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.
Kevin J. Shay 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