Bush Lies II: Second half od link page
bushwatch.com
How a Bush appointee Manipulated Farm Subsidies.
"Responding to a series of corporate scandals last month, President Bush castigated businessmen who practice moral "relativism" and "cut ethical corners." "Our leaders of business must set high and clear expectations of conduct," he said. But this month, Bush appointed to a top post in his Agriculture Department a confessed corner-cutter: a businessman who has admitted to pushing the limits of the law to boost his farm subsidies. Bush used his power of recess appointment to make Tom Dorr undersecretary of agriculture for rural development on Aug. 6, while Congress was out of town. He made the appointment in this unorthodox way because the Senate Agriculture Committee, with nine of 10 Republicans choosing not to vote, had already declined to approve Dorr's nomination....Bush's hypocrisy about high ethical standards is only half the story. The other half is his administration's hypocrisy about farm subsidies." --SLATE, Sept. 2, 2002
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Last week, {Bush's} Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill stood before a packed audience at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to address the continuing scandals of corporate irresponsibility, banking on his own history as chief executive of Alcoa Inc.
"When I was at Alcoa I never sold a single share of Alcoa stock," he said, repeating a claim he had made on CBS's "Early Show" the day before. "I wanted my financial success and the company's success inextricably linked. Other executives should do the same."
But O'Neill did sell Alcoa stock, 662,547 shares in April 1999 worth nearly $30 million, when he was the company's chairman and chief executive....
"He didn't sell a share. He sold a lot of shares," said Marc Steinberg, a law professor at Southern Methodist University and a former SEC enforcement lawyer. --Washington Post, July 18, 2002.
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Bush Lied About Harken Stock Sale Knowledge
Asked later if his [Harken] stock sale had been related to the company's impending setback, {Board member] Bush replied, "I absolutely had no idea and would not have sold it had I known."
In fact, SEC records show that Harken's president had warned board members two months before Bush's sell-off that the company had liquidity problems that would "drastically affect" operations. --SF Chronicle, 07.05.02
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BUSH TRIFECTA QUOTE CAVEATS FOUND...
"'Barring an economic reversal, a national emergency, or a foreign crisis, we should balance the budget this year, next year, and every year.' [the presidential candidate] said that to the Economic Club of Detroit in May 1998, then repeated it at least twice more, in speeches in June and November of that year."
BUT BUSH LIED ABOUT WHO SAID THEM
"In this space last week, it was noted that President Bush often tells audiences that he promised during the 2000 presidential campaign that he would allow the federal budget to go into deficit in times of war, recession or national emergency, but he never imagined he would "have a trifecta." Nobody inside or outside the White House, however, had been able to produce evidence that Bush actually said this during the campaign.... Now comes information that the three caveats were uttered before the 2000 campaign -- by Bush's Democratic opponent, Vice President Al Gore." --Wash. Post, 7/2/02
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BUSH'S TRIFECTA OF LIES: "It takes a brazen politician to make up a story that can be proven false and then to keep lying about it after being busted repeatedly. A case in point is President Bush's repetition last week of a story about a fictitious Chicago campaign statement, just days after his budget director was called on it by "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert....Bush's claim that he listed three exceptions under which he would run deficits during a 2000 Chicago campaign stop -- war, national emergency or recession -- is blatantly false" --Brendan Nyhan, 06.18.02
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Washington Post Buys Into Bush Ohio State Lies
COLUMBUS, Ohio, June 14...The president who spoke here today was not the same president who spoke in New Haven a year ago. Bush aide John Bridgeland told reporters this morning [Friday] that the president's speech, serious and grave, was inspired by the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Pope John Paul II, Aristotle, Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Cicero -- although the president mentioned none of them by name. The former C student, Bridgeland said, "actually discussed Nicomachean ethics" in the Oval Office, not to mention the Patrick Henry-James Madison debate. --Dana Milbank, Wash. Post
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COLUMBUS, Ohio...A senior administration official told reporters [Friday] that Bush "derived" his speech in part from the teachings of a wide range of philosophers, from Aristotle and Adam Smith to de Tocqueville and Pope John Paul II.
Asked if Bush had ever read any of their works, the official said: "We've fully discussed all these ... issues." --Adam Entous, Reuters, 06.14.02
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Politex: Bush Discusses Nicomachean Ethics In The Oval Office
Bush: I don't care if our budget deficit will be $100 billion this year, I promised my millionaire buddies big tax cuts, and they're gonna get 'em.
Bridgeland: Money can't buy happiness, sir.
Bush: Ya got that right!
"Having determined that happiness is the goal of life, Aristotle then concerns himself with the activities in which humans engage in order to obtain happiness." --from a summary of "Nicomachean Ethics"
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White House Admits Bush Lied "When Bush was asked about [the Environmental Protection Agency's report] last week, he dismissively remarked: 'I read the report put out by the bureaucracy.' ...White House press secretary Ari Fleischer fessed up: President Bush didn't actually read that 268-page Environmental Protection Agency report on climate change, even if he said he did. Fleischer was asked Monday at his daily White House briefing about Bush's comments that he'd read the report. "Whenever presidents say they read it, you can read that to be he was briefed," Fleischer said, producing laughter. --AP, June 10, 2002
REACTIONS
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Ari Fleischer Lies For Bush
Like any skilled craftsman, Fleischer has 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 does 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 tells a big one, challenging the question in a way the reporter could not possibly anticipate. Then there's his delivery: Fleischer radiates 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-emotes (which would appear robotic) nor overemotes (which would appear defensive) but seems at all times so natural that one wonders if somehow he has convinced himself of his own untruths.
One month ago, for example, a reporter cited the administration's recent plan to build an education, health, and welfare infrastructure in Afghanistan and asked Fleischer when George W. Bush--who during the campaign repeatedly bad-mouthed nation-building--had come around to the idea. A lesser flack would have given the obvious, spun response: The Bush administration's policies in Afghanistan don't constitute nation-building for reasons X, Y, and Z. The reporter might have expected that reply and prepared a follow-up accordingly. But Fleischer went the other way, bluntly asserting that Bush had never derided nation-building to begin with. "The president has always been for those," Fleischer said. The questioner, likely caught off guard, repeated, "He's always been for..." when Fleischer interjected, "Do you have any evidence to the contrary?" In fact, Bush had denounced nation-building just as unambiguously as Archer had endorsed the national sales tax. "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building," said candidate Bush in the second presidential debate, to take one of many examples. The offending reporter, of course, didn't have any of these quotes handy at the press conference, and so Fleischer managed to extinguish the nation-building queries.
To take another example, after the coup in Venezuela last month, Fleischer announced that "it happened in a very quick fashion as a result of the message of the Venezuelan people." But once the coup was reversed, the administration's seeming support proved embarrassing. So at the next press conference, a reporter asked Fleischer, "Last Friday, you said that it--the seizure of power illegitimately in Venezuela--`happened in a very quick fashion as a result of the message of the Venezuelan people'; that the seizure of power, extraconstitutionally, that is, dissolution of the congress and the supreme court happened as a result of the message of the Venezuelan people."
Fleischer could have acknowledged the underlying fact--that the Bush administration initially endorsed the coup--but then expressed regret at its anti-democratic turn, a turn that the United States presumably opposed and perhaps even tried to prevent. Instead, he replied, "No, that's not what I said." And indeed, it wasn't exactly what he said--after quoting Fleischer verbatim reacting to the coup, the reporter went on to describe some of the things that happened after the coup. And that gave Fleischer his opening: "The dissolution that you just referred to did not take place until later Friday afternoon," he noted. "It could not possibly be addressed in my briefing because it hadn't taken place yet." By focusing on the latter, subordinate part of the reporter's question, Fleischer negated the verbatim quote of his earlier remarks--and thus neatly cut off discussion of the administration's early reaction to news of the coup.
The problem with this tactic is that it's always possible to get caught in an outright lie. Speaking to reporters on the morning of February 28, for instance, Fleischer said of Middle East peace negotiations under Clinton: "As a result of an attempt to push the parties beyond where they were willing to go, that led to expectations that were raised to such a high level that it turned to violence." The story went out that the administration blamed Middle East violence on its predecessor's peacemaking. That afternoon, Fleischer insisted he had said no such thing. "That's a mischaracterization of what I said," he protested. But Fleischer's earlier statement was too fresh in the press corps's mind to simply deny, and the press continued to hound him. Later in the day he was forced to issue a statement of regret.
What this episode illustrates is that stating unambiguous falsehoods carries certain risks--and no press secretary can afford to have his factual accuracy repeatedly challenged by the press. So while Fleischer may employ this tactic more frequently than most press secretaries, it is still relatively rare--the p.r. equivalent of a trick play in football: While spectacular to behold and often successful, more frequent usage would dilute its effectiveness and risk disaster.
The greater feat is to put yourself in a position where you don't have to lie. This can be accomplished in lots of ways--spinning is the preferred approach for most flacks, but that isn't Fleischer's style; candor, obviously, is out of the question. Fleischer's method of choice is question-avoidance. After all, you can't be accused of answering a question untruthfully if you haven't answered it at all. --Jonathan Chait. 06.04.02 (More)
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