George Cannot-Tell-the-Truth Bush-- The Whitehouse's Worst Liar Ever

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http://www.opednews.com/thoreau_053104_george_lies.htm

 

George Cannot-Tell-the-Truth Bush-- The Whitehouse's

Worst Liar Ever

 

By Jackson Thoreau

 

OpEdNews.Com

 

I recently celebrated my 45th birthday on the same day

that John F. Kennedy presumably would have turned 87

had an assassin’s or assassins’ bullets not tragically

ended his life way too soon at age 46.

 

My family left our toy-littered, roach-infested,

two-bedroom, $1,000-a-month castle – hey, we do have a

scenic view from our balcony of some pine trees that

block the parking lot - in the Washington, D.C., area

to spend my birthday at Berkeley Springs, W.V. It’s a

relaxing, artsy spa town not unlike Hot Springs, Ark.,

where George Washington and others visited more than

200 years before.

 

Despite my attempts to clear my mind of things

political for a day, it did not work. There were

actually fewer pro-Bush stickers and other material

displayed in this small West Virginia town than I

expected. Some vehicles even bore Kerry stickers. But

when we came upon a small natural spring hole

designated as Washington’s 18th century bathtub, I had

to remark to my son, “This was where a much better

president than our current one went to take a bath a

long time ago. A loooonnnnggg time ago.”

 

“What’s a president?” he asked, in the automatic

questioning mode of an inquisitive four-year-old.

 

I thought for a moment. “It’s someone who leads the

country and lives in that big White House we saw in

Washington.”

 

He stared at the spring, obviously with other things

on his mind than presidents. “Can I take a bath here,

too?”

 

As my son and his younger sister played in an adjacent

larger spring, I couldn’t help but compare the

“cannot-tell-a-lie” reputation of the country’s first

president to the “cannot-tell-a-true-statement”

philosophy of the current one.

 

And I’m not alone in believing that Bush is the

biggest liar who has occupied the White House, if not

all-time, then in modern times.

 

Princeton University professor and New York Times

columnist Paul Krugman, who was once a junior

economics staffer in the Reagan administration, is

among the leading voices detailing the daily lies of

the Bush administration. Here is one excerpt from a

2002 Krugman column: “The Bush administration lies a

lot….He is as slippery and evasive as any politician

in memory…..The recent spate of articles about

administration dishonesty mainly reflects the campaign

to sell war with Iraq. But the habit itself goes all

the way back to the 2000 campaign, and is manifest on

a wide range of issues. High points would include the

plan for partial privatization of Social Security,

with its 2-1=4 arithmetic; the claim that a tax cut

that delivers 40 percent or more of its benefits to

the richest 1 percent was aimed at the middle class;

the claim that there were 60 lines of stem cells

available for research; the promise to include limits

on carbon dioxide in an environmental plan.”

 

Krugman also noted that “Bush ran as a moderate, a

‘uniter, not a divider.’ The Economist endorsed him

back in 2000 because it saw him as the candidate

better able to transcend partisanship; now the

magazine describes him as the ‘partisan-in-chief.’”

 

A 2003 Washington Monthly survey of conservative and

progressive pundits and journalists concluded that

Bush is a bigger liar than Reagan, Bush Sr., and

Clinton. Among Bush’s lies they chose was announcing

the U.S. had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq

in May 2003, saying his tax cuts would give

middle-class Americans more than $1,000 each when the

super wealthy’s cuts were factored in to that equation

and average payers barely got $200, saying he’d “been

to war” when he used his family connections to get

into the National Guard during the Vietnam War and

went AWOL during more than a year, and promising to

expand AmeriCorps in his 2002 State of the Union

speech before cutting that program’s budget.

 

The Washington Post's political beat reporter Dana

Milbank, who takes on Democratic politicians as

voraciously as Republicans, wrote that Bush’s

" rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy. " To show

you how vindictive and petty the Bush clan is, Milbank

became the target of a White House smear campaign for

that relatively light criticism. Even the conservative

Wall Street Journal reported that " senior [bush]

officials have referred repeatedly to

intelligence…..that remains largely unverified. " Even

Paul Sperry, Washington bureau chief for the more

conservative WorldNetDaily.com, wrote in 2003 that

Bush lied about the threat of Iraq before that

invasion.

 

Politicians, including former Nixon aide John Dean and

Sen. Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada who has

supported Bush on many issues, have publicly called

him a " liar. " In Reid’s case, he made the statement in

2002 after Bush approved Nevada's Yucca Mountain as

the site for long-term disposal of tons of radioactive

nuclear waste. During the 2000 campaign, Bush, who

shows little evidence of having even a superficial

interest in science, had said he would base such a

decision on " sound science, not politics. " Other

individuals and groups – from celebrated writer E.L.

Doctorow and The Nation’s David Corn to Bushlies.net

and MoveOn.org – have documented many more lies.

 

The lies of Bush Jr. are so numerous they not only

fill countless articles and columns, but several

books. I contributed to one, Big Bush Lies, a 270-pp.

collection of essays from academics, legal experts,

financial leaders, activists, and journalists.

Published by RiverWood Books of Ashland, Ore., and

edited by BushWatch.com founder Jerry “Politex”

Barrett, Big Bush Lies is the most recent of such

books, reaching bookstores in June 2004. I believe

it’s also the most complete and meticulously

documented collection, covering Iraq, foreign policy,

national security, the environment, healthcare,

religion, education, women and minority policies,

drunk driving, the National Guard, and other topics in

separate chapters. But then, I have to admit to being

a bit biased – at least I admit it, unlike Bush & Co.

 

The book covers not just the aforementioned lies, but

ones many people seem to forget, ones that occurred

before he took the White House amid lies that he

actually won that election and he and Dick Cheney

actually lived in different states. The lie that Bush

won in 2000 has been covered in many places; for the

latter more obscure lie, on Election Day 2000, Cheney

still owned his home in the exclusive Dallas suburb of

Highland Park, had a Texas driver’s license, listed

himself as a Texas resident on income-tax returns, and

worked most recently as CEO of oil company

Halliburton’s Dallas office. Cheney got around the

Constitution’s 12th Amendment, which states that the

president and vice president have to reside from

different states or forfeit that state’s electoral

votes, merely by switching his voter registration to

Wyoming, where he once lived, in July 2000. He

continued to live in the Dallas area; I observed

television news reports recording Cheney coming out of

his Texas home several times after Nov. 7, 2000.

 

Furthermore, Cheney did not sell his $2.2 million,

4,700-square-foot home until Nov. 30, 2000, well after

the election, to Dianne T. Cash, a wealthy Republican

Party and high society donor, Dallas County records

showed. Cash owned another $2.4 million,

6,400-square-foot home in Highland Park at the same

time. From Sept. 2000 until Jan. 2001, Cash gave a

whopping $204,433 to national Republican

organizations, in addition to buying Cheney’s house,

according to federal records.

 

Another lie told by Bush that you probably haven’t

heard showed that his falsehood record extended beyond

his years in the White House. Several family members

of African American James Byrd, who was murdered in

1998 by three white men who chained him to a truck and

dragged him to death in Jasper, Tx., said Bush lied

when he told Salon.com that he called family members

to offer condolences as Texas governor. Family members

said none of them received a phone call from Bush,

that Bush declined to attend Byrd's funeral, and he

only met with one family member after much public

pressure.

 

Such deceit goes beyond a few simple misstatements or

stretching the truth done by most politicians. With

Bush and other administration officials, lying has

become a long-documented pattern, a policy as sure as

tax cuts for the rich, blood for oil, and world

domination.

 

Conservatives like to harp on Clinton’s “Big Lie” that

he had sex with a woman who was not his wife; beyond

the fact that Republicans, including many of the same

ones who condemned Clinton like impeachment committee

members Henry Hyde and Bob Barr, have lied about

extramarital affairs, Clinton’s lie killed no one. The

lies that Bush and others told to con us into invading

Iraq have resulted in thousands of deaths and probably

permanent damage to the country’s international

reputation. Bush continues to lie to this day about

the threat that Iraq posed before our invasion,

despite evidence to the contrary from the CIA and

other sources that Hussein was contained and did not

have weapons of mass destruction, as the U.S., Israel,

and many other countries have.

 

Americans today are bigger targets for the growing

number of terrorists because of the lies of Bush & Co.

We are not safer because of those lies.

 

If Clinton got impeached by the Republican-controlled

U.S. House over a lie that killed no one, Bush should

get banished from the country for life for his lies.

But that won’t happen because Republican hypocrites

control Congress. Such is among the many problems when

Americans allow one party to dominate our political

functions.

 

I’m old enough to clearly remember the lies of Reagan

and Bush Sr., many of which were more “honest” lies –

if there is such a thing - than the present filth

emanating from the White House. Reagan Iran-Contra

player Oliver North was honest enough to admit he lied

to Congress during that scandal. Today’s Bush

administration not only refuses to admit its lies but

spins them around as a positive course for our nation

and world. John Dean, White House counsel under Nixon,

wrote in 2003 that Bush’s lies “are almost never

justifiable….They are typically of the most serious

kind – lies that misinform the public in such a way as

to disrupt the proper functioning of the democratic

process.”

 

I lived through Nixon and Reagan and Bush Sr., and I’m

sure I’ll live through Bush Jr., even if he steals

another election.

 

But I refuse to observe the lies told by Bush and not

raise my voice against them. I refuse to go along with

this policy. I will risk being branded unpatriotic and

worse by Bush-supporting liars and hypocrites.

 

The future of my kids playing in the tub where the

president who reportedly could not tell a lie bathed

depends on it.

 

Jackson Thoreau is a Washington, D.C.-area

journalist/writer. The latest book to which he

contributed, Big Bush Lies, is available from

RiverWood Books of Ashland, Ore., at

http://www.riverwoodbooks.com/books/Big-Bush-Lies.html.

He can be contacted at jacksonthor or jacksonthor