Liar, Liar, Burning Bright
From the living journalistic god that is Mark Morford:
Oh sweet Jesus, someone actually counted.
Two independent nonprofit journalism groups apparently took enough laudanum and beat down whatever healthy sense of human decency they had in order to plunge straight into that quivering mountain of incompetence that is the official record of the Bush administration, all the false quotes and all the lie-strewn press conferences and all the squinty-eyed fabrications from Dubya, Colin Powell, Condi and Cheney and Rummy et al, that took place in the two years after September 11, 2001, and added them all up.
Is it helpful to know the exact number? Does it make a difference? After all, presidential lying isn't exactly a revelation. Pretty much a national pastime, really. Hell, Bill Clinton lied in a harmless civil lawsuit, and was even impeached for it. Of course, his little oral fixation didn't lead us into an unwinnable trillion-dollar war that will scar the nation for multiple generations and which has wasted 4,000 American lives and resulted in tens of thousands of wounded, crippled and brain-damaged U.S. soldiers. But that's just splitting hairs, really.
After all, it's common knowledge that, say, George Bush Sr. lied about Iran-Contra and "read my lips," Ronald Reagan lied like a nasty old rug about Iran and aiding the Contras, Lyndon Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin to gain support for the Vietnam war, Harry Truman probably lied about Hiroshima and John F. Kennedy probably lied about the Bay of Pigs and, well, all presidents lie, really, to some degree or another and with varying degrees of success and historic consequence. Is it not sort of pointless to whine about it?
Fair enough. But there is something truly special about Bush 43. Something so unique, so poisonous and strange that historians are busy right this minute rewriting not only their books, but their entire way of thinking about how we measure and interpret political malfeasance.
It has to do with matters of scale. It has to do with audacity, with sheer recklessness, with BushCo's stunning contempt for all national and international law and historic precedent and human decency. It is the sense that, at bare minimum, the most significant lies told by previous administrations were, by and large, not massive, calculated stabs to the very heart and infrastructure of the entire nation. They were not designed, as Bush's clearly were, specifically to pervert the entire American experiment, to violently shift us from peace-promoting and defense-oriented protector to an arrogant, insular, pre-emptive attacker, widely loathed and mistrusted worldwide.
See, BushCo rewrote the formulas. From WMD to tax cuts, AmeriCorp to Iraq, this administration has officially reset the bar to an all-time low as to what's possible for a truly dreadful, inept president to get away with without some sort of significant repercussion, impeachment, numerous lightning bolts raining down on his soft little monkey skull. Sure, it took leveraging America's most brutal and heartbreaking tragedy in a generation to pull it off, but does the fact the administration exploited 9/11 like a pedophile exploits a child take anything away from the astonishing depth of the abuse?
But maybe you still argue that, even at a whopping 935 calculated lies told specifically to lead us into a bogus war, it makes no difference. Maybe you argue that a lie is a lie and Bush is no better or worse than Clinton or Reagan and here is a giant cocktail of jaded, raging apathy. Let's all chug it together, shall we?
Fine. If it's a fact that all presidents lie anyway, if there's little we can do to stop them, then let us put forth a new hope. Let us now wish for the next president to lie just as passionately, as powerfully, as strategically as BushCo, and get away with it just as extraordinarily.
But let's make one significant change. Let's urge the new president to lie, well, in the other direction, to lie not in the service of horrific war or in the name of powermongering or so as to line the pockets of corporate cronies, or even to cover up stupid personal behavior, but rather in the name of sliding through an agenda of — oh my God can you believe I'm going to say it? Peace, nonviolence, international respect, humanitarianism, sex positivism, religious tolerance, progressive education. I know. Crazy.
Yes. Give us now a president who lies, calculatedly and strategically, straight in the face of the hard right neocons and the evangelicals and the corporate cretins. Let his or her army of lies lull these groups into a false sense of complacency and/or utter soul-deadening fear so they will keep their mouths shut while the rest of us get some real work done.
There's more, but that's the meat of it.
NINE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FIVE MAJOR LIES.
Impeachment is too good for this dude. Such enormity requires a punishment I can't even think what would befit the crime: maybe if we surgically removed his head and sewed it on a pig? But I'd feel too sorry for the pig to condemn it to such a life of hell...
It's absolutely breathtaking, what the UNELECTED president has done (he certainly stole one election, and I totally believe he shoplifted the second one, as well). He had no mandate. He has no brains. He has no policy. He has no heart, soul, brains or courage. He is the straw with which the Scarecrow was stuffed, the rust upon the Tin Man, the thorn in the Lion's paw. The man is a smirking, simpering, semiliterate bag of rancid dirt.
All he's got is Nazgul like Cheney and the late Rumsfeld, except he's no Dark Lord. He's a Dim Doofus, if that.
And now we see he's a lying sack of maggots as well.
Here ya go (I have grammatical quibbles, but NONE with the sentiment):
Now that there are voices on the House Judiciary Committee strongly advocating for meaningful Cheney impeachment hearings, it is high time to add George Bush to the crescendo.
Just because Dick Cheney is calling the the shots as the acting president, that does not absolve George Bush. Indeed it makes him a constitutional co-conspirator.
Last week the non-profit Center for Public Integrity released an exhaustive study documenting a compelling pattern of false public statements, 935 of them, that "were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses." And Bush topped the list with more lies than any other administration figure.
And just yesterday, after having already once rejected H.R. 1585, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, with an unconstitutional pocket veto (because Congress did not submit to ALL his demands), he then attached a signing statement to the revised bill (H.R. 4986) declaring that he would disregard many other sections of the bill altogether.
The words "out of control" do not even begin to capture the depth of contempt that George Bush has for the entire rest of our Constitutional government and its people.
Sign up, me hearties, yo-ho!
The 935 lies of George W. Bush
Yes, you already knew. But now they're actually quantifiable. Like, say, stab wounds
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Oh sweet Jesus, someone actually counted.
Two independent nonprofit journalism groups apparently took enough laudanum and beat down whatever healthy sense of human decency they had in order to plunge straight into that quivering mountain of incompetence that is the official record of the Bush administration, all the false quotes and all the lie-strewn press conferences and all the squinty-eyed fabrications from Dubya, Colin Powell, Condi and Cheney and Rummy et al, that took place in the two years after September 11, 2001, and added them all up.
Is it helpful to know the exact number? Does it make a difference? After all, presidential lying isn't exactly a revelation. Pretty much a national pastime, really. Hell, Bill Clinton lied in a harmless civil lawsuit, and was even impeached for it. Of course, his little oral fixation didn't lead us into an unwinnable trillion-dollar war that will scar the nation for multiple generations and which has wasted 4,000 American lives and resulted in tens of thousands of wounded, crippled and brain-damaged U.S. soldiers. But that's just splitting hairs, really.
After all, it's common knowledge that, say, George Bush Sr. lied about Iran-Contra and "read my lips," Ronald Reagan lied like a nasty old rug about Iran and aiding the Contras, Lyndon Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin to gain support for the Vietnam war, Harry Truman probably lied about Hiroshima and John F. Kennedy probably lied about the Bay of Pigs and, well, all presidents lie, really, to some degree or another and with varying degrees of success and historic consequence. Is it not sort of pointless to whine about it?
Fair enough. But there is something truly special about Bush 43. Something so unique, so poisonous and strange that historians are busy right this minute rewriting not only their books, but their entire way of thinking about how we measure and interpret political malfeasance.
It has to do with matters of scale. It has to do with audacity, with sheer recklessness, with BushCo's stunning contempt for all national and international law and historic precedent and human decency. It is the sense that, at bare minimum, the most significant lies told by previous administrations were, by and large, not massive, calculated stabs to the very heart and infrastructure of the entire nation. They were not designed, as Bush's clearly were, specifically to pervert the entire American experiment, to violently shift us from peace-promoting and defense-oriented protector to an arrogant, insular, pre-emptive attacker, widely loathed and mistrusted worldwide.
See, BushCo rewrote the formulas. From WMD to tax cuts, AmeriCorp to Iraq, this administration has officially reset the bar to an all-time low as to what's possible for a truly dreadful, inept president to get away with without some sort of significant repercussion, impeachment, numerous lightning bolts raining down on his soft little monkey skull. Sure, it took leveraging America's most brutal and heartbreaking tragedy in a generation to pull it off, but does the fact the administration exploited 9/11 like a pedophile exploits a child take anything away from the astonishing depth of the abuse?
But maybe you still argue that, even at a whopping 935 calculated lies told specifically to lead us into a bogus war, it makes no difference. Maybe you argue that a lie is a lie and Bush is no better or worse than Clinton or Reagan and here is a giant cocktail of jaded, raging apathy. Let's all chug it together, shall we?
Fine. If it's a fact that all presidents lie anyway, if there's little we can do to stop them, then let us put forth a new hope. Let us now wish for the next president to lie just as passionately, as powerfully, as strategically as BushCo, and get away with it just as extraordinarily.
But let's make one significant change. Let's urge the new president to lie, well, in the other direction, to lie not in the service of horrific war or in the name of powermongering or so as to line the pockets of corporate cronies, or even to cover up stupid personal behavior, but rather in the name of sliding through an agenda of — oh my God can you believe I'm going to say it? Peace, nonviolence, international respect, humanitarianism, sex positivism, religious tolerance, progressive education. I know. Crazy.
Yes. Give us now a president who lies, calculatedly and strategically, straight in the face of the hard right neocons and the evangelicals and the corporate cretins. Let his or her army of lies lull these groups into a false sense of complacency and/or utter soul-deadening fear so they will keep their mouths shut while the rest of us get some real work done.
There's more, but that's the meat of it.
NINE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FIVE MAJOR LIES.
Impeachment is too good for this dude. Such enormity requires a punishment I can't even think what would befit the crime: maybe if we surgically removed his head and sewed it on a pig? But I'd feel too sorry for the pig to condemn it to such a life of hell...
It's absolutely breathtaking, what the UNELECTED president has done (he certainly stole one election, and I totally believe he shoplifted the second one, as well). He had no mandate. He has no brains. He has no policy. He has no heart, soul, brains or courage. He is the straw with which the Scarecrow was stuffed, the rust upon the Tin Man, the thorn in the Lion's paw. The man is a smirking, simpering, semiliterate bag of rancid dirt.
All he's got is Nazgul like Cheney and the late Rumsfeld, except he's no Dark Lord. He's a Dim Doofus, if that.
And now we see he's a lying sack of maggots as well.
Here ya go (I have grammatical quibbles, but NONE with the sentiment):
It's Time To Now Put Bush Impeachment On The Table Too
Impeach Bush Action Page:
http://www.usalone.com/impeach_george_bush.php (anyone can use this
link)
Now that there are voices on the House Judiciary Committee strongly advocating for meaningful Cheney impeachment hearings, it is high time to add George Bush to the crescendo.
Just because Dick Cheney is calling the the shots as the acting president, that does not absolve George Bush. Indeed it makes him a constitutional co-conspirator.
Last week the non-profit Center for Public Integrity released an exhaustive study documenting a compelling pattern of false public statements, 935 of them, that "were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses." And Bush topped the list with more lies than any other administration figure.
And just yesterday, after having already once rejected H.R. 1585, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, with an unconstitutional pocket veto (because Congress did not submit to ALL his demands), he then attached a signing statement to the revised bill (H.R. 4986) declaring that he would disregard many other sections of the bill altogether.
The words "out of control" do not even begin to capture the depth of contempt that George Bush has for the entire rest of our Constitutional government and its people.
Sign up, me hearties, yo-ho!
posted by Patricia Kennealy Morrison | 12:42 AM
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