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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (415333)	6/16/2003 4:03:42 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Americans Still Think Iraq Had Weapons of Mass Destruction Before War Only a third believe Bush administration deliberately misled American public There is no question that Bush misled the American public. However, that does not mean they will call him on it. Time will tell.

To: jlallen who wrote (415333)	6/16/2003 4:10:27 PM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 769667

One-third of the public actually thinks that weapons of mass destruction have been found according to an article in the Seattle Times on Sunday. This is a case where opinion collides with reality and opinion prevails over fact.

To: jlallen who wrote (415333)	6/16/2003 4:19:50 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769667

Just shows how effective the big lie can be.....especially when the public is bombarded with it 24/7..

To: jlallen who wrote (415333)	6/16/2003 6:08:17 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769667

This from the Democratic Leadership Council. Bashing Bush on many things (of course), but I thought the bolded blurb was very interesting: ndol.org Fast and Loose With Facts The current furor over the failure so far to find evidence of a massive weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program in Iraq is raising a hitherto taboo subject in the mainstream media: the credibility of George W. Bush and his administration. There's a rich irony in this development. Of all the occasions on which the administration might be called to task for deliberate evasion of the facts, the WMD issue is among the weakest cases. If the Bush administration was wrong about Saddam's WMD program, so, too, was just about everybody else, including U.N. inspectors, the French, the Germans, the Russians, and the Chinese, all of whom accepted prior evidence of such a program as beyond doubt. We'll wait to see what turns up in Iraq, and what turns up in Congressional Intelligence Committee inquiries about the information the administration acted upon. But we think you could probably make a much better case that the administration deliberately exaggerated scant evidence of connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. However the question of the administration's commitment to the truth has been raised, it's good that it has been raised. Since 9/11, George W. Bush and his White House have benefited from a strong and tangible desire among the American people to believe in their commander-in-chief. Indeed, it's a desire that probably goes back to the president's more fundamental claim to represent higher standards of integrity and moral clarity than prevailed in the Clinton administration. But day after day, this administration has built a record of playing fast and loose with facts. The taboo against saying so needs to be overcome, especially for a president who said he wanted to usher in an "era of responsibility." The administration's fiscal policies have been loaded with misstatements so gross and continuous as to be inconceivable as anything other than deliberate. In seeking to parry Democratic claims that the president's various tax cut proposals are targeted to the wealthy, for example, the president and his spokesmen have consistently misused the term "average taxpayers." The ploy is to figure out the "average tax cut benefit" by dividing the total tax cut by the total number of taxpayers, and then attribute it to some fictional middle-class family. But as many critics have pointed out, averages are by definition misleading: when a billionaire enters a room with 50 middle-class people, the average wealth of people in the room skyrockets into the tens of millions. This hasn't for a moment stopped the president himself from trotting out "average taxpayer" numbers on every possible occasion. The administration has played the same sort of basic and unmistakably deliberate games with budget numbers, by turns shortening or lengthening the "window" for budget estimates to minimize public understanding of the massive borrowing the Bush team is undertaking to finance its tax cut and defense spending agendas. Even more mendacious is the administration's habit of using slow phase-ins or abrupt "sunsets" to disguise the cost of tax cuts. Indeed, this particular stunt represents a veritable cluster bomb of mendacity. By proposing slowly phased-in tax cuts, as in the tax rate reductions enacted by Congress in 2001, the administration simultaneously under-stated their full impact on federal revenues and created a rationale for accelerating their implementation in the next tax proposal. And by insincerely proposing sudden "sunsets" or terminations of tax cuts down the road, which the president has done in each of his tax cut proposals, the administration has under-stated their cost while creating a rationale for making tax cuts "permanent" in the next tax proposal. Turning to truth in packaging, let's examine the president's persistent habit of abrupt 180 degree changes in policy to co-opt Democratic proposals. There's nothing wrong with a change of mind, but the president never admits that: instead he pretends these proposals were his idea in the first place. The deceptive nature of these "pivots" is reinforced by the fact that the president does not seem to be constrained by them. Despite his sudden support, after many months of opposition, for a Department of Homeland Security in 2002, homeland security remains a weak and glaring hole in the administration's overall war on terrorism. And in contrast to his ringing and continuing claims to value civilian service to the country, he has allowed Congressional Republicans and his own budget officers to all but strangle AmeriCorps. Worst of all, these lapses in candor reinforce two big whoppers the president continues to trot out despite mounting evidence they are dead wrong. The first is that his administration represents a new form of "compassionate conservatism" committed to an assault on poverty and inequality. In truth, this administration is focused like a laser beam on redistributing incomes upward, as a matter of politics, policy and principle. The second is that the president has "changed the tone in Washington" after the bitter partisanship of the 1990s. In truth, the president leads a Republican Party that has raised partisanship to levels of viciousness not seen since the nineteenth century. The Bush administration's credibility is an issue made legitimate not just by its record of playing fast and loose with facts, but by the president's own constantly repeated pledge in 2000 to "restore honor and integrity to the White House." The record suggests otherwise.