Here is my weekly newspaper column for 12/21/06. Also available online at:
http://www.cumberlink.com/articles/2006/12/21/editorial/rich_lewis/lewis86.txtPresident makes the naughty list
By Rich Lewis, December 21, 2006
Well, all you “Santas” out there have probably been making that list, and checking it twice.
But the question is whether you really enforce the rule about naughty and nice.
If so, I’m afraid you’ll have to repurpose the gift you were planning to send to President Bush.
Because he’s been very naughty.
You see, the president has been lying to us. Again. And lying is not nice. In the case of someone so powerful, it actually goes way beyond naughty — certainly as far as dangerous, and perhaps past unethical and all the way to immoral.
Now, many people happen to think that Bush has been lying about a lot of things since he first started running for president in 2000. Certainly, his repeated promise that he would be “a uniter, not a divider” turned out to be a huge whopper. And it wasn’t that he made an earnest attempt to be a uniter and simply failed, he deliberately and repeatedly sought to divide the country by exploiting our most passionate disagreements.
As for the war in Iraq — well, you’d need several notebooks to write down all the lies, half-truths and deceptions related to the run-up to, and early years of, the war. If you haven’t been keeping track, you can catch up at www.bushwatch.com or any number of other Web sites that tumble onto your computer screen when you Google “Bush lies.”
But the wonderful thing about that annual exercise of making a list and checking it twice is that people get a fresh chance starting every Jan. 1. Their stockings are stuffed or left bare based on how they did in the past 360 days or so.
I’m afraid the president hasn’t shown what your teachers called “signs of improvement” over that period.
In fact, he’s regressed insofar as the untruths of earlier years were often clever and slippery — making it hard to prove that he was lying exactly. Things would be just murky enough that you could sort-of-maybe believe the statements were not total and deliberate falsehoods. Like the time in 2003 he said U.S. forces had “found the weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. Actually, we had found two trailers that were later deemed to be labs for producing helium for weather balloons.
These days, the lies are much less fuzzy. In fact, the president doesn’t even bother to pretend they are not lies anymore.
Two examples should make that clear.
On Nov. 2, reporters asked the president directly whether he foresaw Don Rumsfeld staying on with him as secretary of defense “until the end.”
“Yes, I do,” said the president, noting that Rumsfeld was doing a “fantastic job.”
“So,” a different reporter asked, just to be sure, “you’re expecting Rumsfeld, Secretary Rumsfeld, to stay on the rest of your time here?”
“Yes, I am,” the president declared decisively.
Six days later, Rumsfeld was gone.
Now that might have been one of those “sort-of-maybe” situations, except that on Nov. 8, the president admitted he had lied.
“You... came in the Oval Office, and asked me the question...and basically it was, are you going to do something about Rumsfeld and the Vice President? And my answer was, they’re going to stay on,” Bush said.
“And the reason why is I didn’t want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question and to get you on to another question was to give you that answer.”
In other words, “I lied to change the subject.”
Not nice.
But you wouldn’t cross Uncle Albert off your list for just one fib. Granted, Uncle Albert is not the president of the United States, commander-in-chief and leader of the free world. But still.
The problem is, Bush, who is all those things listed above, admitted this week to an even worse lie.
During an Oct. 25 news conference, the president was asked flat out: “Mr. President, the war in Iraq has lasted almost as long as World War II for the United States.... Do you think we’re winning, and why?
The president replied: “Absolutely, we’re winning....We’re winning.”
OK, if he believed it, he believed it, and it’s not a lie. A delusional misunderstanding of the facts, perhaps, but not a lie.
But then yesterday came the headline in the Washington Post: “U.S. Not Winning War in Iraq, Bush Says for 1st Time.”
Bush had told Post reporter Peter Baker on in an interview on Tuesday, “We’re not winning.”
When Baker reminded the president that he had said less than two months ago that, “Absolutely, we’re winning,” the president replied: “That was an indication of my belief we’re going to win.”
Oh my. That’s embarrassing. The president had lied earlier about his true beliefs and is now verbally shuffling his feet and averting his eyes like any 10-year-old nabbed with his hands in the cookie jar.
Extremely not nice.
So, he’s off the list. Just too naughty this year.
Of course, some people say that a president who tells lies to the people who elected him deserves worse than foregoing a tie or sweater.
But somebody else will have to look into that, because “Santa” doesn’t do impeachment.
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Rich Lewis’ e-mail address is:
[email protected].
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