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?
The rest...
More pic's from Bushorchimp.com
