriage? How on earth is that a special right when every heterosexual in
What else is there? The right to privacy? Nuh-huh.
Bush supports a gays-only sodomy law in his own state that criminalizes consensual sex in private between two homosexuals." New Republic,
Tax Cuts
Bush's crusade for tax cuts is the domestic policy matter that has spawned the most misrepresentations from his camp.
On the 2000 campaign trail, he sold his success as a "tax-cutting person" by hailing cuts he passed in
Instead, the lawmakers passed a $1 billion reduction in property taxes. And these tax cuts turned out to be a sham.
After they kicked in, school districts across the state boosted local tax rates to compensate for the loss of revenue. A 1999 Dallas Morning News analysis found that "many [taxpayers] are still paying as much as they did in 1997, or more." Republican Lieutenant Governor Rick Perry called the cuts "rather illusory."
One of Bush's biggest tax-cut whoppers came when he stated, during the presidential campaign, "The vast majority of my [proposed] tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum."
That estimate was wildly at odds with analyses of where the money would really go. A report by Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal outfit that specializes in distribution analysis, calculated that 42.6 percent of Bush's $1.6 trillion tax package would end up in the pockets of the top 1 percent of earners.
The lowest 60 percent would net 12.6 percent. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, ABC News and NBC News all reported that Bush's package produced the results CTJ calculated.
To deal with the criticism that his plan was a boon for millionaires, Bush devised an imaginary friend--a mythical single waitress who was supporting two children on an income of $22,000, and he talked about her often.
He said he wanted to remove the tax-code barriers that kept this waitress from reaching the middle class, and he insisted that if his tax cuts were passed, "she will pay no income taxes at all." But when Time asked the accounting firm of Deloitte & Touche to analyze precisely how Bush's waitress-mom would be affected by his tax package, the firm reported that she would not see any benefit because she already had no income-tax liability.
As he sold his tax cuts from the White House, Bush maintained in 2001 that with his plan, "the greatest percentage of tax relief goes to the people at the bottom end of the ladder." This was trickery--technically true only because low-income earners pay so little income tax to begin with.
As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it, "a two-parent family of four with income of $26,000 would indeed have its income taxes eliminated under the Bush plan, which is being portrayed as a 100 percent reduction in taxes."
But here was the punch line: The family owed only $20 in income taxes under the existing law. Its overall tax bill (including payroll and excise taxes), though, was $2,500.
So that twenty bucks represented less than 1 percent of its tax burden. Bush's "greatest percentage" line was meaningless in the real world, where people paid their bills with money, not percentages.
Bush also claimed his tax plan--by eliminating the estate tax, at a cost of $300 billion--would "keep family farms in the family."
But, as the New York Times reported, farm-industry experts could not point to a single case of a family losing a farm because of estate taxes.
Asked about this, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said, "If you abolish the death tax, people won't have to hire all those planners to help them keep the land that's rightfully theirs."
Caught in a $300 billion lie, the White House was now saying the reason to abolish the tax--a move that would be a blessing to the richest 2 percent of Americans--was to spare farmers the pain in the ass of estate planning.
Bush's lies did not hinder him. They helped him win the first tax-cut fight--and, then, the tax-cut battle of 2003.
When his second set of super sized tax cuts was assailed for being tilted toward the rich, he claimed, "Ninety-two million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money." The
The truly average taxpayers--those in the middle of the income range--would receive $265.
Bush was using the word "average" in a flimflam fashion. To concoct the misleading $1,083 figure, the Administration took the large dollar amounts high-income taxpayers would receive and added that to the modest, small or nonexistent reductions other taxpayers would get--and then used this total to calculate an average gain.
His claim was akin to saying that if a street had nine households led by unemployed individuals but one with an earner making a million dollars, the average income of the families on the block would be $100,000. The radical Wall Street Journal reported, "Overall, the gains from the taxes are weighted toward upper-income taxpayers."
The Environment
One of Bush's first PR slip-ups as President came when his EPA announced that it would withdraw a new standard for ARSENIC in drinking water that had been developed during the
Bush defended this move by claiming that the new standard had been irresponsibly rushed through: "At the very last minute my predecessor made a decision, and we pulled back his decision so that we can make a decision based upon sound science and what's realistic." And his EPA administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, said the standard had not been based on the "best available science." This was a harsh charge. AND UNTRUE.
The new arsenic standard was no quickie job unattached to reasonable scientific findings. The EPA had worked for a decade on establishing the new, 10-parts-per-billion standard.
Congress had directed the agency to establish a new standard, and it had authorized $2.5 million a year for studies from 1997 through 2000. A 1999 study by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) had concluded that the existing 50-ppb standard "could easily" result in a 1-in-100 cancer risk and had recommended that acceptable levels be lowered "as promptly as possible."
EPA policy-makers had thought that a 3-ppb standard would have been justified by the science, yet they took cost considerations into account and went for the less stringent 10 ppb.
Bush's arsenic move appeared to have been based upon a political calculation--even though Bush, as a candidate, had said he would not decide key policy matters on the basis of politics. But in his book The Right Man, David Frum, a former Bush economic speechwriter, reported that Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser, had "pressed for reversal" of the arsenic standard in an attempt to win votes in New Mexico, one of a few states that have high naturally occurring levels of arsenic and that would face higher costs in meeting the new standard. Ahhh, the politics of poison!
Several months after the EPA suspended the standard, a new NAS study concluded that the 10-ppb standard was indeed scientifically justified and possibly not tight enough. After that, the Administration decided that the original 10 ppb was exactly the right level for a workable rule, even though the latest in "best available science" now suggested that the 10-ppb level might not adequately safeguard water drinkers.
The arsenic screw-up was one of the few lies for which Bush took a hit.
On the matter of global warming, he managed to lie his way through a controversy more deftly.
Months into his presidency, Bush declared that he was opposed to the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 global warming accord. To defend his retreat from the treaty, he cited "the incomplete state of scientific knowledge."
This was a misleading argument, for the scientific consensus was rather firm. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body of thousands of scientists assembled by the UN and the World Meteorological Organization, held that global temperatures were dramatically on the rise and that this increase was, to an unspecified degree, a result of human-induced emissions.
In early June 2001 the NAS released a report Bush had requested, and it concluded global warming was under way and "most likely due to human activities." Rather than accept the analysis it had commissioned, the Bush White House countered with duplicity.
Press secretary Fleischer maintained that the report "concludes that the Earth is warming. But it is inconclusive on why--whether it's man-made causes or whether it's natural causes." That was not spinning. That was prevaricating. The study blamed "human activities" while noting that "natural variability" might be a contributing factor too.
Still, the Bush White House “wanted to make it seem” as if Bush did take the issue seriously.
So on June 11, he delivered a speech on global warming and pledged to craft an alternative to
The following February he unveiled his plan. "Our immediate goal," Bush said, "is to reduce
Relative to the size of our economy? This was a ruse.
Since the
Enough already! It is really getting bad when you might as well ignore TV and print media news as a source of truth and meaningful information, but that is the juncture we are at! So let me suggest some good reading and even reviews that can be more enlightening than the idiot box or some of the drivel written on tree killer tabloids.
Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush by John W. Dean
The Bush - Haters Handbook: A Guide to the Most Appalling Presidency of the Past 100 Years by Jack Huberman
Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America by Molly Ivins
Big Lies : The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth by Joe Conason
The Book on Bush : How George W. (Mis)leads America by Eric Alterman
Conservatives Without Conscience by John W. Dean
The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill by Ron Suskind
American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush by Kevin Phillips
Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror by Richard A. Clarke
Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
NOW THIS IS WHAT I CALL A 5 STAR REVIEW!
The most facile presidential comparison one could make for George W. Bush would be his father, who presided over a war in
But John Dean goes further back, seeing in Bush all the secrecy and scandal of Dean's former boss, the notorious Richard Nixon. The difference, as the title of Dean's book indicates, is that Bush is a heck of a lot worse.
While the book provides insightful snippets of the way Nixon used to do business, it offers them to shed light on the practices of Bush. In Dean's estimation, the secrecy with which Bush and Dick Cheney govern is not merely a preferred system of management but an obsessive strategy meant to conceal a deeply troubling agenda of corporate favoritism and a dramatic growth in unchecked power for the executive branch that put at risk the lives of American citizens, civil liberties, and the Constitution.
Dean sets out to make his point by drawing attention to several areas about which Bush and Cheney have been tight-lipped: the revealing by a "senior White House official" of the identity of an undercover CIA operative whose husband questioned the administration, the health of Cheney, the identity of Cheney's energy task force, the information requested by the bi-partisan 9/11 commission, Bush's business dealings early in his career, the creation of a "shadow government", wartime prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, and scores more.
He theorizes that the truth about these and many other situations, including the decision to go to war in Iraq, will eventually surface and that Bush and Cheney's secrecy is a thus far effective means of keep a lid on a rapidly multiplying set of lies and scandals that far outstrip the misdeeds that led directly to Dean's former employer resigning in disgrace.
Dean's charges are impassioned and more severe than many of Bush's most persistent critics. But those charges are realized only after careful reasoning and steady logic by a man who knows his way around scandal and corruption. --John Moe --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
This title’s accusation bears particular weight coming from the man who warned the super-secretive Richard Nixon that there was a cancer on his presidency, and Dean, who was Nixon’s White House counsel, makes a strong argument that the secrecy of what he dubs the "Bush-Cheney presidency" is "not merely unjustified and excessive but obsessive," and consequently "frighteningly dangerous."
Some of the subjects he touches on have been covered in detail elsewhere, and his chapter on the administration’s stonewalling of the September 11 commission isn’t fully up to date. But few critics have as effectively put the disparate pieces together, linking them to what Dean says is a broader pattern of secrecy from an administration that does its best to control the flow of information on every subject—even the vice president’s health—and uses executive privilege to circumvent congressional scrutiny.
Dean’s probe extends back to Bush’s pre-presidential activities, such as his attempt to withhold his gubernatorial papers from public view, and Dean’s background as an investment banker adds welcome perspective on Bush’s business career (as well as Cheney’s).
Dean ultimately identifies 11 issues (such as the secrecy around the forming of a national energy policy and what Dean calls Bush’s misleading of Congress about war with Iraq) on which the White House’s stance could lead to scandal, and warns that allowing the administration to continue its policy of secrecy may lead to a weakening of democracy.
Despite occasional comments about Bush’s intelligence that will rankle presidential supporters, Dean (Blind Ambition) is generally levelheaded; his role in Watergate and the seriousness of his charge in the national media that Bush has committed impeachable offenses has popped this onto bestseller lists.
Several recent presidents could have been impeached for selected unconstitutional or illegal actions during their presidencies. But the sitting president, George W. Bush, may win the prize for committing the most impeachable offenses of any recent president.
Yet when one thinks of bad behavior leading down the road to possible impeachment, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon come to mind first. Although Bill Clinton was impeached for having sex with an intern and then lying about it to a grand jury.
George W. Bush is following in the footsteps of his predecessors, but may have left more tracks. For starters, invading another country on false pretenses is grounds for impeachment.
Also, the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution essentially says that the people have the right to be secure against unreasonable government searches and seizures and that no search warrants shall be issued without probable cause that a crime has been committed.
And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requires that warrants for national security wiretaps be authorized by the secret FISA court. The law says that it is a crime for government officials to conduct electronic surveillance outside the exclusive purviews of that law or the criminal wiretap statute.
President Bush’s authorization of the monitoring of Americans’ e-mails and phone calls by the National Security Agency (NSA) without even the minimal protection of FISA court warrants is clearly unconstitutional and illegal. Executive searches without judicial review violate the unique checks and balances that the nation’s founders created in the
Furthermore, surveillance of Americans by the NSA, an intelligence service rather than a law enforcement agency, is a regression to the practices of the Vietnam-era, when intelligence agencies were misused to spy on anti-war protesters—ANOTHER IMPEACHABLE VIOLATION OF PEOPLES’ CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS BY LBJ AND NIXON.
President Bush defiantly admits initiating such flagrant domestic spying but contends that the Congress implicitly authorized such activities when it approved the use of force against al Qaeda and that such actions fit within his constitutional powers as commander-in-chief.
But the founders never intended core principles of the Constitution to be suspended during wartime. In fact, they realized that it was in times of war and crisis that constitutional protections of the people were most at risk of usurpation by politicians, who purport to defend American freedom while actually undermining it.
The Bush administration’s FBI has also expanded its use of national security letters to examine the personal records of tens of thousands of Americans who are not suspected of being involved in terrorism or even illegal acts.
Apparently the president is also taking us back to the
Finally, the president’s policies on detainees in the “war on terror” probably qualify as impeachable offenses. The Bush administration decided that the “war on terror” exempted it from an unambiguous criminal law and international conventions (which are also the law of the land) preventing torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners.
An American president permitting torture is both disgraceful and ineffective in getting good information from those held. Furthermore, the administration concocted the fictitious category of “enemy combatants” to deprive detainees of the legal protections of either the
All of these actions are part of President Bush’s attempt to expand the power of presidency during wartime—as if the imperial presidency hadn’t been expanded enough by his recent predecessors. President Bush usually gets the Attorney General or the White House Counsel to agree with his usurpation of congressional and judicial powers, but, of course, who in the executive is going to disagree with their boss?
According to the Washington Post, the Bush administration describes the president’s war making power under the Constitution as “plenary”—meaning absolute.
The founders would roll over in their graves at this interpretation of a document that was actually designed to limit the presidential war power, resulting from their revulsion at the way European monarchs easily took their countries to war and foisted the costs—in blood and treasure—on their people.
Conservative Bob Barr, a former Congressman from Georgia who was quoted in the Post, said it best: “The American people are going to have to say, ‘Enough of this business of justifying everything as necessary for the war on terror.’ Either the Constitution and the laws of this country mean something or they don’t. It is truly frightening what is going on in this country.”
As an instructor of History and Researcher, I have always been guided by the principle that: “The primary duty, responsibility of a Historian is pursue the truth.” Boy am I ever in trouble in this post!
I WAS WRONG. I HAVE ASCERTAINED THE TRUTH. GEORGE W. BUSH IS A GOD DAMNED LIAR!
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