The presidential press conference
By David North
8 March 2003
According to an old adage, even lies should make some sense. This is a rule that the president of the United States—for reasons that are principally political but also partly neurological—is unable to observe. The political aims of the Bush administration require such a blatant and continuous falsification of reality that all connection is lost between what the president says and what masses of people generally perceive. The lies of the administration necessarily assume, therefore, a grotesque “in your face” character.
Matters are not helped by the fact that the president lacks the mental capacity, let alone the intellectual discipline, to construct a logical argument. Yet, no matter how absurd and illogical his statements, the people are expected to accept, without thought or reflection, whatever the president says. That is, they are expected to behave like the personnel of the mass media.
In the hours leading up to the president’s press conference of Thursday night, the media predicted that Bush would use the occasion to explain to the American people why the invasion of Iraq is necessary and unavoidable. What he actually provided was a monotonous litany of obvious lies and non sequiturs.
Speaking before a small and vetted audience of media hacks, who understood that they were not to question, even indirectly, the legitimacy of the administration’s drive to war, Bush intoned the standard mindless slogans, revolving endlessly around the same apocalyptic theme: the imminent threat posed by the devil incarnate, Saddam Hussein, and his Weapons of Mass Destruction.
The United States, the president said, is “confronting the threat posed to our nation and to peace by Saddam Hussein and his weapons of terror.”
The noted American historian Richard Hofstadter several decades ago wrote an interesting study of the role of paranoia in American politics. Were he still alive, he might have updated his book with an entire chapter on the current president’s fixation with Saddam Hussein. As one listened to Bush dwell obsessively on the Baghdad bad man, it was difficult to avoid the impression that within the precincts of Dubya’s oddly immature imagination, the Iraqi president has assumed the form of the bogeyman.
“Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction are a direct threat to this country … I will not leave the American people at the mercy of the Iraqi dictator and his weapons … Saddam Hussein is a threat to our nation … It used to be that we could think that you could contain a person like Saddam Hussein, that oceans would protect us from his type of terror … I believe Saddam Hussein is a threat to the American people … He’s a murderer … He’s a master of deception … the American people know that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction …”
Whenever Bush attempted to wander beyond these programmed phrases, he ran into trouble. He made statements that were blatantly false, and were clearly and directly contradicted a little more than 12 hours later by the leaders of the United Nations inspections program, Dr. Hans Blix and Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei.
Bush declared in his opening statement: “Iraqi operatives continue to hide biological and chemical agents to avoid detection by inspectors. In some cases, these materials have been moved to different locations every 12 to 24 hours or placed in vehicles that are in residential neighborhoods.”
This claim, which simply repeats allegations made by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his disastrous presentation to the United Nations last month, was again refuted by Blix in his Friday report to the Security Council.
“As I noted on 14 February,” Blix stated, “intelligence authorities have claimed that weapons of mass destruction are moved around Iraq by trucks and, in particular, that there are mobile production units for biological weapons. The Iraqi side states that such activities do not exist. Several inspections have taken place at declared and undeclared sites in relation to mobile production facilities. Food and mobile workshops have been seen, as well as large containers with seed processing equipment. No evidence of proscribed activities has so far been found” (emphasis added).
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