Mandanici, the esteemed bard who is so deep into the Democrat interest back pocket he will never dig himself out, certainly does not have the moral authority to pass judgment on the President. This is even aside from the several misstatements and errors in his litany of sins, all of which have been or are still being debated on dozens of other threads and most which have been pretty well discredited.
In other words, just because Mandanici says the President lied, does not make the President a liar.
Foxfyre wrote:I don't think it has been shown definitively that the President 'clearly could not have believe it to be true." There have been pages of assertions that he lied, but not one person has proved it beyond reasonable doubt so far as I have seen.
First, "beyond a reasonable doubt" is a burden of proof for the courts, not for internet forums. Second, I was referring to the quote where he says that the government is required to get a warrant before wiretapping. Seeing as how he signed an order making that not the case, and signed it again, and again, I can't see how anyone can argue that he believed it to be true. Although DebraLaw made a convincing case that what he said was technically and legally true, he could not have believed it to be true.
Frank Rich: Bush Administration As Gaudy, Hollow as 'Phantom of the Opera'
May 12, 2006
In The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (September, Penguin Press), a scathing rebuke of the current administration's definition of "truth," New York Times columnist Frank Rich examines the propaganda misinformation of the Bush era.
Though it was a sequence of events that led to Rich's frustration, he notes the war in Iraq as the epitome of all of the administration's shortcomings: "Placing a higher priority on partisan politics than the nation's welfare, lazy and poor planning, public relations as a substitute for policy, arrogance, unilateralism, an inability to admit or correct mistakes: the same themes recur again and again," he says.
Rich does, however, reserve a measure of respect for the method behind the madness, while shunning the insanity itself. Beyond the White House's policy, he says, "is also a fascinating narrative: the fictional story they rolled out, quite brilliantly at times, that sold the nation on a war against an enemy that did not attack us on 9/11." The Democrats' "tardy, timid and laughably inarticulate" response has perturbed him, but not nearly as much as the actions of the Republican administration: "The White House . . . sold a war of choice to the American people on fictitious grounds and with disastrous results that will continue to play out on many fronts for years to come," he says.
The former Times theatre critic compares the administration's "hunger for big, spectacular, gaudy productions that end up being hollow distractions" to The Phantom of the Opera, "albeit without the songs."
The Machinery of Mendacity
Commentary: Given a public policy debate, conservatives have decided to forgo real debate entirely -- to adopt instead a radical course: denying reality itself.
By Russ Rymer
May/June 2005 Issue
. . . More generally, “Climate of Denial” could serve as a title for the political times we live in. On issue after issue, this administration and this Congress continue to pursue policies that cannot stand the test of honest debate, and require a rewriting of basic facts. The dangers to the country are evident in myriad policy debacles: the illegal, expensive, and unnecessary war we were led into under false pretenses; the “reform” of Social Security based on the unfounded assertion that the program is in “crisis” (and pursued by ideologues pretending their goal is not to end it entirely); the economy plundered by fiscal improvidence; the budget busted by grand theft billed as tax relief.
The danger is graver because the negation of truth is so systematic. Dishonest accounting, willful scientific illiteracy, bowdlerized federal fact sheets, payola paid to putative journalists, “news” networks run by right-wing apparatchiks, think tanks devoted to propaganda rather than thought, the purging of intelligence gatherers and experts throughout the bureaucracy whose findings might refute the party line—this is the machinery of mendacity. Its products are not the cherry-tree lies of embarrassed schoolboys covering up their misdemeanors, but the agitprop of a political ascendancy that considers the manipulation of truth an essential tool. There’s no embarrassment in it.
The same partisans who clucked loudly during their impeachment of President Clinton about the need for a government so transparent that the most private details of a president’s personal life should be open to inspection have wrapped such a dense cloak of secrecy around the current president that even the roster of his administration’s meetings is withheld from the citizenry, under the expressed claim that the White House can’t do what needs doing if the American people are allowed to know what that is. The point here is not the hypocrisy involved, though that is egregious. The point is the downgrading of truth and honesty from principles with universal meaning to partisan weapons to be sheathed or drawn as necessary. No wonder the Bush administration feels no compunction to honor the truth or seek it; it conceives truth as a tactic, valuable only insofar as it is useful against one’s enemies. . . .
Debra LAW, the outstanding legal mind...
I am surprised that the brilliant legal mind, Debra LAW...
I would hope that the brilliant lawyer, Derba LAW...
[Blah...Blah...Blah...]
I would hope that the brilliant lawyer, Derba LAW, would explain to us why the media talking heads usually use the words "allegation".
She won't because it would ruin her argument!
BernardR wrote:[Blah...Blah...Blah...]
I would hope that the brilliant lawyer, Derba LAW, would explain to us why the media talking heads usually use the words "allegation".
She won't because it would ruin her argument!
I won't respond to the essense of your post because, due to the brilliance that you have attributed to me, I have discerned that you have the qualities of a troll who is best handled by scrolling past your dribble. If you present a valid point in a non-trollish manner, perhaps I will honor you with a response. But until then, your dickish baiting will be henceforth ignored.
And I would like to thank Squinney--a wise woman who has from time to time reminded us of the power of the scroll bar. Thanks!
Foxfyre wrote:Mandanici, the esteemed bard who is so deep into the Democrat interest back pocket he will never dig himself out, certainly does not have the moral authority to pass judgment on the President. This is even aside from the several misstatements and errors in his litany of sins, all of which have been or are still being debated on dozens of other threads and most which have been pretty well discredited.
In other words, just because Mandanici says the President lied, does not make the President a liar.
You didn't even take the time to read the article.
You don't know that.
You didn't verify the sources--which he provided in his article--that he used to chronically substantiate the fact that Bush deceived both Congress and the American people with respect to Iraq's alleged attempts to acquire uranium.
Neither did you.
You declared him to be a "Democrat" [gasp . . . omg, NO!]
and therefore, he is unqualified to investigate the facts and write an article that disparages your child-like president who innocently knows not what he says.
I did? Where? (I really expected you to be more precise on these fine points.)
If you claim the facts that he relies upon are inaccurate, set forth the inaccuracies. If you're relying on posts made in other threads to debate the accuracy of this article, provide the links.
The information is already in the other threads and I really don't want to go hunt up all those links. Nor do I care to hijack the thread further in an effort to disupute the bloke's spiel.
For me it is enough to say what I said: just because he says these are lies does not make them lies. And it certainly does not make them lies when at least several of the things he states as fact have been disputed by others.
The Other Lies of George Bush
David Corn
This article was adapted from the new book, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers).
George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small, directly and by omission. His Iraq lies have loomed largest. In the run-up to the invasion, Bush based his case for war on a variety of unfounded claims that extended far beyond his controversial uranium-from-Niger assertion. He maintained that Saddam Hussein possessed "a massive stockpile" of unconventional weapons and was directly "dealing" with Al Qaeda--two suppositions unsupported then (or now) by the available evidence. He said the International Atomic Energy Agency had produced a report in 1998 noting that Iraq was six months from developing a nuclear weapon; no such report existed (and the IAEA had actually reported then that there was no indication Iraq had the ability to produce weapons-grade material). Bush asserted that Iraq was "harboring a terrorist network, headed by a senior Al Qaeda terrorist planner"; US intelligence officials told reporters this terrorist was operating ouside of Al Qaeda control. And two days before launching the war, Bush said, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Yet former deputy CIA director Richard Kerr, who is conducting a review of the prewar intelligence, has said that intelligence was full of qualifiers and caveats, and based on circumstantial and inferential evidence. That is, it was not no-doubt stuff. And after the major fighting was done, Bush declared, "We found the weapons of mass destruction." But he could only point to two tractor-trailers that the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded were mobile bioweapons labs. Other experts--including the DIA's own engineering experts--disagreed with this finding.
But Bush's truth-defying crusade for war did not mark a shift for him. Throughout his campaign for the presidency and his years in the White House, Bush has mugged the truth in many other areas to advance his agenda. Lying has been one of the essential tools of his presidency. To call the forty-third President of the United States a prevaricator is not an exercise of opinion, not an inflammatory talk-radio device. Rather, it is backed up by an all-too-extensive record of self-serving falsifications. While politicians are often derided as liars, this charge should be particularly stinging for Bush. During the campaign of 2000, he pitched himself as a candidate who could "restore" honor and integrity to an Oval Office stained by the misdeeds and falsehoods of his predecessor. To brand Bush a liar is to negate what he and his supporters declared was his most basic and most important qualification for the job. . . .
* * *
September 11
As many Americans and others yearned to make sense of the evil attacks of September 11, Bush elected to share with the public a deceptively simplistic explanation of this catastrophe. Repeatedly, he said that the United States had been struck because of its love of freedom. "America was targeted for attack," he maintained, "because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world." This was shallow analysis, a comic-book interpretation of the event that covered up complexities and denied Americans information crucial for developing a full understanding of the attacks. In the view Bush furnished, Osama bin Laden was a would-be conqueror of the world, a man motivated solely by irrational evil, who killed for the purpose of destroying freedom.
But as the State Department's own terrorism experts--as well as nongovernment experts--noted, bin Laden was motivated by a specific geostrategic and theological aim: to chase the United States out of the Middle East in order to ease the way for a fundamentalist takeover of the region. Peter Bergen, a former CNN producer and the first journalist to arrange a television interview with bin Laden, observes in his book Holy War, Inc., "What [bin Laden] condemns the United States for is simple: its policies in the Middle East." Rather than acknowledge the realities of bin Laden's war on America, Bush attempted to create and perpetuate a war-on-freedom myth.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush was disingenuous on other fronts. Days after the attack, he asserted, "No one could have conceivably imagined suicide bombers burrowing into our society and then emerging all in the same day to fly their aircraft--fly US aircraft--into buildings full of innocent people." His aides echoed this sentiment for months. They were wrong. Such a scenario had been imagined and feared by terrorism experts. And plots of this sort had previously been uncovered and thwarted by security services in other nations--in operations known to US officials. According to the 9/11 inquiry conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees, the US intelligence establishment had received numerous reports that bin Laden and other terrorists were interested in mounting 9/11-like strikes against the United States.
Fourteen months after the attack, Bush said, "We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of September the 11th." But his actions belied this rhetoric. His White House refused to turn over information to the intelligence committees about a pre-9/11 intelligence briefing he had had seen, and the Bush Administration would not allow the committees to tell the public what intelligence warnings Bush had received before September 11. More famously, Bush would not declassify the twenty-seven-page portion of the committees' final report that concerned connections between the 9/11 hijackers and Saudi Arabia. And following September 11, Bush repeatedly maintained that his Administration was doing everything possible to secure the nation. But that was not true. The Administration did not move--and has not moved--quickly to address gaping security concerns, including vulnerabilities at chemical plants and ports and a huge shortfall in resources for first responders [see Corn, "Homeland Insecurity," September 22].
It did not start with Iraq. Bush has been lying throughout the presidency. He claimed he had not gotten to know disgraced Enron chief Ken Lay until after the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. But Lay had been one of Bush's larger contributors during that election and had--according to Lay himself--been friends with Bush for years before it. In June 2001, Bush said, "We're not going to deploy a [missile defense] system that doesn't work." But then he ordered the deployment of a system that was not yet operational. (A June 2003 General Accounting Office study noted, "Testing to date has provided only limited data for determining whether the system will work as intended.") His White House claimed that it was necessary to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to "secure America's energy needs." But the US Geological Survey noted that the amount of oil that might be found there would cover up to slightly more than two years' worth of oil consumption. Such a supply would hardly "secure" the nation's needs.
Speaking for his boss, Fleischer in 2002 said, "the President does, of course, believe that younger workers...are going to receive no money for their Social Security taxes." No money? That was not so. A projected crunch will hit in four decades or so. But even when this happens, the system will be able to pay an estimated 70 percent of benefits--which is somewhat more than "no money." When Bush in August 2001 announced he would permit federal funding of stem-cell research only for projects that used existing stem-cell lines--in a move to placate social conservatives, who opposed this sort of research--he said that there were sixty existing lines, and he asserted that his decision "allows us to explore the promise and potential of stem-cell research." Yet at the time--according to scientific experts in the field and various media reports--there were closer to ten available lines, not nearly enough to support a promising research effort.
Does Bush believe his own untruths? Did he truly consider a WMD-loaded Saddam Hussein an imminent threat to the United States? Or was he knowingly employing dramatic license because he wanted war for other reasons? Did he really think the average middle-class taxpayer would receive $1,083 from his second tax-cut plan? Or did he realize this was a fuzzy number cooked up to make the package seem a better deal than it was for middle- and low-income workers? Did he believe there were enough stem-cell lines to support robust research? Or did he know he had exaggerated the number of lines in order to avoid a politically tough decision?
It's hard to tell. Bush's public statements do suggest he is a binary thinker who views the world in black-and-white terms. You're either for freedom or against it. With the United States or not. Tax cuts are good--always. The more tax cuts the better--always. He's impatient with nuances. Asked in 1999 to name something he wasn't good at, Bush replied, "Sitting down and reading a 500-page book on public policy or philosophy or something." Bush likes life to be clear-cut. And perhaps that causes him to either bend the truth or see (and promote) a bent version of reality. Observers can debate whether Bush considers his embellishments and misrepresentations to be the honest-to-God truth or whether he cynically hurls falsehoods to con the public. But believer or deceiver--the result is the same.
With his misrepresentations and false assertions, Bush has dramatically changed the nation and the world. Relying on deceptions, he turned the United States into an occupying power. Using lies, he pushed through tax cuts that will profoundly reshape the US budget for years to come, most likely insuring a long stretch of deficits that will make it difficult, perhaps impossible, for the federal government to fund existing programs or contemplate new ones.
Does Bush lie more than his predecessors, more than his political opponents? That's irrelevant. He's guiding the nation during difficult and perhaps perilous times, in which a credible President is much in need. Prosperity or economic decline? War or peace? Security or fear? This country has a lot to deal with. Lies from the White House poison the debates that must occur if Americans are going to confront and overcome the challenges of this century at home and abroad.
Presidential lying, in fact, threatens the country. To render informed and wise choices about the crucial and complicated controversies of the day, people need truthful information. The President is generally in a position to define and dominate a debate more than other political players. And a lie from the White House--or a fib or a misrepresentation or a fudged number--can go a long way toward distorting the national discussion.
Bush campaigned for the presidency as the fellow who would bring honesty back to the White House. During his first full day on the job, while swearing in his White House staff, he reminded his cadre, "On a mantelpiece in this great house is inscribed the prayer of John Adams, that only the wise and honest may rule under this roof." But Adams's prayer would once more go unanswered. There has been no restoration of integrity. Bush's promise was a lie. The future of the United States remains in the hands of a dishonest man.
THE TRUTH: "The future of the United States remains in the hands of a dishonest man."
You didn't even take the time to read the article.
You don't know that.
You didn't verify the sources--which he provided in his article--that he used to chronically substantiate the fact that Bush deceived both Congress and the American people with respect to Iraq's alleged attempts to acquire uranium.
Neither did you.
You declared him to be a "Democrat" [gasp . . . omg, NO!]
and therefore, he is unqualified to investigate the facts and write an article that disparages your child-like president who innocently knows not what he says.
I did? Where? (I really expected you to be more precise on these fine points.)
If you claim the facts that he relies upon are inaccurate, set forth the inaccuracies. If you're relying on posts made in other threads to debate the accuracy of this article, provide the links.
The information is already in the other threads and I really don't want to go hunt up all those links. Nor do I care to hijack the thread further in an effort to disupute the bloke's spiel.
For me it is enough to say what I said: just because he says these are lies does not make them lies. And it certainly does not make them lies when at least several of the things he states as fact have been disputed by others.
Not David Corn nor John Fund nor any other leftwing hack or even responsible journalist, nor any blogger, nor any politician, nor any other person out there can make something a lie by saying it is a lie. They may believe it is a lie, and they may cite it as a lie, and they may even explain why they think it is a lie, but it still doesn't make it a lie.
That is unless everything cited that turns out to be untrue is considered a lie. If that's the case there are an awful lot of liars. In fact Diogenes is surely still morosely trudging around the world, because there will not be an honest man (or woman or child) to be found anywhere and probably none have ever lived or will ever be born.
Tico, where is that scroll key again?
Read 'em and weep, Tico, Bernard, Brandon.
In a new nationwide CNN poll, more people think Clinton is honest than think Bush is.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/05/12/bush.clinton.poll/index.html
