It matters little how many other people believed, or did not believe, that Saddam had nasty stuff. They didn’t pull the trigger. The responsibility is not distributed, it rests with him. He had access to all the available information, available information that demanded the acceptance of a credible doubt. He ignored that doubt. He told us he was right to do so, that is duty as president demanded it. It was not true.
No one else bears the same reponsibility to go the extra mile, to be certain of one’s facts. This is true of any presidential function, but moving the nation to war is the gravest of all such functions. It is, literally, life and death. For thousands.
Every move the President makes is a statement, it reflects on his oath of office. Whether or not he precisely said "I am entirely certain about this " (point of fact, I think he did…) is only of interest to those who would fashion a defense from the sophistic parsing of words. It does not depend on the meaning of “lie”. By leading us to war under false and misleading premises makes a triviality of “lie”.
And don’t forget, the man himself said that he never made a mistake–oops, sorry, that is not quite accurate. He said that he couldn’t recall any mistakes–not a one.
He is amazing! To never set a foot wrong–no wonder folks support him…
Yes, he said those things. Now show that they are lies, as opposed to huge mistakes.
And answer me this, too: since Hillary Clinton also stated that Iraq had WMD, and supported the invasion of Iraq, is she a liar, too?
In my book, no. She was just as wrong as George Bush.
brickbacon: You’ve made the most intelligent point in the last three pages of this thread. However, I’m not inclined to call someone a liar because they do not lay out every part of an issue. If, for all this energy and heat being generated here, someone cannot point out clear cases of Bush saying “X”, but knowing “not X,” then I think the liar label doesn’t stick well.
There is a slight difference. George Bush knew exactly how reliable the information was, and chose to go along with it (it was spoon fed to a willing Bush by Chalabi). Hillary knew there was evidence, and made her statements. She didn’t make a motion to invade Iraq based on it.
So your suggestion that “the man himself said he never made a mistake” isn’t just “not quite accurate,” it’s the exact opposite of what actually happened.
This tactic of pouncing on word choice and other minor details and trying to twist them far enough to make it look like there might not have been any intentional dishonesty doesn’t seem likely to convince to many people.
According to this article , we have: “Bush just signed the Medicare measure into law last month. While it was moving through Congress, Bush, White House officials and congressional Republican leaders had assured doubting conservatives that the bill’s costs would stay within the $400 billion estimate.” That takes care of points one and two. On point three, a 17 billion dollar difference doesn’t matter. The issue, for this thread anyway, is whether Bush lied about the accuracy of the 400 billion figure. He said it was true when he knew it wasn’t true. On point four, there was a controversy at the time of the vote as to the cost. There was some evidence supporting both sides of the controversy, Bush as his pals withheld an estimate, by threat of firing, that would have alerted some conservatives to the fact that the higher figure, not the lower, was the truthful one. On point six, try here . Note that Congressional Pubs themselves accuse their leader of “lying through his teeth” on this one. Point five isn’t relevant to the question of Bush’s honesty. The threat accomplished the purpose of making the guy stay quiet until the vote was through; after that there wouldn’t be any reason to fire him.
Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, even France all believed that lower figure was the truth. George Tenet assured him it was (who was a Clinton appointee…not suggesting sabotage, but you can draw your own conclusions…) There were credible reports from British Intelligence that the lower figure was the truth.
So really, it was all just an honest mistake. Could happen to anyone.
But there were only 2,820,000 hits - and they were about stupid things like war, national security, etc. That’s small potatoes, obviously, to the ‘most powerful man in the world’.
I really don’t understand why the American people aren’t crying out for his impeachment.
Honest to God, people. We have done this to death. We have used the word “lie” and every euphemism and variant on the idea. When Bush was elected in 2000 I said to myself that we were going to have to put up with a center rightist government that might just put the breaks on the radicals in Congress. I remembered his father. What I had no appreciation of is the lengths these people were willing to go to obtain and retain power and the objects of their ambitions to power.
This government in the pursuit of its objectives, from the take over of Iraq, to the reduction of the tax burden on the wealthy, to the evisceration of the social security system, to the elimination of environmental restraint on business, to the imposition of restraints on access to the courts, to the curtailment of competitive forces, to pandering to social puritans, to generally comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted has followed a Chicken Little policy.
It is not that the President and his government lies. It is that the President and his government does not care what the truth is. We have now been subjected to four years of special pleading, manipulation of factoids, part truth, conjecture presented a verity, suppression of dissenting views, evasion of responsibility and deliberate and calculated misrepresentation. Any one who does not realize that is just not paying attention or is so invested in this bunch of happy warriors as not to be capable of paying attention.
Don’t tell me that the President really and sincerely did not appreciate that it was an acorn not the sky that was falling. If the President had bothered to look he would have known it was an acorn. However, it served the President’s purposes to think and say that the sky was falling. This is government by deception. This is outcome based analysis.
You my put lipstick and a calico dress on a pig and call it Florence but it is still a pig. I ain’t buying it.
What about inaccurately portraying the content of an article? Will that convince lots of people?
The differences between your story and your cite that I pointed out were not minor details. They go to the crux of your claim that the White House lied about anything.
So let me see if I’ve got this straight – cite to Fox News = bad (bringing about calls of “Faux News,” etc.); cite to Capital Hill Blues (site motto: “Nobody’s life liberty or property is safe while Congress is in session”) = A-OK.
Come on! Let’s try and maintain some semblance of objectivity here. Surely we can do better than citing to an anti-government blog. And keep in mind that your cite is to the author’s characterization of events. The author has not provided us with any details or quotes regarding what the admin actually did, which would allow us to make up our own minds; he’s just characterizing what they did, and hoping that we mindlessly accept that. Your 2nd cite is to a blog that quotes Capital Hill Blues. So it’s no better.
Well, now they just had indications that the number may be higher. And they shared those indications with “select lawmakers” long before the White House came out with its own estimate.
It’s also kind of silly to characterize the White House’s estimates (especially their preliminary estimates) as the “true” number. First, it appears that the White House didn’t form an opinion until after the bill was passed. Moreover, it appears that the CBO is standing by their conclusion that the bill will cost $395 billion. The article even goes into the myriad reasons for why there might be such significant differences in the estimates, meaning that neither figure is “true.”
And let’s take a look at what the Bush admin supposedly did that was wrong:
“Hide the ball” implies that they didn’t share all facts with everyone; lying would mean that they misrepresented those facts. Nobody (credible) appears to be contending that the admin lied about anything.
I’ll leave the rest out to save the hamsters, but suffice it that there are 4 rather large problems with your assertion that Bush was lying about the lower figure: 1) it doesn’t look like Bush ever represented that the lower figure was the correct one; 2) it’s impossible for Bush to know that the lower figure was incorrect; 3) it doesn’t look like Bush ever had knowledge that the higher figure was the correct one; and 4) Bush shared the higher figure with some lawmakers, and other lawmakers knew about it.
Despite the provacative opening statement of the database you loinked to,
I decided to overlook it and see what they had.
I chose the obvious selections in the database.
Topic: Iraq - Al Qaeda Links
Speaker: Bush, George - President
Now remember that the database is there to point out dishonesty comparable to the truth.
Dishonesty, to me, is to lack sincerity or what you know to be truthfulness, or to lie and intintionally decieve.
Pretty compelling isn’t it? I even checked the source links and sure enough, everythign quoted there is pretty much verbatim. SO why would he out right lie like that? What woudl make him say such. What was his references? Of course the meme complex of the site forbade it to supply such links directly.
Seems they say they get their information from things like defectors, detainees, and Intelligence services. Seeing as how the President cannot verify every peice of information he gets personally, how else is he to get such information on an inaccessible regime? So where is the blatant dishonesty?
If the terrorists were in Northern Iraq, then that would make (2) true. But it seems that the database you linked to wants to infer that Bush was refering to Saddam being linked to 9/11 only. Who is being dishonest on that point?
Afetr ferreting out those first two sophisms, I gave up on thinking maybe the database listed had an agenda but the facts may speak for themselves. They did. Try again.
There is one point of view that the President’s exaggeration was trivial.
It follows, in this point of view, that rather than a lie, what the President committed was allowable exaggeration. This is specious. It bears repeating why:
2 Policy options on the table:
Violent Invasion; or
Continued Weapons Inspections.
Had the President dispassionately presented the evidence known to him, in all its heavily caveated glory, what would the result have been?
Puffs, I’m not sure what you’re getting at, but we been through most of this in agonizing detail. The camp “in northern Iraq” was in the section of Iraq not under Saddam’s control. Technically, it was in Iraq proper, but in what you might think of as “rebel held” territory. They were not pals.
Most of the dishonesty foisted upon us by the Bushiviks took the form of innuendo and insinuation, leaving a bit of room for deniability. Cheney carried the ball mostly when it came to outright bullshitting, except for Colin Powells festival of crapola celebrated at the UN two years back. Aside from corrrectly identifying the assembled members, not one word…repeat, not one word!..of his subsequent presentation has been corraborated. It was, as the French say, le croque du merde.
Now we have people here who want to believe that deliberately misleading by insinuation and suggestion is not the same as lying. They are welcome to that, as they are clearly beyond convincing anyway. If the Finger of God pointed GeeDubya out and the skies boomed out “Lying Sack of Shit!”, they would wonder how the liberals subverted Jehovah.
I think the quote I posted from Powell says just that.
Now that is a lie. It’s not misleading, or aform of innuendo and insinuation, leaving a bit of room for deniability. Not one word!? Shall I directly link much that was corraborated? Allot hasn’t been, true. But you saying not one word! as if it was all pulled out of the Administrations ass is what makes all of you wolf cryers so damn hard to even empathise with.
Intelligence services and defectors and such is where they got their information. The whole world was on the same page. They corraborated each other findings. You tell me how Bush was being dishonest, as my orginal post was replying to, when the entire world’s intellence confirmed his statements? Soe of the intellegence was wring, yes. But not all of it. Some people may have deliberately misled and others definately lied in reports and such, but you cannot prove Bush or anyone was anything but duped in those occassions.
You people want everyone to believe as you. He is a big liar and all he does is lie. YOu can’t prove the lies, but those are the conclusions you are happy with. Thats fine. Many people believe Bush honestly felt the threat was real. They feel that under that percieved threat he did the right thing. Without evidence of him being a liar, and just innuendos and accusations, you can yell LIAR all you want. Its what you believe, thats fine. Doesn’t ake it fact. But what is so mind boggling as that you people have the audacity to be outraged others don’t have the same bias and political preferences as you to come to same unproven conclusion.
Get over yourselves. You are apparently in the minority. ANd if you want to accuse of hypocracy, where is the database of all of the liberal lies that have gone on?
It is hardly worth mentioning that Intelligence services the world over have been haemorraging people since day 1, each of whom have declared that their intelligence doesn’t say anything like what Mr Bush so forcefully asserted.