This is last year's list of Bushie lies, #2 is a Bush lie, but the list has grown much longer since then, much-much longer:
Dana Milbank in a recent Washington Post article noted that Mr. Bush has a penchant for, shall we say, taking liberties with the truth. Mr. Milbank noted that Mr. Bush had recently made a number of statements that were “dubious.” Mr. Bush is engaged in a pattern of “distortions and exaggerations.” In particular, Milbank notes the following:
1) The President told the nation that Iraq has a growing fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used “for missions targeting the United States.” In fact, none of those aircraft have the range to reach the U.S.
2) Mr. Bush cited a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency as saying that Iraq was “six months away from developing a (nuclear) weapon." The IAEA never issued such a report.
3) Mr. Bush recently suggested that union intransigence was preventing custom inspectors from wearing radiation detectors (in an effort to keep nuclear material out of the U.S.). The union had agreed to wear such devices months ago.
4) Mr. Bush says on the campaign trail that the terrorism insurance legislation he favors would create “over 300,000 jobs.” Slate’s Daniel Gross has studied the matter and finds Mr. Bush’s statement to be baseless.
5) The President suggested a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq in the form of a high-ranking Al Qaeda member getting medical treatment in Baghdad earlier this year. Intelligence officials later acknowledged they had no “hard evidence” that Iraq’s government knew the Al Qaeda member was there.
6) Mr. Bush implied that an Iraqi defector had provided information concerning the state of Iraq’s WMD program as of 1998. The defector had no information concerning the state of that program since his retirement in 1991.
7) Mr. Bush suggests on the stump that his 2001 tax cuts were limited to nine years as a result of a “quirk in the rules in the United States Senate.” In truth, the tax cut was limited to nine years by Mr. Bush and the Republicans in an effort to keep the cost of the bill to $1.35 trillion and to disguise the long-term fiscal consequences of the cut.
8) Mr. Bush brags he enacted “the biggest increase in education spending in a long, long time." In fact, the 15% increase authorized in Mr. Bush’s education bill is the largest since the year before when Mr. Clinton’s budget increased education spending by 18.5%.
Mr. Milbank’s list of exaggerations, distortions and lies is not even close to exhaustive. The administration has also told the following whoppers:
9) Mr. Bush has often told the “trifecta” story. In the story he claims that during the campaign he said that he would not run a deficit except in the case of war, national emergency or recession. Mr. Bush then grins and says, “Never did I dream we'd get the trifecta." Mr. Bush never made any such statement during the campaign. His assertion that he did is simply false. After the press pointed out to the White House that Mr. Bush was not telling the truth, Mr. Bush continued to tell his “whopper.” See The New Republic.
10) Soon after the inauguration, the White House was peddling the story that Clinton staffers stole silverware, china and the Presidential Seal off Air Force One. That was simply a lie.
11) The administration has been relentless in promoting the story that Al Qaeda and Iraq were in league with regard to 9/11 based on an alleged meeting between Iraqi officials and hijacker Muhammed Atta in Prague. That story has now been shown to be a fiction by no less a source than Vaclav Havel.
12) Mr. Bush suggested that Ken Lay of Enron supported Anne Richards in the Texas Governor’s race. That was a real whopper.
13) The administration has been evasive on the issue of the percentage of benefits flowing to the top 1% of earners from the 2001 tax cut.
14) As Jeff Cooper reports:
In mid-August, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld argued that the presence of Al Qaeda personnel within Iraq showed Saddam Hussein's support of the group. A week later, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage acknowledged that the Al Qaeda members in question were in Kurd-controlled parts of the country, beyond Hussein's reach.
15) On April 5, 2002, Mr. Bush told British television, with regard to the Middle East, that:
Well, we've tried summits in the past, as you may remember. It wasn't all that long ago where a summit was called and nothing happened, and as a result we had significant intifada in the area.
On April 6, 2002, Mr. Bush told reporters:
Somebody told me there's a story floating around that somehow I am blaming the Clinton administration for what's going on in the Middle East right now. … I appreciate what President Clinton tried to do. He tried to bring peace to the Middle East.
16) John Ashcroft, on satellite television from Moscow told us that Jose Padilla had been arrested trying to enter the U.S. to explode a “dirty bomb.” Soon “administration officials were pointing out that Padilla had no radioactive material or any other bomb-making equipment. Nor had he chosen a target, or formulated a plan.”
17) As Spinsanity has pointed out, the Bush Office of Management and Budget has a pattern of dissembling.
18) The final whopper is from the January 6, 2000, Republican Primary debate in New Hampshire in which Candidate Bush pledged he would never use the office of the presidency "to obsfucate (sic)."
That list also is not exhaustive. We could list many more examples. That listing is sufficient to conclude that the Bush administration has engaged in a pattern of deceit, lies, exaggerations, evasions and distortions.
What are we to make of such a pattern? What standard should we apply in assessing the Bush administration’s reluctance to tell the simple truth? You may recall that in 2000, the Bush campaign, its allies and the press felt that Al Gore had a problem with the truth. Perhaps, then, it would be fair to apply to the current administration the same standards that the press and the Republicans applied to Al Gore during the campaign.
If so, we, like Dick Cheney, should be “puzzled and saddened” by this administration's inability to tell the truth.
Perhaps we should conclude that the administration is “deeply dishonest” or “delusional” as Donald Lambro of the Washington Times and Michael Medved of USA Today are quoted by Bob Somerby as saying of Al Gore.
In the words of Walter Shapiro in USA Today, we could conclude that Mr. Bush has a “character flaw” which is “deeply troubling.”
Is the Bush administration’s casual attitude towards the truth really relevant to any important issue? Jonah Goldberg of NRO assures us that it is:
No matter what perspective you come from, it seems hard to imagine how anyone can say that the character of the president is irrelevant…But all of this is such an old and flagrantly obvious argument which misses the simple, old-fashioned point. Presidents should try to tell the truth and be gentlemen.
Mr. Goldberg further reminds us that:
Americans understand that truth telling matters, I think. I hope. And I thought the press understood this, but I'm changing my mind….But lying goes to the heart of politics and turns it black. It is always relevant….
Honesty is a virtue. Thus, if we wish the definitive take on how to react to the Bush administration’s deceptions, we should look to an expert on virtue, Mr. William Bennett. Mr. Bennett in an October 11, 2002, Wall Street Journal Op-Ed wrote the following:
Nevertheless, as the Founders understood, almost nothing matters more in a chief executive than his public character and trustworthiness, his truthfulness and integrity…
[P]ersistent lies by a person in high public office are not merely "personal"; they have to do with the public interest. Public office is a public trust, and people who violate it ought to be held accountable…
[T]he American public's loss of trust in government is a vital national issue. We don't need another president to deepen further the people's cynicism.
Finally, whether you're talking about a police officer, a teacher, a doctor or a car mechanic, it matters greatly whether that person's word is good. If it matters for all these people, then it surely matters in choosing a president.
For once, we could not agree more with Mr. Bennett.
posted by dwight meredith at 11:48 PM |
