Jabs and Hooks

The Bush Administration are, collectively, a team of trust-busters, but not in the sense of breaking up monopolies (which they encourage in every way they can) but in the way that they have shamelessly manipulated the populace with lies and misinformation, taking cynical advantage of the vast reservoir of patriotism and respect for the presidency that the average citizen has.

What we had in 2000 was very much like a bloodless coup, bringing in a new leadership group under starkly false pretenses (compassionate conservatism, protecting the budget surplus and the environment, etc.) which then proceeded to fail miserably on all fronts, from protecting the country from attack to keeping the budget balanced.

They also, under the falsest of pretenses, put us in a nasty foreign war without a semblance of a sensible plan to extricate ourselves. But, owing to the one thing they do accomplish better than any administration in history -- manipulating the truth and people’s emotions -– they got re-elected.

An Iraqi man who met George W. Bush during a State Department function a scant six weeks before the war started (and a year or two after it was decided by Bush’s team that they would attack that nation) was shocked that he had to explain to our president the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, and what their religious and political backgrounds were.

Lying on the record and in speeches about our intentions for going to war in Iraq, the presence of WMDs in that country, and everything else during the run-up to our engagement there, was at least 100 million times worse than Bill Clinton’s sneaky dissembling about Monica Lewinsky. So why no Special Prosecutor? Why no talk, other than from the indefatigable Molly Ivins, of impeachment? Why is this man still the president?