The 935 Lies of George W. Bush
Yes, you already knew. But now they’re actually quantifiable. Like, say, stab wounds
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?
But maybe you still argue that, even at a whopping 935 calculated lies told specifically to lead us into a bogus war, it makes no difference. Maybe you argue that a lie is a lie and Bush is no better or worse than Clinton or Reagan and here is a giant cocktail of jaded, raging apathy. Let’s all chug it together, shall we?
Fine. If it’s a fact that all presidents lie anyway, if there’s little we can do to stop them, then let us put forth a new hope. Let us now wish for the next president to lie just as passionately, as powerfully, as strategically as BushCo, and get away with it just as extraordinarily.
But let’s make one significant change. Let’s urge the new president to lie, well, in the other direction, to lie not in the service of horrific war or in the name of powermongering or so as to line the pockets of corporate cronies, or even to cover up stupid personal behavior, but rather in the name of sliding through an agenda of - oh my God can you believe I’m going to say it? Peace, nonviolence, international respect, humanitarianism, sex positivism, religious tolerance, progressive education. I know. Crazy.
Yes. Give us now a president who lies, calculatedly and strategically, straight in the face of the hard right neocons and the evangelicals and the corporate cretins. Let his or her army of lies lull these groups into a false sense of complacency and/or utter soul-deadening fear so they will keep their mouths shut while the rest of us get some real work done.
“As an angry, well-armed God is my witness, I will never push through a national handgun ban,” would be a good lie for this new president, thus shutting up the NRA and assuaging the bogus American cowboy mythology, as his army of crazy hippies do the exact opposite and quietly work to make the nation safer and more humane. The horror! The outcry! Whatever.
Or how about this: “All foreign religions clearly hate and wish harm upon America, and therefore it shall be the policy of this administration to never, under any circumstances, attempt to understand other beliefs, to open our schools and textbooks to include honest religious information, or generally reeducate the absolutist, Christian-drunk American populace.” And then begin a quiet, subversive national program to revolutionize the spiritual IQ of upcoming generations. The terrible lie!
“America must remain aggressive and antagonistic to all questionable nations who do not cower properly to our demands. We shall close our borders and police the Internet and maintain nasty vigilance on all citizens at all times. This is the only way to true national security.” What’s the direct opposite of such a promise? Do it, prez!
“And finally, I shall never abolish the death penalty, legalize marijuana, approve gay marriage, promote honest sex education for teens, honor habeas corpus and the Geneva Convention, or eliminate the insidious farm subsidy program. We shall never stop lying about ethanol or offer solar subsidies for every household in America. Our direct ties to horribly misogynistic, terrorist-supporting Saudi Arabian power regimes shall remain deeply corruptive and powerful forevermore.”
Go ahead, Mr. or Mrs. Next President. Lie your tail off if you must. But this time, let’s try to make it a real party.
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him. Mark Morford’s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate and in the Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle.
© The San Francisco Chronicle
This is as good as it gets or is going to get. Brilliant. There needs to be a real effort toward accomplishing what Morford is suggesting here. Since we live now in a fog of media lies, government and corporate lies, why not exploit the trend for something really useful. The only problem is, any politician (Hillary, Obama, or any of the repugs running) making such promises to the far right would almost certainly deliver on them truthfully. They’ wouldn’t be lying, so we’d all lose again.
Since Nancy Pelosi took “impeachment off the table” in November 2006, why are you wasting time quantifying past crimes while more crimes are being committed by the Regime each day ?
Not that I am a masochist but I need some wallpaper “to cover a spot where the rain leaks in” - any idea where I see / read / print all 935 of these whoppers?
Subversive is the key word. Now that we live in a fascist state, subversion is one of the few tools we have left. Maybe not the same as Mark outlined, but a subversive network working as a “Shadow” government. Silent termites slowly eating away at the infrastructure of an unjustifiable architecture.
I guess lying which leads to an illegal war is NOT a ‘…high crime or misdemeanor…..”
His soft little monkey skull?!! I love it!
Scale does matter. Big time. And the scales of justice are teetering on the edge.
Didn’t we learn not to lie in kindergarden?
It is the simplest lessons that are the hardest to learn.
walt,
Can’t find a link right off - ‘google’ “935 lies” and you should find the list.
We know what they are, many repeated ad nauseum (WMD, Al Queda, 911, et.al.).
My first thought was “only 935?” but then I see it was limited to just Iraq.
Then again. I’m still thinking “only 935″? I used to keep a log of all the things the Bush administration did that that ticked me off. It ran into the hundreds. I gave up. I wouldn’t have the stomach to work through 935 of his lies.
We don’t need more lies. We need more courage. We need to run a country based on courage; not fear, lies and machismo.
to those of you looking for this list/search engine/series of toobs…
the site is:
http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/
you can search by keyword (terrorist, yellowcake, world war 3, etc)
another site of note:
www.WexlerWantsHearings.com
935 counts of treason???
good thing waterboarding isn’t torture… ’cause that’s exactly what i’d do to bush, cheney, rove, wolfowitz, etc… and there’s no law saying i can’t.
thanks, dubya, for all the stupid ideas.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/
Mr Morford,
Don’t you think that a connection may exist between “…BushCo’s stunning contempt for all national and international law and … human decency” and 9/11 massacre of American citizens? Isn’t the Big Lie of 9/11 the mother of all lies that followed?
Nice article by the way , as usual. It is always a pleasure to read you
I’m sure he can make it to 1000 before he leaves! Go Dumbya!
It’s be like Kennedy’s 1000 days in office only….not.
He repeated most of them when he gave his State Of The Union Address. Our Congress for the most part gave him standing ovations.
Shit
Capitalism is a lie and from it springs forth all the other lies we are told.
Cheers.
Only 935?
But those who counted are rather finicky about the DEFINITION of lie, and
about whether it was known to be untrue at the time. My guess is that if you relaxed the definitions a little, there would have been 500,000 lies told.
Rhetorical questions and statements that are simply misleading were not counted. Also not counted is demonisation of the enemy and generous descriptions of ourselves.
For example, you can be hard pressed to find actual lies in your local newspaper. Most of them are carefully qualified using “apparently” or “allegedly” or “said President Bush” or “according to intelligence sources”.
But the real way that our media lies is by omission. We get shown news that reinforces the goal of the propaganda, not the news that would destroy the edifice of lies.
Better than wallpaper, Walt. Engrave all the lies in granite a la the Viet Nam war memorial and build a circular monument around the White House so everyone who visits Washington can read exactly what’s going on inside.
What number commandment is ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’? And ‘ thou shalt not kill’? ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors wife, nor his ass, nor ANYTHING else that is thy neighbors’?
Just by even the most casual observation of Bush’s ‘obeying’ God and the Commandments, one sees that he has violated EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM!
I wonder if what the US is suffering is the Xtian “God’s” wrath… in which case this is simply divine punishment for your own transgressions.
Have fun.
Chain lies were not counted twice:-
“In press briefings, interviews, and other question-and-answer venues, each answer was categorized for purposes of this study as a distinct statement. In speeches or briefings, only when one statement clearly ends was the next statement considered, and then only if a “buffer” of at least 50 words separated the statements.” -
http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard
If only this were a comedy. It would end now, given that the president has been exposed.
But he is still there! And this is reality as far as I can tell.
Ah, but it is a comedy, braith, both dark and sardonic, just as Vonnegut would have written it. Just hard to think so when your stuck in the story. Morford’s razor sharp phrasing is perfect for this somewhat surreal moment in history.
I mean really. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
Fool me 935 times? This is well beyond the threshold where absurdity becomes comedy.
I like the analogy with a Vonnegut novel. Absurdity is the correct word. But, as Campbell said, the old stories tell us to go forward and act as if what we do matters.
Ah, Campbell also said, “The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It always will be. Your job is to straighten out your own life.”
He also said, Buddha inspired, to “participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”
Difficult that last one, but a worthy objective.
“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.”
Please stop perpetuating the myth that this administration’s war crimes have anything to do with “incompetence”.
Tsk, tsk… if they were competent no one would be complaining! And we’d still be screwed!
935 lies are merely a firewall to divert casual observers from the real lie, the big lie that 9/11 was an attack from outside our country. The real terrorists, the traitors to the entire earth, are those murderers who orchestrated the events of 9/11 within our own government. White men and women, dressed in smiles, concerned looks and blue business power-suits (usually adorned with American Flag pins), are masquerading as our protectors. They are in fact, the perpetrators. There is no doubt, only deception and diversion. The “war on terror” is a sham fed by subconscious racism and a desire to preserve the fragile constructs of the “i” civilization.
It is all over (that which is still worth preserving), unless we confront the real and catastrophic “inconvenient truth” still emanating like a tuning fork of illness from the open wound of ground zero.
@Clemsy January 31st, 2008 8:01 am
You hit it. That HAS to be the slogan:-
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 935 times, shame on me.”
Even better…
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 935 times, just shoot me.”
This is just plain asinine. If only the editors of the major newspapers would have publicized them at the beginning.
I personally forwarded the article “The twenty lies of George W. Bush” to a host of major newspapers and websites as soon as it appeared*. But it was ignored. Is censorship any better than lying? The mass media fully participated in these mass deceptions. The compilation’s authors and Mark Morford are as guilty as Bush. What they are doing now is not providing news, but merely engaging in recreational finger-pointing; beating a dead horse. Just the latest from Big Brother’s Department of Infotainment.
*”The twenty lies of George W. Bush” by Patrick Martin, March 20, 2003
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/mar2003/bush-m20.shtml
Say, Kem Patrick - didn’t you notice that only one half of the auditorium leapt to their feet to give him standing ovations? The Republican side. The Dems sat still for the most part as far as I could see; many looking dispassionate and even grim. I couldn’t bear to watch the whole thing, it was so awful; this character in a tragedy actually having the nerve to be sarcastic, curt, and smirky. But I laugh now when I think of the Repubs leaping to their feet to show support for the most morally empty, venal and incompetent administration we’ve ever seen in this country! The Repubs have sealed their fate before the eyes of God.