A book report in today’s Post reviews The Lies of George Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception.
George Washington, at least according to Parson Weems, never told a lie. Subsequent presidents, as David Corn admits, have not always lived up to his standard. In a rich gallery of examples, we remember Lyndon Johnson (the Gulf of Tonkin), Richard Nixon (“I am not a crook”), Ronald Reagan (“I did not trade arms for hostages”), George H.W. Bush (“Read my lips: no new taxes”) and, of course, Bill Clinton (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman”).
It is Corn’s contention, however, that George W. Bush not only knows how to lie but has done it on a grander scale, deliberately, systematically and to good effect, ever since he entered politics, and before that, too. “George Bush is a liar,” he begins. “He has lied large and small. He has lied directly and by omission. He has misstated facts, knowingly or not. He has misled. He has broken promises, been unfaithful to political vows. Through his campaign for the presidency and his first years in the White House, he has mugged the truth — not merely in honest error, but deliberately, consistently, and repeatedly to advance his career and his agenda.”
The book lists such untruths as:
On the home front, the president has systematically advocated tax cuts as if they would make a real difference to broad swaths of the American people. In reality, as Corn and many others have shown, their benefits will go overwhelmingly to a small percentage at the top of the economic tree. For example, the proposed tax cuts would give more than $93,000 to a family with a million-dollar income, while half of all taxpayers would receive $100 or less. According to the Financial Times, the stimulus the cuts can be expected to give to the economy would be “negligible.” When this is pointed out, the president and his men mutter reflexively about “class war.”
In individual cases, Bush’s misrepresentation of the impact of legislation verges on the absurd. For example, he boasted that he would “eliminate the death tax” (the Republican phrase for estate tax) “to keep family farms in the family.” The picture is of weeping towheaded kids evicted by agents of an unfeeling bureaucracy from crimson-painted homesteads amid the cottonwoods. But under current laws a farm couple can pass on a farm worth more than $4 million untaxed if their heirs continue to work it for 10 years. The IRS states that “almost no working farmers” owe any estate tax. Even such a farmer-friendly outfit as the American Farm Bureau cannot cite a single example of a farm sold because of estate tax. Politics, not agrarian distress, lay behind this myth.
… More generally, the president and key officials in his administration have shuffled and equivocated in almost all they have said about the decision to invade Iraq. It is clear that decision was taken long before Sept. 11, 2001. It seems to have been taken not because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (as it now appears he did not, at least when the war began) or because he might pass them to al Qaeda (with whom he was on the worst of terms), or even because he was a vicious tyrant — that, after all, had not stopped the United States from tilting toward him in 1983 — but to fit in with what looks like a naive neoconservative dream that war in Iraq would produce a peaceful, democratic Middle East.
The review concludes with an indictment of the culture of lies — and the “journalistic” book industry that has sprung up to exploit it. It’s only to be expected as a backlash to the constant control of message and information that the people in power have learned to exert.
