The Pinocchio Presidency

Yesterday's release of footage from a secure tele-conference between FEMA director Brown, Secretary Chertoff, President Bush and others, held as hurricane Katrina approached the Gulf Coast, is a chilling and disgusting reminder of how tragically the Feds mismanaged the disaster. Among other things, all three were clearly warned of the certainty of the destruction and the likelihood of the levees breaking.

It also adds yet more damning weight to the assertion that the President is a bold-faced liar. When interviewed after the hurricane, he famously responded “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” Which we know now to be a dishonest, brazen deception. When he said it, nothing in his body-language or demeanor suggested any hesitation or confusion about this forceful assertion, and later attempts to re-spin it seem nothing more than ridiculous, demeaning attempts to get out of a lie.

There’s more.

The President stated in January 2005 that “Torture is never acceptable nor do we hand people over to countries that do torture.” Yet as subsequent evidence demonstrated, the Bush Administration made “rendition” a regular part of its terrorism playbook long before 2005--facts that remain uncontested. At a minimum, dozens of suspects were turned over to various brutal third-world governments for the express purpose of gaining intelligence through torture. So his January statement was another clear and bold-faced lie. It sounded virtuous and made for excellent public relations, but it could only have been a cold, calculated lie.

And when the President spoke in April of 2004 about wiretapping, stating that “a wiretap requires a court order” and thus implying that the legal procedure had not been circumvented by him, he knew that his own administration had already been wiretapping Americans without court oversight. His statement was boldly disingenuous and misleading, he surely must have known it was false, and thus, another instance of a lying President.

When pundits ask why the President’s approval ratings have dropped to an all-time low of 34%, perhaps it is because the public no longer sees Bush as an earnest, warm-hearted straight-talker, but rather as a cold, calculating liar. The media use words like dissembling, partisan and half-truth because they are afraid to accurately describe what the American people recognize in their hearts--that Bush and his bunch have been clearly and constantly lying. No, they are not the first politicians to lie. But from the start, they spewed so much rhetoric about their morals, their virtues, their values, that the hypocrisy is that much more intense, that much more a betrayal.

Bush is a liar. His Presidency is full of lies. And that’s the straight truth.