McGovern:congress should impeach Bush and Cheney

[araby]

http://southernavenger.ccpblogs.com/2008/02/21/george-mcgovern-impeach-president-bush/

An interesting commentary. I found one thing especially interesting. Remember Hurricane Katrina? Remember how everyone freaked out that President Bush didn't didn't move FEMA quickly or efficiently? I heard thought after thought that, "it wasn't the President's fault." Oh really?

I happen to think that if EVER the President or the people of the country should move in to help others, that disaster was a perfect example. That's when you help people...when they're standing waste deep in water, houses flooded. People need to help themselves, yes. But in a disaster like Katrina-there has to be sympathy at the Federal level, and plans to help our citizens in trouble. I've heard more lately about how Bush has helped the AIDS epidemic in Africa more than our own folks down in New Orleans. Total bullshit.

[Zanchief]

They didn't have enough money to make it worth his time to help them.

I always laugh when I hear people say he didn't have the authority to help. Imagine if after 9/11 the president said he couldn't do anything for a few days while he was working out the paper work. Of course he could get FEMA in there.

[Kramer]

true dat.

[Lueyen]

The basic reason Congress will not initiate impeachment based on the reasons given is that in all reasons given dealing with domestic and internal matters the same charges could be applied to other government officials including many members of congress. Some of the charges McGovern lists would have even been historically applicable to other presidencies, including those of some of our founding fathers. Of course in the end the real reason Congress does not pursue impeachment is that there is no real case for it, political spin and hype might do well in the media, but is wholly lacking when it comes to legal proceedings.

[Arlos]

I think a more realistic reason why it's not pursued is this congress at least is realistic enough to know it would never get the 2/3 majority to convict. I think he's definitely impeachable, for violating FISA if nothing else, but they'd never win conviction, so they're not going to turn him into a martyr by making the attempt. Especially when he's out in less than a year anyway.

-Arlos

[Kramer]

i think enough people have written and are writing books hating on him that his legacy will be questionable at best

and i agree, it would never make a 2/3

[Lyion]

Popularity does not make one a good or bad President.

Just like Arlos ignoring the legal system and saying something is illegal does not make it so, nor does my wanting abortion to be classified as murder makes it so.

[Arlos]

*yawn* I am far from the only one to be aware of the illegalities of the administration's end-run around the FISA law, which was put into place SPECIFICALLY to disallow the executive branch discretionary wiretapping authority without specific approval for each tap by the judiciary branch. Blame Nixon's excesses for the reason behind it, when he wiretapped domestic politicians, reporters, etc.

Go look on the web, you can find any number of scholarly legal opinions showing how impeachable Bush is. But attempting it when you know it won't succeed is something the GOP does, not the Democrats, at least by what we've learned in the last 10-12 years of political history.

Oh, and Bush is not a bad president because he is unpopular. He is unpopular because he IS a bad president. Get the order right.

-Arlos

[Lyion]

Fortunately Scholarly legal opinions are worthless. Whether they are for or against what one wants the law to be.

Their opinion and ours is solely that. What matters are facts and courts and their interpretation of the law.

That won't stop the rabid types from screaming impeach Bush, when most moderates and others realize it's just BDS. As Lueyen rightly opined it is solely rhetoric to be partisan without any true merit.

[Arlos]

What matters are facts and courts and their interpretation of the law.

I agree that that's what matters in the end. Well, technically in the case of impeachment of a president no courts are actually involved one way or the other, so it could be argued that that's an exception, but that's a technicality at best.

The thing is, we have yet to have a court rule one way or another on this. The problem is, the right-led court has established a near-impossible standard to meet in order to actually sue to find out if its illegal or not, and as a result there has been no ruling from the courts on the legality or illegality of the program. Not that I have any doubts as to which way it would be ruled given an impartial panel, but I doubt we'll ever see the program itself brought to trial the way it should be.

So, your comment about the courts determining the legality is, at best, a red herring, as you know as well as I do how unlikely it is to go to trial, given the insane standing standards the court has set in this case. In any case, there's very few people, regardless of how far left they are, that are legitimately calling for Bush to be impeached at this point. I certainly am not. I think, given a completely impartial jury he WOULD be impeached, and probably should have been when this first came to light, but that is water under the bridge. Plus, given that we don't live in an ideal world, we live in the real one, one must bend to the reality that there's no way the GOP side would vote for impeachment, and given that he's gone in 9-10 months anyway, there is no point to even starting the process.

Oh, and Lueyen: Spin, hype and naked partisanship got Clinton impeached, so don't say it can never occur. Fortunately, reason prevailed and he was acquitted, best efforts of Newt & Co notwithstanding.

-Arlos

[Lueyen]

Oh, and Lueyen: Spin, hype and naked partisanship got Clinton impeached, so don't say it can never occur. Fortunately, reason prevailed and he was acquitted, best efforts of Newt & Co notwithstanding.

The term "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" as an impeachable offense in the constitution was taken directly from the British practice of impeachment. In Brittan impeaching someone for a high crime or misdemeanor need not involve violation of civil or penal code, but something that as seen as a violation of moral code. Even in an age of relative morality, ask yourself how many wives would condone Clinton's actions if it were their husband. How many bosses for that matter would approve of his actions by an employee. I believe in your answers you will find that the vast majority of people would not consider that moral behavior, and would by any definition consider it improper relations. Bill Clinton in a white house press conference told the American Public that there were no improper relations with Lewinsky. To call that anything but a lie, you must take the thin arguments Clinton did, and if you believe that your beliefs on what is immoral are on the fringe way out side the bounds of normal society.

Still some would argue that "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" constitutes a violation of laws. Even at that you have Bill Clinton perjuring himself in front of a grand jury, which is a violation of the law.

The reasons for impeachment in the case of Clinton were completely solid. Spin and hype were not the tools of those bringing the charges and pursuing the impeachment, they were tools of the defense. The case is pretty cut and dry. Unlike the charges of Bush lying about WMD we don't have to postulate what Clinton was thinking about an external matter, quite simply we only need look at what he said regarding his own actions.

He satisfied both definitions of "high Crimes and Misdemeanors", in both lying to the American Public and in lying before a grand jury. If you can honestly tell me you don't think he lied, then by all means I'd love to hear the argument, it should be entertaining. Note that I have not even gone into the claim of executive privilege being used as a means to obstruct justice, something Clinton also tried, and something Nixon faced impeachment over.

Regardless of successful removal from office, articles of impeachment were drafted and charges brought. This is a case of regardless of being able to accomplish the removal from office, congress was bound by oath to protect the constitution to hold impeachment proceedings.

Go look on the web, you can find any number of scholarly legal opinions showing how impeachable Bush is. But attempting it when you know it won't succeed is something the GOP does, not the Democrats, at least by what we've learned in the last 10-12 years of political history.

Frankly even if impeachment can not be seen through to the removal from office, if the actions of the individual are of such a grievous nature as you charge regarding Bush and the FISA court then members of Congress are duty bound to initiate impeachment regardless if they believe they have the numbers to make it lead to removal from office.

What you are basically saying is that Republicans will do the right thing and fight even if they don't think they can win if it is a just cause, Democrats won't fight even if they believe it to be a just cause because they don't believe they can win... hell that can often times be seen in their stances on military action too.

So either impeachment proceedings have not been initiated due to the basis actually being mostly political fodder with little or no real substance, or the people who believe it to be true are reluctant to adhere to their oath of office due to lack of intestinal fortitude, take your pick. Sure I understand you pick and choose your battles... but if indeed you were to believe all that has been charged against the Bush Administration, the overwhelming and important nature of those charges would demand your action.

[Arlos]

I do not believe that someone saying he didn't get a blowjob is an impeachable offense, sorry. First of all, it's a question that never should have been asked in the first place, and second, he's human, 95% of men who'd done that would do exactly the same thing. Attempting to impeach based on morality is a very very bad idea to begin with, as the ever-shifting question of WHOSE morality is the basis rears its ugly head. It cannot be Christian morality (nor jewish, nor buddhist, nor any other religion) as that would violate the separation of church & state rather dramatically.

Impeachment should be reserved for serious malfeasance. Nixon, for example, was eminently impeachable, and would have been had he not resigned. For minor issues, there is provision for censure (basically an official reprimand). Had the GOP attempted to censure Clinton for getting the blowjob and saying he didn't, that would have been entirely understandable and I probably would've even supported it, as he DID do wrong. But in no way did his level of wrongdoing rise to the standard necessary for conviction under "High Crimes" for impeachment, and I am glad that sanity prevailed and he was acquitted. It was a witch hunt, plain and simple.

As for Bush, there is no doubt in any reasonable person that a war (even if not officially declared as such) is something significantly more serious than getting a dick sucked. Likewise is directly defying the will of Congress, as expressed in the FISA statute, and claiming extreme levels of unchecked executive power to ignore statute. So, if there was malfeasance and deliberate deception in the leadup to military action, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of our citizens, I believe that would most certainly be a weightier issue than whether or not someone got cum on a dress after oral sex.

Lastly, I don't know about anyone else, but I prefer my politicians to be realists, not Don Quixote-esque useless tilters at windmills, that resulted in bringing effective governance to a screeching halt in the name of dubious principle. How many of those that cried for his head had mistresses of their own? Statistically speaking, the odds are high that many of them did. How many were, at the same time, taking bribes from Abramoff? Or, in the case of Duke Cunningham, taking millions from defense lobbyists? Hypocrisy is hardly a civic virtue. Where then is "principle"?

-Arlos

[Lueyen]

I do not believe that someone saying he didn't get a blowjob is an impeachable offense, sorry. First of all, it's a question that never should have been asked in the first place, and second, he's human, 95% of men who'd done that would do exactly the same thing.

How about lying under oath in a court of law? That's a heck of a precedence, If you don't feel a question you are asked is something that should have been asked then feel free to lie on the stand. I suspect you are right about the 95 percent of men, but I have to say when it comes to the highest office in the land I'd rather have someone from the other 5 percent who has to moral character to tell the truth when they swear an oath to do so, (sure makes you wonder just how serious he took his oath of office). Better yet I'd rather have a president who didn't even have to face the option of lying or divulging adulterous actions in the oval office, but I'm kinda old fashioned that way.

Attempting to impeach based on morality is a very very bad idea to begin with, as the ever-shifting question of WHOSE morality is the basis rears its ugly head. It cannot be Christian morality (nor jewish, nor buddhist, nor any other religion) as that would violate the separation of church & state rather dramatically.

I'm pretty sure most atheists or agnostics would consider extra marital sexual relations while one is at work to be immoral on some level, but quite honestly my point was not that he should have been impeached over immoral acts, it was that the average sane individual, an overwhelming majority of the general populace would consider his relations with Lewinsky and where they took place improper.

Impeachment should be reserved for serious malfeasance. Nixon, for example, was eminently impeachable, and would have been had he not resigned. For minor issues, there is provision for censure (basically an official reprimand). Had the GOP attempted to censure Clinton for getting the blowjob and saying he didn't, that would have been entirely understandable and I probably would've even supported it, as he DID do wrong. But in no way did his level of wrongdoing rise to the standard necessary for conviction under "High Crimes" for impeachment, and I am glad that sanity prevailed and he was acquitted. It was a witch hunt, plain and simple.

Interesting that you should mention Nixon as a comparison. Many of the articles of impeachment drafted against Richard Nixon would apply to Bill Clinton as well here are just a few:

(1) Making or causing to be made false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employes of the United States.

(2) Withholding relevant and material evidence or information from lawfully authorized investigative officers and employes of the United States.

Like Nixon, Clinton also tried to invoke executive privilege, and in no small part due to the precedence from the Nixon case that was shot down.

(8) Making false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States into believing that a thorough and complete investigation has been conducted with respect to allegation of misconduct on the part of personnel of the Executive Branch of the United States and personnel of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, and that there was no involvement of such personnel in such misconduct

The reasons why the actions were taken might be different, but the actions were the same.

Of course there was quite the list on Nixon, and actually quite a few other parallels that can be drawn but for brevities sake in an already long post I'll forgo a discussion of these other areas and stick to just the issue of lying.

As for Bush, there is no doubt in any reasonable person that a war (even if not officially declared as such) is something significantly more serious than getting a dick sucked.

Oh, and for the last time, stop beating the drum, we are *NOT* "at war".

Sorry man I couldn't resist that one.

Likewise is directly defying the will of Congress, as expressed in the FISA statute, and claiming extreme levels of unchecked executive power to ignore statute. So, if there was malfeasance and deliberate deception in the leadup to military action, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of our citizens, I believe that would most certainly be a weightier issue than whether or not someone got cum on a dress after oral sex.

Lastly, I don't know about anyone else, but I prefer my politicians to be realists, not Don Quixote-esque useless tilters at windmills, that resulted in bringing effective governance to a screeching halt in the name of dubious principle. How many of those that cried for his head had mistresses of their own? Statistically speaking, the odds are high that many of them did. How many were, at the same time, taking bribes from Abramoff? Or, in the case of Duke Cunningham, taking millions from defense lobbyists? Hypocrisy is hardly a civic virtue. Where then is "principle"?

-Arlos

I'll tell you what I'll take it a step further for you and concede this: The president lying under oath about a matter of personal action has no where near the gravity of what you charge. Again however I will state, especially with the severity of that charge in light that it is the duty of any member of Congress who believes those charges to be accurate to draft articles of impeachment. And again I'll state it in another way, they haven't because in the end they know it's really just a windmill... err political rhetoric, unlike Don Quixote, deep down they don't really believe their own delusions.

[Arlos]

I am in no way arguing what he did was right. I simply believe that one needs to look at the totality of circumstances involved in order for actual justice to be done. Yes, lying, especially under oath is a Bad Thing. Having an affair with an employee while not involved in an open marriage is likewise immoral and a Bad Thing. For these actions he certainly deserved official censure, which is the mechanism by which relatively minor offenses are dealt with.

Secretly wiretapping political opponents, hiring dirty trickster squads to sabotage campaigns of opponents you would rather not run again (see: Muskie and the Canuck letter), and the like, all of which Nixon WAS guilty of certainly rank much higher on the serious offense scale than an untruth about an act of oral sex. Can we agree on this?

Do not single Clinton out for trying to claim executive privilege in a time of scandal, either. How many times has Bush done so in this presidency? What was the most recent claim, that white house officials are never required to talk to congress under any circumstances, due to executive privilege? (that was from some of the recent transcripts from one of the congressional investigations into the Justice department, I believe it was). Nixon tried to claim executive privilege over the tapes recorded in his office, before the supreme court demanded he turn them over.

Clinton's impeachment never should have happened. Censure, certainly, impeachment, no. Nixon could have and would have been impeached and convicted had he not resigned. Even his staunchest supporters, like Barry Goldwater, were set and ready to convict him after they heard the tapes. As for Bush, if he did what I believe he did, he certainly does merit impeachment. The question is whether or not there is sufficient hard evidence to confirm all of it. There certainly is a great deal of circumstantial evidence for that, as well as incompetency among his appointees, but sufficient direct evidence to convict in a formal legal proceeding, I don't know. Even if there was, this is a very different batch of Republicans than Goldwater was representative of, and I doubt that they would vote to convict, regardless of what evidence there was.

Oh, and as for my comment, do note that I qualified it by confirming that it had never been declared as such. heh. Perhaps I better should have stated, "A time of extended military action resulting in the deaths of thousands of troops and tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians". It would be more accurate and probably more effective as well.

-Arlos

[Lueyen]

There is one glaring difference between the Nixon/Clinton claims of executive privilege and those of Bush is that in Bush's case every time it's been in the context of a refusal to congressional subpoenas and probes. In effect he's invoked it for the reason of it's existence, separation of powers. With Clinton and Nixon it was invoked for the purposes of refusing to divulge information to special prosecutors in a criminal investigation of personal conduct outside of the presidential duties. In short the executive branch can refuse to turn over sensitive information regarding the actions of the president and his subordinates where it involves the execution of the duties of the branch. Executive privilege can not be invoked to protect information pertaining to a criminal investigation regarding activities that were not performed in the course of execution of executive duties.

In short Bush has invoked executive privilege to maintain the separation and balance of powers between the branches of our government. Nixon and Clinton invoked it to try and prevent turning over evidence pertinent to a criminal investigation regarding actions outside the duties of the executive branch. Executive Privilege can be invoked and upheld to protect the office, but not the individual.

Now why is it that there has been no criminal investigation regarding the surveillance program as there was with Nixon and Clinton? It's because at the end of the day the people in a position to do something about it do not act because they realize the actual content of the accusations would not stand up in a court of law, so they try and take it to the court of public opinion, where the qualifications for admissible evidence and "ruling" are far less stringent and easily manipulated.

As far as your last statement and my previous quotes... I do believe I understand where you were coming from on both counts, in that I think I understand the intent even if the statements were seemingly contradictory. We see things from a slightly different angle. I dislike authorizations for use of military force by congress in lieu of a formal declaration of war. I believe Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq (both times), and Korea should all have been formally declared wars. The problem of course with our current enemy is that it is not nation based, and if not written at least the general perception is that a formal declaration of war must include a country as a target. I suspect a great many people would go absolutely ape shit if congress made a formal declaration of war against terrorist organizations granting the president a great deal of latitude and discretion about where troops would be deployed to combat the subjectively defined enemy.

[Evermore]

Lue, the problem with our current "enemy" is that the enemy is an ideology.

[Lyion]

We have plenty of enemies and countries that dislike us. This won't change with a new administration, and their personal ways of dealing with countries with animosity towards us. Also, it isn't solely ideaology. We don't care if people don't like us. What we care about is if they have the capability to do us harm and if there is a good way of preventing that.

The reasons for the Afghanistan and Iraq invasion was the imminent threat that we felt they posed post 9/11, as one had attacked us and one was deemed to be a danger. Most people felt they were a danger, and the invasion was done in a bipartisan accord, even though many Democrats have changed their tune.

Now unfortunately we solely have Bush Derangement Syndrome and overt outright partisan lying to try and score political points which is pretty despicable, but not surprising since to some political power and rhetoric is more important than facts or what's best for the country.

[Evermore]

the basis of terrorism is an ideaology, The "believers" morph it in to physical reality. Leaving out the stupidity the US has subjected them to over the years, if these believers didnt view us as infidels we wouldnt have need to take issue. Honestly thou that culture has been killing themselves for centuries. What made bush think he can step in and solve the issues is beyond me. the fact Bush used rhetoric and lies to justify us invading only adds to the situation. Gas on a fire syndrome?

This, however;

Now unfortunately we solely have Bush Derangement Syndrome and overt outright partisan lying to try and score political points which is pretty despicable, but not surprising since to some political power and rhetoric is more important than facts or what's best for the country.

Is very true. Hell McCain seems to be basing his campaign on the fear factor

[Lyion]

the basis of terrorism is an ideaology, The "believers" morph it in to physical reality. Leaving out the stupidity the US has subjected them to over the years, if these believers didnt view us as infidels we wouldnt have need to take issue. Honestly thou that culture has been killing themselves for centuries. What made bush think he can step in and solve the issues is beyond me. the fact Bush used rhetoric and lies to justify us invading only adds to the situation. Gas on a fire syndrome?

Correct, but terrorism requires money, people, and a place to practice said ideology. It's pretty easy to find these spots in North Africa, Iran, Eastern Pakistan, Sudan, etc, and to see the money trail back to these governments who are supporting and anchoring the Hezbollah's, Hamas', and Al Qaeda's.

Again, saying Bush used lies and rhetoric to enforce the Clinton Doctrine and plans regarding Iraq just really makes me scratch my head and wonder where in the world you get that quote from? The Code Pink website? You can say the Bush administration was incompetent in handling the war, and we'd have mutual agreement, but when you turn it into angst ridden Bush hatred and distort the simple truth then it makes it hard to discuss this.

This, however;

Now unfortunately we solely have Bush Derangement Syndrome and overt outright partisan lying to try and score political points which is pretty despicable, but not surprising since to some political power and rhetoric is more important than facts or what's best for the country.

Is very true. Hell McCain seems to be basing his campaign on the fear factor

Of course. Whether you want to sell yourself based on all American jobs moving to China, or the economy which has been on an upswing for most of the last 6 years, but secretly is terrible, or other forms of class warfare, the whole point of politics is the fear factor.

I prefer people vote based on the fear factor, than in the word's of Hillary, 'Let's just get everybody together. Let's get unified. The sky will open. The light will come down. Celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.'"

[Evermore]

Again, saying Bush used lies and rhetoric to enforce the Clinton Doctrine and plans regarding Iraq just really makes me scratch my head and wonder where in the world you get that quote from? The Code Pink website? You can say the Bush administration was incompetent in handling the war, and we'd have mutual agreement, but when you turn it into angst ridden Bush hatred and distort the simple truth then it makes it hard to discuss this.

I am not sure after all that has been put in the news on this why you seem to insist that Bush told the truth? Clinton Doctrine or not its still lies. He claimed WMD's and none were ever found. Fact was the production of said WMD's was halted in 1991. Invading to halt human rights violations would have been a better and true reason.
See below
http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/

Consider, for example, these false public statements made in the run-up to war:

On August 26, 2002, in an address to the national convention of the Veteran of Foreign Wars, Cheney flatly declared: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." In fact, former CIA Director George Tenet later recalled, Cheney's assertions went well beyond his agency's assessments at the time. Another CIA official, referring to the same speech, told journalist Ron Suskind, "Our reaction was, 'Where is he getting this stuff from?' "

In the closing days of September 2002, with a congressional vote fast approaching on authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, Bush told the nation in his weekly radio address: "The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. . . . This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year." A few days later, similar findings were also included in a much-hurried National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction — an analysis that hadn't been done in years, as the intelligence community had deemed it unnecessary and the White House hadn't requested it.

In July 2002, Rumsfeld had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: "Sure." In fact, an assessment issued that same month by the Defense Intelligence Agency (and confirmed weeks later by CIA Director Tenet) found an absence of "compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda." What's more, an earlier DIA assessment said that "the nature of the regime's relationship with Al Qaeda is unclear."

On May 29, 2003, in an interview with Polish TV, President Bush declared: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." But as journalist Bob Woodward reported in State of Denial, days earlier a team of civilian experts dispatched to examine the two mobile labs found in Iraq had concluded in a field report that the labs were not for biological weapons. The team's final report, completed the following month, concluded that the labs had probably been used to manufacture hydrogen for weather balloons.

On January 28, 2003, in his annual State of the Union address, Bush asserted: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." Two weeks earlier, an analyst with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research sent an email to colleagues in the intelligence community laying out why he believed the uranium-purchase agreement "probably is a hoax."

On February 5, 2003, in an address to the United Nations Security Council, Powell said: "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources." As it turned out, however, two of the main human sources to which Powell referred had provided false information. One was an Iraqi con artist, code-named "Curveball," whom American intelligence officials were dubious about and in fact had never even spoken to. The other was an Al Qaeda detainee, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had reportedly been sent to Eqypt by the CIA and tortured and who later recanted the information he had provided. Libi told the CIA in January 2004 that he had "decided he would fabricate any information interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over to [a foreign government]."

Bush has mishandled the war and frankly has mishandled his whole presidency. We are suffering for it.

[Lyion]

There are no lies or deceptions here, just political games. To counterpoint:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007540

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.

The main "lie" that George W. Bush is accused of telling us is that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD as they have invariably come to be called. From this followed the subsidiary "lie" that Iraq under Saddam's regime posed a two-edged mortal threat. On the one hand, we were informed, there was a distinct (or even "imminent") possibility that Saddam himself would use these weapons against us or our allies; and on the other hand, there was the still more dangerous possibility that he would supply them to terrorists like those who had already attacked us on 9/11 and to whom he was linked.

This entire scenario of purported deceit was given a new lease on life by the indictment in late October of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby stands accused of making false statements to the FBI and of committing perjury in testifying before a grand jury that had been convened to find out who in the Bush administration had "outed" Valerie Plame, a CIA agent married to the retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The supposed purpose of leaking this classified information to the press was to retaliate against Mr. Wilson for having "debunked" (in his words) "the lies that led to war."

Now, as it happens, Mr. Libby was not charged with having outed Ms. Plame but only with having lied about when and from whom he first learned that she worked for the CIA. Moreover, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who brought the indictment against him, made a point of emphasizing that "this indictment is not about the war":

This indictment is not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.

This is simply an indictment that says, in a national-security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person--a person, Mr. Libby--lied or not.

No matter. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, spoke for a host of other opponents of the war in insisting:

This case is bigger than the leak of classified information. It is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the president.

Yet even stipulating--which I do only for the sake of argument--that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Mr. Bush was lying when he asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Mr. Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.

How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was "a slam dunk." This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Mr. Tenet had the backing of all 15 agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with "high confidence" was that "Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions."

The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel and--yes--France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix--who headed the U.N. team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past--lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:

The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km [105 miles] southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.

Mr. Blix now claims that he was only being "cautious" here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration "misled itself" in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.

So, once again, did the British, the French and the Germans, all of whom signed on in advance to Secretary of State Colin Powell's reading of the satellite photos he presented to the U.N. in the period leading up to the invasion. Mr. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, now feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as secretary of state. But Mr. Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lack for company in interpreting the available evidence as it did:

I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can't. I've wrestled with it. [But] when you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical-weapons ASP--Ammunition Supply Point--with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they're there, you have to conclude that it's a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP, and everything is changed, everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [Tenet's deputy] was convinced, that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate.

Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Mr. Wilkerson informs us that even the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as INR, was convinced:

People say, well, INR dissented. That's a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That's all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios.

In explaining its dissent on Iraq's nuclear program, the INR had, as stated in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about:

Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. . . . INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors . . . in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program.

But, according to Wilkerson:

The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by God, we did it to this rpm, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?

In short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, "the consensus of the intelligence community," as Mr. Wilkerson puts it, "was overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.

Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under Clinton. "In the late spring of 2002," Pollack has written:

I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).

No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with "high confidence" was that "Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material." (Hard as it is to believe, let alone to reconcile with his general position, Joseph C. Wilson IV, in a speech he delivered three months after the invasion at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, offhandedly made the following remark: "I remain of the view that we will find biological and chemical weapons and we may well find something that indicates that Saddam's regime maintained an interest in nuclear weapons.")

But the consensus on which Mr. Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Bill Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:

Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.

Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:

He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.

Finally, Mr. Clinton's secretary of defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained "absolutely convinced" of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.

Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Mr. Clinton and his people made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President "to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs."

Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:

Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.

This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Mr. Bush succeeded Mr. Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new president, a group of senators led by Bob Graham declared:

There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.

Sen. Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Mr. Bush's benefit what he had told Mr. Clinton some years earlier:

Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:

There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.

Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush's opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:

We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

And here is Mr. Gore again, in that same year:

Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.

Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:

I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force--if necessary--to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.

Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Mr. Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:

Kennedy: "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."

Byrd: "The last U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons."

Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Times repeatedly insisted that "without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again."

The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was "hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country's salvation."

So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with this admonition:

Of all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous--or more urgent--than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.

All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Mr. Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Mr. Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the 16 resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?

Another fallback charge is that Mr. Bush, operating mainly through Mr. Cheney, somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.

The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission, which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached the same conclusion, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."

Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was ruthless enough to use them, accused Mr. Bush of telling a different sort of lie by characterizing the risk as "imminent." But this, too, is false: Mr. Bush consistently rejected imminence as a justification for war. Thus, in the State of the Union address he delivered only three months after 9/11, Mr. Bush declared that he would "not wait on events while dangers gather" and that he would "not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer." Then, in a speech at West Point six months later, he reiterated the same point: "If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long." And as if that were not clear enough, he went out of his way in his State of the Union address in 2003 (that is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word "imminent" itself precisely in order to repudiate it:

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

What of the related charge that it was still another "lie" to suggest, as Mr. Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its findings were summarized in the mainstream media, the committee's report explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion, as did a comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which pointed to "meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al-Qaeda operatives."

Which brings us to Joseph C. Wilson, IV and what to my mind wins the palm for the most disgraceful instance of all.

The story begins with the notorious 16 words inserted--after, be it noted, much vetting by the CIA and the State Department--into Bush's 2003 State of the Union address:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

This is the "lie" Mr. Wilson bragged of having "debunked" after being sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to check out the intelligence it had received to that effect. Mr. Wilson would later angrily deny that his wife had recommended him for this mission, and would do his best to spread the impression that choosing him had been the vice president's idea. But Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, through whom Mr. Wilson first planted this impression, was eventually forced to admit that "Cheney apparently didn't know that Wilson had been dispatched." (By the time Mr. Kristof grudgingly issued this retraction, Mr. Wilson himself, in characteristically shameless fashion, was denying that he had ever "said the vice president sent me or ordered me sent.") And as for his wife's supposed nonrole in his mission, here is what Valerie Plame Wilson wrote in a memo to her boss at the CIA:

My husband has good relations with the PM [the prime minister of Niger] and the former minister of mines . . ., both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.

More than a year after his return, with the help of Mr. Kristof, and also Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, and then through an op-ed piece in the Times under his own name, Mr. Wilson succeeded, probably beyond his wildest dreams, in setting off a political firestorm.

In response, the White House, no doubt hoping to prevent his allegation about the 16 words from becoming a proxy for the charge that (in Mr. Wilson's latest iteration of it) "lies and disinformation [were] used to justify the invasion of Iraq," eventually acknowledged that the president's statement "did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address." As might have been expected, however, this panicky response served to make things worse rather than better. And yet it was totally unnecessary--for the maddeningly simple reason that every single one of the 16 words at issue was true.

That is, British intelligence had assured the CIA that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from the African country of Niger. Furthermore--and notwithstanding the endlessly repeated assertion that this assurance has now been discredited--Britain's independent Butler commission concluded that it was "well-founded." The relevant passage is worth quoting at length:

a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.

b. The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.

c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium, and the British government did not claim this.

As if that were not enough to settle the matter, Mr. Wilson himself, far from challenging the British report when he was "debriefed" on his return from Niger (although challenging it is what he now never stops doing), actually strengthened the CIA's belief in its accuracy. From the Senate Intelligence Committee report:

He [the CIA reports officer] said he judged that the most important fact in the report [by Mr. Wilson] was that Niger officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Niger prime minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium.

And again:

The report on [Mr. Wilson's] trip to Niger . . . did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original CIA reports on the uranium deal.

This passage goes on to note that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research--which (as we have already seen) did not believe that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons--found support in Mr. Wilson's report for its "assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq." But if so, this, as the Butler report quoted above points out, would not mean that Iraq had not tried to buy it--which was the only claim made by British intelligence and then by Mr. Bush in the famous 16 words.

The liar here, then, was not Mr. Bush but Mr. Wilson. And Mr. Wilson also lied when he told the Washington Post that he had unmasked as forgeries certain documents given to American intelligence (by whom it is not yet clear) that supposedly contained additional evidence of Saddam's efforts to buy uranium from Niger. The documents did indeed turn out to be forgeries; but, according to the Butler report:

The forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine [that assessment].

More damning yet to Mr. Wilson, the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered that he had never laid eyes on the documents in question:

[Mr. Wilson] also told committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article . . . which said, "among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.' " Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports.

To top all this off, just as Mr. Cheney had nothing to do with the choice of Mr. Wilson for the mission to Niger, neither was it true that, as Mr. Wilson "confirmed" for a credulous New Republic reporter, "the CIA circulated [his] report to the Vice President's office," thereby supposedly proving that Cheney and his staff "knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie." Yet--the mind reels--if Mr. Cheney had actually been briefed on Mr. Wilson's oral report to the CIA (which he was not), he would, like the CIA itself, have been more inclined to believe that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.

So much for the author of the best-selling and much-acclaimed book whose title alone--"The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity"--has set a new record for chutzpah.

But there is worse. In his press conference on the indictment against Mr. Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald insisted that lying to federal investigators is a serious crime both because it is itself against the law and because, by sending them on endless wild-goose chases, it constitutes the even more serious crime of obstruction of justice. By those standards, Mr. Wilson--who has repeatedly made false statements about every aspect of his mission to Niger, including whose idea it was to send him and what he told the CIA upon his return; who was then shown up by the Senate Intelligence Committee as having lied about the forged documents; and whose mendacity has sent the whole country into a wild-goose chase after allegations that, the more they are refuted, the more they keep being repeated--is himself an excellent candidate for criminal prosecution.

And so long as we are hunting for liars in this area, let me suggest that we begin with the Democrats now proclaiming that they were duped, and that we then broaden out to all those who in their desperation to delegitimize the larger policy being tested in Iraq--the policy of making the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy--have consistently used distortion, misrepresentation and selective perception to vilify as immoral a bold and noble enterprise and to brand as an ignominious defeat what is proving itself more and more every day to be a victory of American arms and a vindication of American ideals.

[10sun]

I've written many letters about Pres. George W Bush's foul terms. Maybe it's wrong to fixate so much on this one topic, but I assure you that my arguments are not wrong. The points I plan to make in this letter will sound tediously familiar to everyone who wants to help people see Pres. Bush's stultiloquent, sick ballyhoos for what they are. Nevertheless, facts and their accuracy make a story, not the overdramatization of whatever he dreams up. Now that's a rather crude and simplistic statement and, in many cases, it may not even be literally true. But there is a sense in which it is generally true, a sense in which it decidedly expresses how he is absolutely determined to believe that emotionalism is a viable and vital objective for our nation's educational institutions, and he's not about to let facts or reason get in his way. It seems that no one else is telling you that we're still a long way from being able to keep our priorities in check. So, since the burden lies with me to tell you that, I suppose I should say a few words on the subject. To begin with, all Pres. Bush really wants is to hang onto the perks he's getting from the system. That's all he really cares about.

A trip to your local library would reveal that Pres. Bush might force us to bow down low before ridiculous, sex-crazed dummkopfs as soon as our backs are turned. What are we to do then? Place blinders over our eyes and hope we don't see the horrible outcome? The last time I told his deputies that I want to feed the starving, house the homeless, cure the sick, and still find wonder and awe in the sunrise and the moonlight they declared in response, "But you and I are objects for Pres. Bush to use then casually throw away and forget like old newsprint that's performed its duty catching bird droppings." Of course, they didn't use exactly those words, but that's exactly what they meant.

I do not propose a supernatural solution to the problems we're having with Pres. Bush. Instead, I propose a practical, realistic, down-to-earth approach that requires only that I make a cause célèbre out of exposing his rantings for what they really are. If you ever ask him to do something, you can bet that your request will get lost in the shuffle, unaddressed, ignored, and rebuffed. Some of us have an opportunity to come in contact with lubricious nutcases (also known as Pres. Bush's cultists) on a regular basis at work or in school. We, therefore, may be able to gain some insight into the way they think, into their values; we may be able to understand why they want to muster enough force to sully my reputation. It takes more than a mass of malign pikers to catalogue Pres. Bush's swindles and perversions. It takes a great many thoughtful and semi-thoughtful people who are willing to build a true community of spirit and purpose based on mutual respect and caring. Pres. Bush proclaims at every opportunity that his mission is to crush any semblance of opposition to his coprophagous, audacious obloquies. Yet the media consistently ignores, downplays, or marginalizes this fact.

There is no such thing as evil in the abstract. It exists only in the evil deeds of evil people like Pres. Bush. If there's an untold story here, it's that I don't give a hoot in Hell if he opposes my quest to build a world overflowing with compassion and tolerance. Regular readers of my letters probably take that for granted, but if I am to institute change, I must explain to the population at large that if he is going to make an emotional appeal then he should also include a rational argument. Pres. Bush's most steadfast claim is that his activities are on the up-and-up. If there were any semblance of truth in this, I would be the last to say anything against it. As it stands, however, on the issue of metagrobolism, Pres. Bush is wrong again. Sure, it's not fair for him to resort to underhanded tactics. But it would be charitable of me not to mention that Pres. Bush's writings are a treasure trove of ad hominem attacks, inerudite accusations, and biased reporting from a deplorable point of view. Fortunately, I am not beset by a spirit of false charity so I will instead maintain that he can't fool me. I've met uncouth jackanapes before, so I know that heathenism doesn't work. So why does Pres. Bush cling to it? You see, this is a lesson for those with eyes to see. It is a lesson not so much about Pres. Bush's splenetic behavior but about the way that if you don't think that Pres. Bush is -- for lack of a better word -- amoral, then you've missed the whole point of this letter.

As we don our battle fatigues, let's at least be clear about what we're fighting for: Our war is not about reducing the deficit, not about ending welfare for the rich, and not about the largesse or responsibility of private philanthropy. All we want is for Pres. Bush's operatives not to fill the air with recrimination and rancor. Pres. Bush says that anyone who resists him deserves to be crushed. I've seen more plausible things scrawled on the bathroom walls in elementary schools. As he matures emotionally he'll eventually grow out of his present way of thinking and come to realize that his propaganda factories continuously spew forth messages like, "Character development is not a matter of 'strength through adversity' but rather, 'entitlement through victimization'" and, "Truth is whatever your grievance group says it is". What they don't tell you, though, is that when I say that Pres. Bush's smear tactics are careless, I mean it. I don't mean that they remind me of something careless or that they have one or two careless characteristics. I mean that they are careless. In fact, the most careless thing about them is the way that they prevent people from seeing that I'm not writing this letter for your entertainment. I'm not even writing it for your education. I'm writing it for our very survival.

Pres. Bush may be reasonably cunning with words. However, he is thoroughly Pecksniffian with everything else. One could truthfully say that his flunkies believe that those rights and protections which give us voice in a democratic society are the cause of particularism and social chaos and must be thwarted or dismantled. But saying that would miss the real point, which is that while he and other shabby ninnies sometimes differ on the details and scale of their upcoming campaigns of terror they never fail to agree on the basic principle and substance. Hence, it is imperative that you understand that some of the facts I'm about to present may seem shocking. This they certainly are. However, the simple ability to open students' eyes, minds, hearts, and souls to the world around them is a pons asinorum that Pres. Bush may never cross. Disguised in this drollery is an important message: Blackguardism is not merely an attack on our moral fiber. It is also a politically motivated attack on knowledge.

Pres. Bush's actions manifest themselves in two phases. Phase one: infringe upon our most important constitutional rights. Phase two: present a false image to the world by hiding unpleasant but vitally important realities about his revenge fantasies. When one examines the ramifications of letting Pres. Bush impose a narrow theological agenda on secular society, one finds a preponderance of evidence leading to the conclusion that he knows how to lie. It's too bad he doesn't yet understand the ramifications of lying. If I wanted to brainwash and manipulate a large segment of the population, I would convince them that Pres. Bush never engages in oligophrenic, lecherous, or froward politics. In fact, that's exactly what Pres. Bush does as part of his quest to discredit and intimidate the opposition.

If you believe nothing else that I've written about Pres. Bush, you can believe this: Once people obtain the critical skills that enable them to think and reflect and speculate independently, they'll realize that I didn't want to talk about this. I really didn't. But "Pres. Bush" has now become part of my vocabulary. Whenever I see someone pursue a twofold credo of obscurantism and radicalism, I tell him or her to stop "Pres. Bush-ing".

I wish I could say this nicely but I don't have much tolerance for bumptious, fastidious lamebrains: Pres. Bush has a natural talent for complaining. He can find any aspect of life and whine about it for hours upon hours. If he were to put increased disruptive powers in the hands of shrewish parvenus, social upheaval and violence would follow. It is therefore clear that inequality does not beget equality. (The merits of Pres. Bush's convictions won't be discussed here because they lack merit.) Something recently occurred to me that might occur to Pres. Bush, as well, if he would just turn down the volume of his voice for a moment: Every time Pres. Bush utters or writes a statement that supports recidivism -- even indirectly -- it sends a message that Pres. Bush is a man of peace. I certainly assert that we mustn't let him make such statements, partly because he presents quasi-scientific and pseudointellectual justifications for his putrid pronouncements in order to convince people that at birth every living being is assigned a celestial serial number or frequency power spectrum, but primarily because I have frequently criticized his unspoken plan to devalue me as a person. He usually addresses my criticisms by accusing me of autism, exclusivism, child molestation, and halitosis. Pres. Bush hopes that by delegitimizing me this way, no one will listen to me when I say that ignorance is bliss. This may be why Pres. Bush's apologists are generally all smiles.

I want to unify our community. Pres. Bush, in contrast, wants to drive divisive ideological wedges through it. No matter how much talk and analysis occurs, if we do nothing, he will keep on turning the trickle of onanism into a tidal wave. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can draw a picture of what we conceive of under the word "hyperconscientiousness". That's it for this letter. I sincerely hope that typing it was not a complete waste of energy. Unfortunately, I do realize that my words will probably trigger no useful response in the flabby synapses of Pres. George W Bush's brain. I just felt obligated to go through the motions because what I really want from him is an apology.

Spoiler for :

I hope you read all of that because I know I didn't.

[Evermore]

Lyion that whole post leads one to believe that Bush was a victim of his own staff's incompetence and lies. I, for one, cannot believe that he acted in good faith and without true knowledge of the situation. Bush is a buffoon for sure but you seem to be suggesting here a level of incompetence on the level of a hollywood comedy. Just looking at who is profiting by this war is reason enough to doubt his sincerity. If he did act as you are suggesting, then he definatly needs to be impeached. I have no doubt he lied. None. Just the proven fact that there were no WMD's should be enought to raise questions.

As a side note; you might want to refer to a more independent source.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Norman_Podhoretz

[Lyion]

What did he lie about? I'm missing this?

Are you saying Bush knew that there were no WMDS, and that was common knowledge during the run up to the Iraq War?

Did the Clinton administration, congress, the CIA, and others all lie too? Essentially, you're saying all of congress, all of the worlds intelligence agencies, and past administration officials all outright lied and deceived us?

The Senate already debunked Joe Wilson's report, as did the major intel agencies. Wilson most certainly did not tell the truth, however there are zero facts or support for your claims of any Bush deception.

[Evermore]

you mean the agencies that supported and authorzed the war, under false pretenses, debunked these reports? btw there is tons of evidence and support for my assertions.


For arguement's sake and arguement's sake only. Lets say there wasnt any false pretenses. Why then, when learned that none of these WMD's etc actually existing, did we halt operations and begin a pull out? Terrorists?