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Just
Plain Liars
March
18, 2004
By punpirate
 It
is a repetitive theme in the alternative press that the Bush
administration collectively seems to be the largest complement
of liars ever to have inhabited Washington, DC. The continuing
mystery is why the public hasn't risen up and ripped out all
their tongues.
I do not need to recount in detail all the instances in
which the Bushies have lied. Just the latest examples will
suffice: Richard Foster, chief actuary at the Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services, feared dismissal for revealing
the true costs of the latest Medicare bill, and his superior,
Tom Scully, after muzzling him, then ran away to the safety
of Alston & Bird, a law firm in which "Scully's initial focus
will be on healthcare regulatory, strategic, and public policy
matters," according to the firm's self-congratulatory press
release.
Let's ignore all the old-Europe nonsense about the Iraq
war, uh, invasion. Donald Rumsfeld, on Face the Nation this
past Sunday, had his ass
handed to him by one of the biggest pre-war hawks in the
press, Tom "give war a chance" Friedman, when Rumsfeld averred
that no one in the administration said, before the invasion,
that Iraq's threat to the US was "imminent." Friedman, uncharacteristically,
fed Rumsfeld's words back to him as if he were force-feeding
a French goose headed for the paté hall of fame:
[From the FTN transcript] Mr. FRIEDMAN: We have
one here. It says "some have argued that the nu"
- this is you speaking - "that the nuclear threat from
Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven
years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so
certain."
Sec. RUMSFELD: Mm-hmm. It - my view of - of the
situation was that he - he had - we - we believe, the best
intelligence that we had and other countries had and that
- that we believed and we still do not know - we will know.
Well, conservatives, that's even funnier than Clinton's
definition of what "is" is. And a lot more people died because
of such lies, including the better part of 550 of our own.
Condoleezza Rice, patron saint of rich people and oil tankers,
doesn't fare much better in her recent remarks in the press.
On Meet the Press, Rice said:
"We all believed that it is an urgent threat
and I believe to this day that it was an urgent threat....
And we are safer as a result, because today Iraq is no longer
going to be a state of weapons of mass destruction concern.''
Parsing such a remark requires considerable legal leeway
in the definition of the phrase, "we all believed." Well,
all except the tens of millions marching in the streets of
this country and other countries around the world, who did
not believe as the administration did. It's not even worth
the additional effort to determine if "weapons of mass destruction
concern" is somehow more significant or different than "weapons
of mass destruction-related program activities." Both estimations
are prevarications. Both are obfuscations. More plainly, both
are lies.
Even the darling of moderates everywhere, Colin Powell,
was willing to whore for the administration, on ABC's This
Week, saying, "We may not find the stockpiles. They may not
exist any longer. But let's not suggest that somehow we knew
this.... We went to the United Nations, we went to the world
with the best information we had. Nothing that was cooked."
The rest of the world wonders why Powell didn't say this
in front of a barbeque, outfitted with a chef's apron and
a fork.
Then, there's the VP, Richard Cheney, whose distance from
the truth spans from here to Sedna, the latest planetoid outside
the orbit of Pluto. Cheney, in all his latest appearances
before the press, continues to assert that there were and
are nuclear weapons in Iraq. In the March 14th edition of
the Toronto Sun, Eric Margolis refers to such claims
as follows: "Vice President Dick Cheney's bizarre jeremiads
about 'Iraq's reconstituted nuclear weapons' were absurd."
All this is in defense of the biggest liar of them all -
George W. Bush - the Texas-sized liar in charge of all the
lesser liars, the man who fronts the neo-conservative assault
on us all. These days, there's lots of talk about Bush being
somehow absolved from guilt because he doesn't read and trusts
his advisors to tell him the news. The idea that repeating,
innocuously, the lies of those around him gives him a pass
just doesn't wash. No president in the last several decades
would have been afforded that luxury. Indeed, few have, save
Bush.
Nixon, hiding behind the cloak of executive privilege, was
still found to be naked in his duplicity and resigned the
presidency. Reagan, finally hard-pressed in a news conference
with a question about Iran-Contra, admitted that he and his
administration had not been forthright. Carter, basically
honest, accepted culpability for a failed hostage rescue attempt
in 1980. Clinton parsed the word "is" for all his worth, but
still apologized to the nation for his private, but indecorous,
behavior which the right wing so determinedly forced him to
reveal. Even the elder Bush was forced to admit that an inviolate
promise of not raising taxes was not exactly inviolate, after
all, however minimal that increase might have been.
But, Dubya admits no error, offers no apologies, strides
Caligula-like through the wreckage he's created and has little
to offer the public except a smirk and even more lies - about
job creation, about the war, about the environment, about
the horrors of September 11, 2001, about everything important
to the general public.
Yet, the religious right and Republicans in general continue
to perpetuate the myth that Bush is an honorable, decent,
trustworthy man. Bush has sought to conceal every unpleasant
detail of his pre-political life from the public, because
he knows that any full exposition would reveal his character
in a way that would forever prevent him from participation
in political life. But, the spin goes on - Bush is a moral,
honest man - even in contradiction of the truth that is his
presidency.
punpirate is a New Mexico writer who thinks there's a Bush
administration opening for Lewis Carroll's Red Queen.
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