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Contribute The Consortium On-line is a product of The Consortium for Independent Journalism, Inc. To contact CIJ, click here. Emperor Bush W.'s War on the Environment The 2000 Campaign Media Crisis The Clinton Scandals Nazi Echo (Pinochet) The Dark Side of Rev. Moon Contra Crack Lost History The October Surprise "X-Files" International |
The Washington press corps has come grudgingly to the recognition that George W. Bush is “malleable” with the truth, as the Washington Post delicately put it. Pressing for war with Iraq, Bush has been exaggerating his case so much that even CIA analysts are complaining, as a number of newspapers have now reported.
But
the underlying reality about Bush’s honesty is far worse. Throughout his
adult life, Bush has dodged the truth along with personal responsibility
for his actions. Indeed, a remarkable feature of his presidency is the gap
between Bush's public image as a straight-talking everyman and the
behind-the-curtain Bush whose imperial impulse sometimes flashes into
public view. Like
a boy emperor convinced of his infallibility, Bush rarely admits errors,
‘fesses up to misstatements or apologizes for inappropriate behavior. Especially
since the Sept. 11 attacks and his soaring “united-we-stand” poll
numbers, Bush has behaved as an imperious leader, treating others rudely
when he’s crossed. In a recent example, at a summit in Los Cabos,
Mexico, Bush cut short a press conference with Mexican President Vincente
Fox before the Spanish-to-English translation of Fox’s last answer was
completed. Upset
over Fox’s refusal to get behind the Iraq war, the U.S. president
“glowered during Fox’s windup and looked annoyed at the unruliness of
the camera crews,” the Washington Post reported. “The last straw was
when a cell phone went off, which infuriates Bush … In a breach of
protocol, Bush cut off the translator before Fox’s answers could be
rendered into English” and walked away. [Washington Post, Oct. 27, 2002] Bush
displayed his pique again when he felt frustrated over a legislative
dispute on the homeland security bill. In a campaign speech, he declared
that the Democratic-controlled Senate "is not interested in the
security of the American people" and stuck by that charge although a
number of Democratic senators had served their country in war and two,
Daniel Inouye and Max Cleland, were maimed in combat. Bush rebuffed calls
for an apology. Bush’s
self-certainty appears unshaken despite obvious and costly misjudgments,
including his failure to heed warnings about the al Qaeda terrorist threat
in the first months of his presidency and his rejection of advice that his
tax cut would throw the government into deficit. Rather than admit to
flaws or reassess situations, Bush digs in his heels (as with the tax cut)
or moves to block public disclosure of the full story (as with stopping
the proposed independent commission on the Sept. 11 attacks). Iraq
Exaggerations
While
the signs of Bush’s imperial presidency have been growing for months,
only recently have his tendencies to exaggerate, cover up and lie come
into sharper focus for much of the national news media. For
instance, it's now recognized that Bush tried to scare the American people
with notions that Iraqi drone aircraft might fly to the United States
despite their range of only a few hundred miles. In a national address, he
also cited a brief medical stay of an al Qaeda operative in Iraq as proof
of an Iraqi-al Qaeda connection, though there’s no evidence the Iraqi
government even knew of the man’s presence. "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," Bush said in his Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati. But what Bush left out of his one-sided risk equation was the possibility that his administration’s actions may increase the danger to Americans, not reduce or eliminate it. On the day of Bush’s speech, the CIA made that exact point in a letter to Congress. CIA analysts judged the likelihood of Iraq attacking the United States without U.S. provocation as "low" but rising dramatically if the U.S. prepared for a preemptive strike. "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or C.B.W. [chemical or biological warfare] against the United States," wrote CIA director George Tenet. "Should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions." [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Misleading the Nation to War.”] While
the CIA analysis might seem obvious – when people are threatened, they'll
take counter-measures – Bush reacted like a monarch who
despises contradiction. He authorized a special intelligence group under
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to find evidence that would support the
president's conclusions. Still,
when Bush’s recent false statements about Iraq are mentioned in the U.S.
press, they are couched in euphemisms and placed in rationalizing context.
In the Post’s story entitled “For Bush, Fact Are Malleable,” the
subhead reads “Presidential Tradition of Embroidering Key Assertions
Continues,” as if Bush is carrying forward some historic mission. Direct
language about lying also is avoided in favor of gentler language. “As
Bush leads the nation toward a confrontation with Iraq and his party into
battle in midterm elections, his rhetoric has taken some flights of
fancy,” the Post wrote. [Washington Post, Oct. 22, 2002] Bush’s
“flights of fancy,” however, are not limited to his determination to
fight a war with Iraq. They have been a lifelong trait, enabled by a press
corps that seems to buy into the Bush family’s special status as
American royalty, much like medieval courtiers averted their eyes from
missteps by the king and queen. With his family name and his father’s
establishment ties, Bush has always been shielded from the accountability
most Americans face. The
contrast with the treatment of the lowly born Bill Clinton could not be
more glaring. Nearly every rumor circulating about Clinton was fair game
and the editorial boards demanded apologies for his mistakes. Al
Gore, too, was excoriated for supposedly exaggerating details about his
life and his achievements, even when many of Gore’s “exaggerations”
turned out to be tendentious interpretations of Gore’s words or
misquotes by the press (such as Gore’s supposed claim he “invented the
Internet” and his supposed statement about the Love Canal toxic waste
clean-up that “I was the one that started it all” – neither of which
Gore actually said.) [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Al
Gore vs. the Press."] Double
Standards
This
journalistic double standard, combined with the Bush family’s obsession
with secrecy, has left key periods of Bush’s life cloaked in mystery.
The pattern dates back to the wild days of Bush’s early adulthood, a
period that swirled with rumors of drug and alcohol abuse. Rather
than demanding straight answers, the New York Times and other leading
newspapers chastised those who jumped to conclusions about Bush’s
cocaine use based on anonymous allegations and Bush’s refusal to address
the issue directly. Rather than putting the onus on Bush to go beyond
clever formulations, such as his claim that he could have met his
father’s personnel requirement against recent drug abuse, the Times and
other news outlets stressed the lack of on-the-record confirmations about
Bush’s behavior. Most
news outlets were equally protective of Bush’s response to questions
about his Vietnam War duty in the Texas Air National Guard. Bush has never
given convincing or comprehensive answers to questions about how he
slipped into and held onto a cherished Guard spot, allowing him to avoid
service in Vietnam.
“My
first impulse and first inclination was to support the country,” Bush
recalled in an interview about his backing for the war effort. [NYT, July
11, 2000]. Yet Bush said no one to his knowledge helped him get into the
National Guard. “I asked to become a pilot,” Bush said. “I met the
qualifications, and ended up becoming an F-102 pilot,” The
Associated Press reported. [AP, July 5, 1999] The
Bush family has denied that political strings were pulled, though the
available evidence suggests they were. Despite having the lowest acceptable score for entry,
Bush jumped over other young men waiting to get into the National Guard. In
sworn testimony in a civil lawsuit, former Texas Speaker of the House Ben
Barnes explained how Bush won his Guard slot. At the request of a Bush
family friend, Houston businessman Sid Adger, Barnes testified that he
referred Bush’s name to a high-ranking Guard official, Gen. James Rose. Barnes
was questioned under oath about the issue in connection with suggestions
that Gtech, a company Barnes lobbied for, was allowed to keep a Texas
state contract in exchange for Barnes’s silence about Bush and the
Guard, an allegation that Barnes denied. [Dallas Morning News, Sept. 28,
1999, and Washington Post, Sept. 21, 1999] After
getting into the Guard, Bush’s service record became another source of
mystery, which attracted far less press scrutiny in 2000 than Clinton’s
draft records did in 1992. Bush appears to have skipped duty for up to a
year. “In
his final 18 months of military service in 1972 and 1973, Bush did not fly
at all,” the Boston Globe reported. “And for much of that time, Bush
was all but unaccounted for: For a full year, there is no record that he
showed up for the periodic drills required of part-time guardsmen.”
[Boston Globe, May 23, 2000] Bush
responded through a spokesman that he had “some recollection” of
attending drills that year, “but maybe not consistently.” This dubious
response satisfied the bulk of the national press corps. Business Ties
During
the campaign, Bush also escaped tough scrutiny of his business career,
which amounted to a string of high-paying corporate jobs arranged or
backed by his father’s friends usually ending in financial disaster,
before Bush moved on to the next sweetheart deal. [For details, see
Consortiumnews.com's "The
Bush Family Oiligarchy: The Third Generation."] In
2000, the heady days of the bull market, little press attention was
devoted to the sorts of corporate insider deals that gained notoriety in
the past year after Enron Corp.’s collapse. Many campaign reporters saw
Bush’s intricate business deals as mind-numbing and thus of marginal
interest, though again this attitude didn’t protected Clinton from years
of investigative reporting about his failed Whitewater land deal. By
contrast to the media’s Whitewater obsession, facts about Bush’s role
on the board of Harken Energy Co. have only dribbled out over the past
several years. Following his family’s traditional pattern, Bush has
rejected calls for full disclosure and insisted that enough evidence is
already available. The
picture that is emerging is not pretty. Bush managed to unload $850,000
worth of stock in a mysterious transaction in 1990, while Harken was
facing a cash crunch and was planning to sell shares in two subsidiaries
to avert bankruptcy. Outside
lawyers from the Haynes and Boone law firm advised Harken officers and
directors on June 15, 1990, that if they possessed any negative
information about the company’s outlook, a stock sale might be viewed as
illegal trading. Bush, who had attended a meeting four days earlier on the
plan to sell off the two subsidiaries, went ahead anyway. On
June 22, 1990, Bush sold 212,140 shares to a still-unidentified buyer who
spared Bush the trouble of selling on the open market, which likely would
have tanked Harken’s lightly traded stock and meant less money for Bush.
The sale also preceded Harken’s disclosure of more than $23 million in
losses for the second quarter, which caused the stock to fall 20 percent
before recovering for a time. To
make matters worse, Bush missed deadlines by up to eight months for
disclosing four stock sales to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
After the missed deadlines were noted in published reports in 1991, the
SEC opened an insider-trading investigation. At the time, Bush’s father
was president of the United States and the person who appointed the SEC
chairman. George
W. Bush denied any wrongdoing in the Harken stock sales. He insisted that
he had sold into the “good news” of Harken landing offshore drilling
rights in Bahrain. Bush’s lawyers also argued that he had cleared the
stock sale with the Haynes and Boone lawyers, a claim that proved to be
important in the SEC’s decision to close the investigation on Aug. 21,
1991, without ever interviewing Bush. But
what the SEC didn’t know at the time was that the Haynes and Boone
lawyers had sent Bush and other Harken officials that letter warning
against selling shares if they knew about the company’s financial
troubles. One day after the investigation was closed, Bush’s lawyer
Robert W. Jordan delivered the warning letter to the SEC. Asked recently
about the letter, the SEC investigators said they had no memory of reading
it. “The
SEC investigation apparently never examined a key issue raised in the
memo: whether Bush’s insider knowledge of a plan to rescue the company
from financial collapse by spinning off two troubled units was a factor in
his decision to sell,” the Boston Globe reported. [Boston Globe, Oct.
30, 2002; also, see Washington Post, Nov. 1, 2002] Missing
Paperwork
Bush
also has been less than forthcoming about why he missed the deadlines for
reporting that stock sale and three others. For years, he claimed publicly
that he had sent the reports in on time and the SEC had lost them, a sort
of the bureaucrats-ate-my-stock-sale-reports argument. The
issue resurfaced again this year when Bush positioned himself as a friend
of embattled shareholders and demanded that corporate officers reveal
their stock sales almost immediately. Asked why he had not lived up to his
own admonition, Bush shifted the blame to Harken’s lawyers for the late
filings, before changing his story again to say that he simply didn’t
know what had happened. He never apologized for claiming falsely for years
that it had been the SEC’s fault. Bush
used $606,000 of his Harken profits to buy a stake in the Texas Rangers.
After Bush helped engineer public financing for a new baseball stadium, he
sold his interest in the team for $14.9 million. [See Bill Minutaglio's First
Son.] The Harken shares that Bush sold for $4 each in 1990 are now
worth the equivalent of two cents each. Bush’s
pattern of glossing over the truth continued during his tenure as Texas
governor and into the 2000 presidential campaign. As Texas governor, Bush boasted that he knew how to work in a bipartisan manner. One of his examples was the expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program [CHIP]. “In 1999, Governor Bush and the Texas Legislature worked together to implement the CHIPs program for more than 423,000 children,” the Bush campaign said. Yet,
according to the Houston Chronicle, Bush tried to block the
Democratic initiative in the Texas Legislature to expand the CHIP program
to children of parents earning up to twice the federal poverty level
(about $33,600 for a family of four). Bush favored instead covering
parents up to only 150 percent of poverty (about $25,200 for a family of
four). [Houston Chronicle, Aug. 30, 2000]. After
losing the legislative battle, Bush turned around and claimed credit for
the CHIP expansion and his success in working with Democrats. `Dignity' A centerpiece of his 2000 campaign was the theme that Bush would change the “tone” of Washington and restore “dignity” to the White House. Yet,
during the Republican primaries, the Bush campaign targeted Sen. John
McCain, R-Ariz., for personal attacks. By fall 1999, McCain, who spent
five years in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp, had narrowed
Bush’s lead and the Bush assault began. In
October 1999, McCain said, “'Apparently the memo has gone out from the
Bush campaign to start attacking John McCain, something that I'd hoped
wouldn't happen.”' [AP, Oct. 26, 1999] Bush’s
negative attacks intensified after McCain won the New Hampshire primary.
To undercut, McCain, Bush’s campaign ran a misleading ad attacking the
senator for not supporting breast cancer research. The ad cited an omnibus
spending bill, which McCain voted against not because of the breast cancer
research but because of the enormous spending included in the entire
package. McCain complained, but the Bush attack strategy worked. To
bolster his conservative credentials heading into the key South Carolina
primary, Bush spoke at Bob Jones University and avoided criticizing the
school's racist and anti-Catholic policies. After nailing down South
Carolina, Bush shifted gears again, issuing a rare apology for not having
criticized prejudice at Bob Jones, a contrition that played well in the
upcoming primaries in the North. After
securing the Republican nomination, Bush renewed his pledge to run a
positive general election campaign, but that didn't stop him from making
veiled personal attacks on Clinton and Gore. Stressing
the "dignity" theme in the first presidential debate, Bush tried
to make an issue out of President Clinton’s practice of allowing his
friends and supporters to sleep over at the White House. “I believe
they've moved that sign, ‘The buck stops here,’ from the Oval Office
desk to ‘The buck stops here’ on the Lincoln bedroom, and that's not
good for the country. It's not right” Bush said. Bush
didn't mention that since he had taken office as Texas governor in 1995,
he had 203 guests stay over at the Governor’s Mansion in Austin, Texas.
More than half of them had contributed to his campaign, amounting to $2.2
million. [The Public
I] The news media, however, took little note of Bush's hypocrisy. Global
Warming
Similarly,
the press let Gov. Bush escape any serious attention over false and
misleading statements about his record on the environment. In the Oct. 11,
2000, debate, Bush offered conflicting statements within the space of a
few minutes, but the big-time press took no notice. Bush’s
first swing at the issue of pollution-causing industrial plants went this
way: “We need to make sure that if we decontrol our plants that there's
mandatory -- that the plants must conform to clean air standards, the
grand-fathered plants. That's what we did in Texas. No excuses. I mean,
you must conform.” Just minutes later, he had shifted toward what sounded like a voluntary program. “Well, I -- I -- I don't believe in command-and-control out of Washington, D.C. I believe Washington ought to set standards, but I don't -- again, I think we ought to be collaborative at the local levels. And I think we ought to work with people at the local levels.” Beyond
the question of coherence, Bush’s statements seemed contradictory.
Either the national government sets standards with compliance required or
local governments can be allowed to set their own environmental rules,
possibly in cooperation with business. Bush seemed to be having it both
ways. In
Texas, Bush’s record suggested that he opposed mandatory standards even
at the local and state levels. Bush cited as his most significant
environmental accomplishment the setting of new rules for grand-fathered
industrial plants, previously exempt from Texas clean air laws – what he
apparently was referring to in his debate remarks. But
those plants were asked only to voluntarily comply with the clean air
rules. The 1997 law carried no penalties for industries that didn’t seek
a permit under the law. It was the kind of standard that polluting
industries might have written for themselves. And as it turned out, they
had. Bush’s
Texas administration had drafted the new rules in close collaboration with
representatives of the industries being regulated. The role of industry
representatives was discovered in confidential memos obtained by the
Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition under the state’s
Freedom of Information Act. [Sierra Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 1999] Once
in the White House, Bush followed a similar pattern, inviting Enron's
Kenneth Lay and other energy executives to secret meetings with Vice
President Dick Cheney's energy task force. The Bush White House is still
battling legal demands that the records of those meetings be made public. Greening
Earth
Bush
also has muddied the waters on the global-warming debate, suggesting at
different points that the science was inconclusive, even though U.S. and
international scientists have long concluded that the threat is real. Even
industry front groups, such as the Greening Earth Society, which supplied
Bush some of his data for his presidential campaign, no longer deny the
global-warming trends, though they argue that global warming might be
beneficial. The Greening Earth Society, which was created by the Western
Fuels Association, argues that higher levels of carbon dioxide will spur
plant growth. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Bush,
Coal & the Internet." At
another point in the Oct. 11 presidential debate, Bush said the
Clinton-Gore administration “took 40 million acres of land out of
circulation without consulting local officials. … I just cited an
example of the administration just unilaterally acting without any
input.” Bush
was referring to a Clinton-Gore proposal to protect 40 million acres of
roadless areas in national forests from more road building and logging. As
the Sierra Club noted in a press release, Bush’s statement was false. “In
fact, the Forest Service conducted 600 public meetings about the proposal
nationwide and more than one million Americans urged the administration to
strengthen the proposal,” the Sierra Club said. “There was ample
opportunity for local officials and others to comment on the proposal.” Defending
his own record in Texas, Bush also asserted that “our water is cleaner
now.” False again, the Sierra Club said. “The discharge of industrial
toxic pollution into surface waters in Texas increased from 23.2 million
pounds in 1995 to 25.2 million pounds in 1998, the last year with data
available,” a Sierra Club press release said. 'Sound
Principles'
On
a more personal note, Bush contended that he was not a man who needed a
focus group or polls to tell him what to think. "We've got too much
polling and focus groups going on in Washington today," Bush said.
"We need decisions made on sound principles.” Left out of Bush's anti-polling remark was that his campaign had spent roughly $1 million on polls and focus groups, about equal to the Gore campaign’s spending, according to a report by NBC News. [Oct. 6, 2000]. Indeed, Bush changed his campaign slogan from “Compassionate Conservative” to “Real Plans for Real People” because of poll analysis done by his campaign. In perhaps Bush’s most obvious whopper in the first presidential debate, the Republican claimed that the Gore campaign had “out-spent me,” Bush said. In fact,
Bush had raised and spent more than twice as much money in the election as
Gore had raised and spent. There was no explanation from the Bush campaign
about this inaccurate claim and the national news media did not press for
one. If Gore had made a similar misrepresentation, media pundits would have filled the air waves for days about Lyin' Al – as happened when Gore mistakenly recalled traveling to a disaster site with the director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration, when he had actually gone with the deputy director. But Bush had that image of a straight-talking guy. So his misstatements were given a pass or treated as innocent mistakes. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Protecting Bush-Cheney."] Florida
Recount This pattern of protecting Bush when he lied or changed position continued into the 36-day Florida recount battle. Bush, the opponent of federal intervention in state affairs, was the one who rushed to the U.S. Supreme Court to get it to overturn a state court ruling in favor of a full recount. The
"strict constructionists," who long had decried federal courts
making law, called on the Supreme Court's conservative majority to adopt
new legal theories, initially to delay the counting of votes and then to
impose an impossible deadline of two hours for the state to refine its
recount plan and complete the tally. When the deadline couldn't be met,
Bush was declared the winner. In
the recount fight, Bush also flip-flopped on his longtime contempt for
"trial lawyers." Though Al Gore was portrayed as the one who
would do or say anything to win, it was Bush who turned to the hated
lawyers to nail down the White House. Bush’s
recount committee paid $4.4 million for lawyers to block a full counting
of the votes in Florida, according to financial records filed with the
Internal Revenue Service. That was more than the total budget of Gore's
recount effort, which spent $3.2 million on various expenses, the IRS
records showed. Bush's total recount spending was $13.8 million, about
four times Gore's total. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com's
"Bush's
Conspiracy to Riot."] On to WashingtonMoving
into the White House seems to have emboldened Bush in his confidence that
he can virtually shape reality with his words and the words of his
spokesmen. For
instance, when Enron plunged into bankruptcy in December 2001, Bush
minimized his relationship with Enron's disgraced chief, Ken Lay, whom
Bush used to refer to affectionately as "Kenny Boy." Responding
to a reporter's question on Jan. 11, Bush acted as if he barely knew one
of biggest and most loyal backers. Bush said Lay "was a supporter of
Ann Richards in my run in 1994" for the Texas governorship. Bush
implied that he had gotten to know Lay as a Richards holdover appointee to
a Texas business council. In reality, the Bush-Lay relationship could be traced back at least a half decade before the 1994 race. It grew out of the Houston social circle where oil tycoons have long rubbed shoulders with political players – and where Ken and Linda Lay had grown close to George H.W. and Barbara Bush in the 1980s. Since then, Lay and other Enron executives have written big checks for one Bush initiative after another. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Bush & Ken Lay: Slip Slidin' Away."] Bush's
defenders also argued that Bush's refusal to bail out the sinking energy
trader was proof of Bush's integrity. The story line was that all of Ken
Lay’s millions couldn’t buy George W. Bush. For that reason, Enron has
been called a financial scandal, not a political scandal. The evidence, however, showed that prior to Nov. 8, 2001, when the SEC delivered subpoenas to Enron, the Bush administration did what it could to help Enron replenish its coffers with billions of dollars. Enron desperately needed that money to prevent the exposure of mounting losses hidden in off-the-books partnerships, a bookkeeping black hole that was sucking Enron toward bankruptcy. As Enron’s crisis worsened through the first nine months of the Bush presidency, Ken Lay got Bush’s help in three principal ways: --Bush personally joined the fight against imposing caps on the soaring price of electricity in California at a time when Enron was artificially driving up the price of electricity by manipulating supply. Bush’s rear-guard action against price caps bought Enron and other energy traders extra time to gouge hundreds of millions of dollars from California’s consumers. --Bush granted Lay broad influence over the administration’s energy policies, including the choice of key regulators to oversee Enron’s businesses. The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was suddenly replaced in 2001 after he began to delve into Enron’s complex derivative-financing schemes. --Bush had his National Security Council staff organize an administration-wide campaign to pressure the Indian government to accommodate Enron, which wanted to sell its generating plant in Dabhol, India, for $2.3 billion. Bush administration pressure on India over the Dabhol plant continued even after Sept. 11, when India’s support was needed for the war on terrorism. The administration’s threats against India on Enron’s behalf didn’t stop until Nov. 8, when the SEC's formal investigation was announced and Enron admitted overstating earnings by $586 million. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Bush Did Try to Save Enron."] Fibbing Other examples of Bush being "malleable" with the facts are less serious, though perhaps as troubling. Last May, for instance, Bush pretended to have read a 268-page report by the Environmental Protection Agency on global warming. The report concluded that human consumption of fossil fuels was to blame for rising global temperatures and would have serious consequences for the planet. That was not the result that Bush wanted, a fact he made clear to reporters by demanding more study of the subject. "I read the report put out by the bureaucracy," Bush said dismissively. However, the White House was later forced to amend the definition of "read." Spokesman Ari Fleischer explained that "whenever presidents say the read it, you can read that to be he was briefed." [AP, June 10, 2002] Another case of Bush stretching the truth came in his explanation of why the federal budget had gone from record surpluses back into deficit, estimated at about $160 billion for the first full fiscal year of Bush's presidency. In speech after speech this year, Bush told Republican audiences that he had stated during the 2000 campaign that he would keep the budget balanced except in event of war, recession or national emergency. Bush then offered his punch line: "Little did I realize we'd get the trifecta." The joking reference to the Sept. 11 tragedy – and to a term for a horseracing bet on the correct order of finish for three horses – always got a laugh from his listeners. Beyond the questionable taste of the joke, however, Bush's claim about having set the criteria for going back into deficit appears to have been fabricated. Neither the White House nor independent researchers could locate any such statement by Bush. Researchers did find, however, that during the campaign, Gore had used the cautionary examples of what might force the government back into deficit spending. A Life of Deception Bush's supporters may argue that Bush's presidential whoppers are not unusual, that all presidents and probably all politicians exaggerate or twist the truth now and then. That was the point the Washington Post was making in describing Bush's malleability with the truth as part of a long presidential tradition. But Bush's growing record of lies, both big and small, suggest something perhaps more troubling. His personal history of heavy drinking, likely drug use, carousing, disappearances from military duty, repeated business failures and political hypocrisies – combined with his ability to avoid ever paying a significant price for his deceptions – may have given him this sense of his own infallibility. That view of invulnerability to consequences at a time the nation is facing an array of complex dangers could prove a hazardous mix. The pressure on Bush to revert to a lifelong pattern of telling lies and half-truths – and getting away with it – will almost certainly lead to more bending of reality to his political needs. That danger is twofold: Bush may compensate for his lack of foreign policy experience by trying to make regional realities fit with his limited knowledge, and he may misrepresent key information to the American people to simplify his challenge of keeping the U.S. public onboard. Yet at the core of any democracy is the right of the voters to know the facts. That is especially true for a democracy facing a world of crises. |
