- The Pentagon a) denied American forces had used incendiary white phosphorus as an anti-personal weapon in the 2005 battle in Fallujah, b) claimed that over 171,000 Iraqi security forces had been “trained and equipped” by the summer of 2005, and c) for months publicized that former NFL star Pat Tillman had died gloriously in combat in Afghanistan.
Actually, all these statements were false. The Pentagon subsequently acknowledged using phosphorus as a weapon, even though the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons forbids use of such incendiaries (which “cause burns, skin irritation and damage to organs or bones”) against military targets amid concentrations of civilians. It turned out that not 171,000 Iraqis but only one of 107 Iraqi battalions—or some 750 soldiers—were able to fights the insurgency without the aid of U.S. troops—“which is what you’d be forgiven for thinking ‘trained and equipped’ means” wrote The New Republic, an early supporter of the conflict.
And after allowing Tillman to become a PR poster-boy for fighting terrorists, the Pentagon admitted that he had tragically been killed by friendly fire—and his mother confirmed that he had opposed Bush and had said, “this war is so f---ing illegal.”
- Vice President Cheney said on CNN on June 21, 2005 that “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”
Actually, that same week General Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that “this is a thinking and adapting adversary” and that insurgencies average nine years. Secretary Rumsfeld then said that insurgency could last up to 12 years, which would make for a very long “last throes”—not to mention that the scale of violence has been going up in Iraq from an average of X attacks monthly in Z to an average of A attacks in B.
- Vice President Cheney said that a) Hussein had reconstituted nuclear weapons, b) “it was pretty well confirmed” that Iraqi agents met with 9/11 mastermind Mohammed Atta in Prague, c) he’d never seen Senator Edwards before their 2004 debate and d) he had no idea who sent Joe Wilson to Niger.
Actually, the best evidence compels the conclusion that Dick Cheney is an incorrigibly, habitual liar. He recanted his national TV claim about “reconstituted nuclear weapons.” Although he tried to deny ever saying that the Atta meeting was “pretty well confirmed” once this rumor was debunked by the 9/11 Commission, a gleeful Jon Stewart combined video clips of Cheney’s denials with Cheney saying exactly that on Meet the Press. Videotapes also showed Cheney and Edwards together several times before their debate. Last, the Vice President told Tim Russert “I don’t know Joe Wilson… I don’t know who sent Joe Wilson”—thee months after receiving a briefing about Wilson’s trip to Niger from CIA director Tenet and then telling Scooter Libby that Valerie Plame may have helped arrange her husband’s trip to Niger.
- Asked “of all the people in the Unted States you had to choose from, is Harriet Miers the most qualified to serve on the Supreme Court?” President Bush answered “yes.”
Actually, George Will, William Kristol, Charles Krautheimer, David Frum, and Trent Lott—all devout and devoted conservatives—said his answer was self-evidently absurd.
- Asked about the 2001 EPA 268 page report on global warming, Bush said, “I read the report put out by the bureaucracy.”
Actually, explained press secretary Ari Fleischer later “Whenever Presidents say they read it, you can read that to be he was briefed.”
- As a presidential candidate in 2000, Governor Bush mocked President Clinton’s supposed obsession with fund-raising and polling. “I believe they’ve moved that sign, ‘The buck stops here,’” said Bush, “from the Oval Office desk to the Lincoln bedroom and that’s not good for the country.”
Actually, as Texas Governor, he had 203 guests stay overnight at the Governor’s mansion in 1995, with over half contributing a total of $2.2 million; while Clinton raised $38.7 million in his first 18 months as president, Bush raised $142 million. And although the Bush-Cheney ticket condemned Clinton-Gore for fund-raising in the White House, within four months of the inauguration Cheney held a reception at his vice-presidential residence for 400 top Republican donors who had given or pledged at least $100,000 each. The Bush administration “[does] as much polling as the Clinton administration,” said former Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming. “I used to think they didn’t but they do.”
- United Republicans in Washington are seeking to abolish the “death tax.”
Actually, there is no such thing. No one is taxed when they die. However, an estate tax—beginning with Abraham Lincoln to help pay for the Union side in the Civil War—is imposed on about 1 percent of American couples whose estates are worth over $3 million (which will rise to $6 million in 2009). The money collected by the IRS in estate taxes goes to pay for, among other expenses, a) Humvees in Iraq, b) drilling subsidies for energy companies, and c) the salaries of Lynn Cheney’s staff. To be fair, when President Bush and Speaker Hastert denounce the “death tax,” it’s a 99 percent falsehood, not a total lie.
- Bush told the Detroit Economic Club on February 8, 2005 that “my budget reduces spending… It keeps us on track to cut the deficit in half by 2009.”
Actually, spending under Bush has gone up [X] percent and tax revenues have gone down by about $2 trillion—and as of January 2006, he’s never vetoed a spending bill. He has accumulated more deficits per year than any of his 42 predecessors—and his ’06 budget does not include the estimated $81.9 billion cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, nor any upfront transition costs for restructuring Social Security, which he’s proposed. In 2001, the Congressional Budget Office projected that total federal surpluses would accumulate to $5.6 trillion over 2002 to 2011; by 2005, this turned into approximately $4 trillion projected deficit—for a swing of $9 trillion plus in just five years (or a loss of $4.6 billion a day).
- At the top of Bush’s second term agenda was “Social Security” reform. He pushed hard, and so far unsuccessfully, for diverting some part of Social Security payments to private accounts in order to save the program from bankruptcy and to provide retirees with a second income stream.
Actually, economists have shown it would do neither. The Social Security Trust Fund will be solvent at least until 2054—and then would be as “bankrupt” as the federal government is now since it too spends more than it takes in. Nor was the White House ever able to explain how shifting from guaranteed Social Security payments to problematic private accounts based on a fluctuating stock market—with a price-tag of $2 trillion in transaction costs and fees—would increase net wealth. Economist and columnist Paul Krugman was withering on this point, again and again exposing W’s fuzzy math that 1 -1 = 3. And the public agreed, preferring the current system of setting aside a portion of wages for retirement at a very small operating cost, spreading risk among all and guaranteeing benefits. There is a long-term demographic and fiscal problem for all entitlement programs that Bush inherited and that his major tax cuts, major spending increases and major deficits only worsens.
One more thing. We had a system of private accounts from 1789 to 1936, before the Social Security system began in 1937. It didn’t work. Then, three-fourths of all seniors ended up in poverty, now only a tenth do.
- After Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, the President told ABC’s Diane Sawyer that “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees” and asked of his administration’s performance, “what went wrong?”
Actually, in 2001 FEMA predicted that a hurricane hitting New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters that could strike the U.S.—and numerous articles in New Orleans newspapers had warned about the catastrophic costs if Lake Pontchartrain overwhelmed the levees protecting a city mostly below sea level. Then the Bush administration cut flood control funding for New Orleans by 44 percent to help pay for the Iraq war. What went wrong, as is now widely accepted, is that the incompetent crony who ran FEMA—Michael Brown, a college buddy of Bush’s campaign chairman—repeatedly failed to respond either quickly or well before, during or after the hurricane struck (other than taking a long dinner he wouldn’t allow to be interrupted and sending an email to an aide about how he as a “fashion god”). And Bush was so thoroughly detached from the situation that aides had to compile video clips from TV to persuade him to interrupt the interrupt the conclusion of his beloved August holiday.
For good measure, an obviously defensive president also told Sawyer that he hoped “people don’t play politics during this period of time.” A scornful Frank Rich in the The New York Times couldn’t contain himself:
Presumably that means that the photos of him wistfully surveying the Katrina damage from Air Force One won't be sold to campaign donors as the equivalent 9/11 photos were…But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy.
When you add up all these documented “actuallys” one wonders why any reasonable person would believe a word that Bush and Cheney say. They are living embodiments of George Bernard Shaw’s observation in Politics and the English Language, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Conservative apologists like New York Times columnist David Brooks, Washington Post columnist Charles Krautheimer, and Fox Cable News anchor Sean Hannity dismiss criticisms of Bush’s honesty as merely the rantings of “Bush-bashers”—or, to quote Brooks, Democrats who believe “the only problem is that the country doesn’t hate George Bush enough.” But this is largely a debater’s trick to avoid engaging the merits of the critique, namely, that critics hate not Bush but deceptions that cost lives and treasure. If they and other defenders doubt the conclusion that the Bush administration is the least honest American history, let them try to develop a comparable list—or book—of deception and disinformation about say, JFK or LBJ or Bill Clinton or even Richard Nixon. Can they come up with as many examples of the gap between statement and reality?
Why this penchant for untruths? And what are its consequences? When you study Bush’s pattern of deceptions, a thread emerges again and again. Even before facts are weighed, he invariably arrives at predictably conservative conclusions. So unlike, say, political but empirical presidents like a Kennedy, a Nixon, or a Clinton, who would usually weigh facts to arrive at conclusions, Bush employs a reverse-thinking that arrives at conclusions which in turn lead to “facts.” His analysis is more catechistic than logical, as information becomes largely props supporting his ideological constructs. One senior Bush aide told author Ron Suskind that he was part of “what we call the reality-based community [who] believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality. That’s not the way the world works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality.”
Other presidents were also different because they often had a depth of experience or analysis that would enable them to weigh information, puzzle through options and arrive at plausible conclusions, which came to be vindicated by history. Eisenhower’s international sophistication enabled him to swat aside those radicals who urged a preemptive strike against Soviet ballistic missiles when we had a big nuclear advantage. Kennedy earned his pay the week he refused the advice of his hawks to bomb Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962 and then balanced enough tough talk and shrewd maneuvering to avoid a nuclear war. Nixon could jettison his famous antipathy to communism in order to use China to stalemate the USSR. Clinton, despite a campaign pledge to stimulate the economy, instead began an effort to shrink the size of the federal deficit and federal bureaucracy—his political base protested, but interest rates fell and the economy boomed.
Lacking comparable experience or depth, Bush is prone to grab onto a useful intellectual framework like a life preserver and then not let go—whether it’s Myron Magnet’s dour interpretation of the 60s in The Dream and the Nightmare or Marvin Olansky’s exuberant view on government faith-based programs in The Tragedy of American Compassion or Paul Wolfowitz’s muscular analysis that preventive wars were winnable and essential, starting with Iraq.
So if Bush is guided not by facts but first principles, where do these first principles come from? Basically, Bush invariably does what his base wants, which means the far right and big donors. George W. Bush is a naturally conservative man from a very conservative area. In Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics, Michael Lind concludes that “The Texas conservatism of George W. Bush combines 17th century religion, 18th century economics and 19th century imperialism.”
The religious reference is especially telling, since, for Bush, the religious right is the spine of the hard right. And Bush’s own religiosity is sincere and well-known. So when in 2000 Bush was asked who was the most important political philosopher in his life, it was not very surprising when he answered “Jesus Christ.” Now, 15 years after his turn to religion, he and advisor Karl Rove know that 85 percent of Americans tell pollsters they identify with some religious faith, that twice as many Americans believe in the devil as in evolution, and that the percentages who believe the world will end in a coming battle of Armageddon—followed by Christ’s return to inaugurate a thousand year reign of peace called the Millennium—are 40 percent of the country, 48 percent of Christians and 71 percent of Evangelicals.
Chapter 2 described Bush’s close ties to the far religious right and Chapter 4 his close ties to big business. Indeed, until he became governor and president, his entire career had been in the business sector. When one tries to come up with any examples of when W has broken with big business, it’s hard to come up with even one. This the public understands. Even at the height of his popularity in mid-2002, a poll found that by 58 percent to 23 percent the public thought that “big business has too much influence” with him.
When the lens a politician views the world through is fitted by the hard right and big business, one is reminded of the adage, “to the jaundiced eye, all looks yellow.” When a president’s voter and donor base in the 21st century requires him to question evolution, stem cell research, and global warming, while supporting the elimination of estate taxes, dividend taxes, ergonomic standards, and affirmative action, the public costs and consequences are very high.
Conservatives have long been powerful proponents of “cost-benefit” analysis whenever an economic regulation is proposed—yes a safer car is nice, but at what cost? But when it came to a judgment about war—yes, getting rid of Saddam Hussein is a good thing, but at what cost?—they wouldn’t hear of it. After American public opinion had soured on Iraq by late 2005, John Mueller, an authority on wars and public opinion, told The Washington Post that “people are wiling to pay a certain price… but for many people, [the Iraq war] is too rich for their blood.”
Here’s the debit side of the ledger that conservatives blithely ignore. Provable mistakes and misjudgments in Iraq—with Rumsfeld bragging to Tim Russert that he had anticipated so many after-invasion problems, but the insurgency problem probably wasn’t on his list—have had the following catastrophic effects: some 2500 dead American soldiers and probably some 30,000 casualties (if one includes accidents, which used to be the case), as well as an estimated 25,000 Iraqi civilians; the precipitous decline of America’s standing throughout the world and—especially after Abu Ghraib—its collapse in the Muslim world; a weakening of alliances needed to fight terrorism collaboratively; misdirecting our energies away from Tora Bora; not to mention real nuclear threats such as North Korea and Iran; allowing bin Laden to escape from Afghanistan; and because he’s seen as a Bush who cried wolf, the likely inability to rally the U.N. or a global alliance should a real WMD crisis occur.
Sissella Bok, in her 1986 book Lying: Moral Choices in Public and Private Life, framed the problem:
Imagine a society, no matter how ideal in other respects, where word and gesture could never be counted upon. Questions asked, answers given, information exchanged—all would be worthless. A warning that a well was poisoned or a pleas for help in an accident would come to be ignored unless independent confirmation could be found… Trust is a social good just as much as the air we breathe or the water we drink.
There is an alternative to a presidential dissembler polluting the well of democracy. After a string of misstatements, a frustrated Bush aide told the media in July, 2001 that “the President of the United States is not a fact-checker.” The FDR White House had a decidedly different approach. FDR’s speechwriter Robert Sherwood wrote in his book Roosevelt and Hopkins:
The New York Times can make mistakes—the World Almanac can make mistakes—but the President of the United States must not make mistakes. This constant thought imposed a harrowing responsibility. After 1940, the White House had its resident statistician, Isador Lubin, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who was constantly available and incalculably valuable to Roosevelt and to Hopkins in checking every decimal point.
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