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The President Sets the Example
by James Glaser
"George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small, directly and by omission. His Iraq lies have loomed largest." Try googling, "George Bush lies." You can start reading some of the 31,700,000 hits that pop up. Of course some of those pages are about our current president's father's lies, but most I have to assume are George W's. When the boss constantly lies in trying to make his job performance seem better, those working under him start to pick up the habit. That is what has been happening with those who serve under our current President, George W. Bush. Try reading "The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies about War and Terrorism," by Steve Perry and you will start to get the picture. This week Donald Rumsfeld tried using his boss's lying tactic and got caught. SFGate.com writes, "Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tried to rewrite history this week when he denied making prewar claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction." It seems some heckler asked Donald why he lied about knowing where those WMDs were in Iraq, and Donald said he never lied about that. The heckler said, "You said you knew where they were." And Rumsfeld shot back with, "I did not. I said I knew where suspected sites were." You would think that by now most politicians would know that they can't lie about what they said in the past because of video archives and the internet. Everything said now a days is recorded in some form, and the internet makes retrieval easy. In point of fact, Donald Rumsfeld was asked by ABC news back on March 30, 2003, eleven days after the war started if he was surprised that no weapons were found yet. As Eric Rosenberg, writing for the Hearst Newspapers, reports, "Rumsfeld answered, 'Not at all. The area in the south and the west and the north that the coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where the weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.'" On September 10, 2003, according to Rosenberg, Rumsfeld told the National Press Club, "I said, 'We know they're in that area.' I should have said. 'I believe they're in that area. Our intelligence tells us they're in that area.'" Before the war Donald Rumsfeld was making speeches trying to drum up support for taking the troops away from the search for Osama bin Laden, and sending them it Iraq. At one of these speeches, on January 20, 2003, at the Reserve Officers Association he said that Saddam "has large, unaccounted-for stockpiles for some 38,000 liters of botulism toxin, 500 tons of sarin gas, mustard gas, VX nerve agent, upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical weapons, along with mobile biological weapons labs." We now know none of that was true. George Bush told the world that we had found those mobile weapon labs, but they turned out to be mobile weather research trailers. That didn't stop George; he used that line for months after the world knew the truth. It wasn't that long ago that the White House was saying that George Bush really didn't know who Jack Abramoff was. This week the Associated Press reports, "The Secret Service has agreed to turn over White House visitor logs that will show how often convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff met with Bush administration officials—and with whom he met." The AP reports that in one ten month period Abramoff or his staff "logged in nearly 200 meetings" with the administration at the White House. There is no doubt that George Bush has lied to the American people. The Republican Party might say the President only put his "spin" on the facts, but we have come to learn that "spin" is Washington's euphemism for lying. With years of lying to the American people under his belt, Bush's whole administration now feels they are sanctioned to use this same tool to help them look good. The only thing is, as most mothers will tell you, lying is wrong, and like Donald Rumsfeld found out last week, if you lie, you usually will get caught in the end. |
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