FROM THE WASHINGTON POST
December 18, 2003; Page C03
"Trust Buster"
By Godfrey Hodgson
George Washington, at least according to Parson Weems, never told a lie. Subsequent presidents, as David Corn admits, have not always lived up to his standard. In a rich gallery of examples, we remember Lyndon Johnson (the Gulf of Tonkin), Richard Nixon ("I am not a crook"), Ronald Reagan ("I did not trade arms for hostages"), George H.W. Bush ("Read my lips: no new taxes") and, of course, Bill Clinton ("I did not have sexual relations with that woman").
It is Corn's contention, however, that George W. Bush not only knows how to lie but has done it on a grander scale, deliberately, systematically and to good effect, ever since he entered politics, and before that, too. "George Bush is a liar," he begins. "He has lied large and small. He has lied directly and by omission. He has misstated facts, knowingly or not. He has misled. He has broken promises, been unfaithful to political vows. Through his campaign for the presidency and his first years in the White House, he has mugged the truth -- not merely in honest error, but deliberately, consistently, and repeatedly to advance his career and his agenda."
Corn alleges that between his (unsuccessful) campaign for Congress in 1978 and his campaign for governor of Texas in 1994, Bush changed his position on abortion from "pro-choice" to "pro-life"; that he claimed to have been in the Air Force when he was in the Texas Air National Guard; and that he lied about an arrest for drunken driving. Corn also contends that in the 2000 South Carolina primary, Bush allowed his staff, if he did not order them, to put about the crudest calumnies about his dangerous rival, Sen. John McCain. He maintains, too, that the president did not speak the truth when he said he did not meet Kenneth Lay (of Enron) until after 1994, when records (so Corn says) show that Bush's oil venture company, Spectrum 7, was a partner with an Enron subsidiary in Texas in 1986.
Corn, the Washington editor of The Nation, makes no pretense of political impartiality. This is a fierce polemic, but it is based on an immense amount of research. In my judgment it does present a serious case for the president's partisans to answer in relation to both domestic and foreign policy, a case that ought to be in voters' minds when they cast their ballots in the 2004 presidential election.
On the home front, the president has systematically advocated tax cuts as if they would make a real difference to broad swaths of the American people. In reality, as Corn and many others have shown, their benefits will go overwhelmingly to a small percentage at the top of the economic tree. For example, the proposed tax cuts would give more than $93,000 to a family with a million-dollar income, while half of all taxpayers would receive $100 or less. According to the Financial Times, the stimulus the cuts can be expected to give to the economy would be "negligible." When this is pointed out, the president and his men mutter reflexively about "class war."
In individual cases, Bush's misrepresentation of the impact of legislation verges on the absurd. For example, he boasted that he would "eliminate the death tax" (the Republican phrase for estate tax) "to keep family farms in the family." The picture is of weeping towheaded kids evicted by agents of an unfeeling bureaucracy from crimson-painted homesteads amid the cottonwoods. But under current laws a farm couple can pass on a farm worth more than $4 million untaxed if their heirs continue to work it for 10 years. The IRS states that "almost no working farmers" owe any estate tax. Even such a farmer-friendly outfit as the American Farm Bureau cannot cite a single example of a farm sold because of estate tax. Politics, not agrarian distress, lay behind this myth.
The cynicism with which foreign policy has been sold to the American public, Corn shows, is even more barefaced. Understandably, perhaps, the Bush administration underestimated civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Less forgivably, its spokesmen, from Vice President Cheney down, persistently hinted that the 9/11 terrorist Mohamed Atta met Iraqi agents in Prague, thus justifying an attack on Iraq, though there appears to be no evidence that this is true, and reason to believe that Atta traveled to Prague to buy a cheap air ticket to the United States.
More generally, the president and key officials in his administration have shuffled and equivocated in almost all they have said about the decision to invade Iraq. It is clear that decision was taken long before Sept. 11, 2001. It seems to have been taken not because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (as it now appears he did not, at least when the war began) or because he might pass them to al Qaeda (with whom he was on the worst of terms), or even because he was a vicious tyrant -- that, after all, had not stopped the United States from tilting toward him in 1983 -- but to fit in with what looks like a naive neoconservative dream that war in Iraq would produce a peaceful, democratic Middle East.
Readers can hardly avoid drawing three troubling conclusions from Corn's painstaking indictment. The first is that the Bush administration has been even more willing than its predecessors to spin, prevaricate and, if necessary, coldly lie for its own advantage. The second is that, with honorable exceptions, the American news media have not lived up to their reputation for hard-nosed skepticism when it comes to challenging the administration's claims. The third is more troubling still. It used to be unacceptable to accuse presidents and Cabinet secretaries of wholesale lying. But now Corn is by no means alone in throwing that word around. Indeed a whole literary genre has come into existence: political-lie porn. Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" is a bestseller, while from the other side of the fence Ann Coulter screams back "liberal lies" like a conservative fishwife in the same billingsgate. A political culture in which lies and charges of lying are thought normal is a dangerous one. Weimar was one such, and it was Adolf Hitler who learned how to exploit it. The currency, not only of lying but also of charges of lying, suggests just how viciously polarized American politics has become, and 2004 is not yet here.
Hodgson is an associate fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University and author of "The Gentleman from New York."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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