"The recall provision was created to get rid of governors guilty of malfeasance - not so malfeasers could put themselves into office."

- Chris Lehane, a Gray Davis recall adviser

By: Paul Krugman  

I used to be a great admirer of Mr. Greenspan. But something has gone very wrong with the maestro.

His testimony last week was surprising on several counts. There is very little evidence in the data for a strong recovery ready to break out. As far as I can make out, Mr. Greenspan's optimism is entirely based on models predicting that tax cuts and low interest rates will get the economy moving. But that's what the models said last year too: the report that accompanied his July 2002 testimony predicted an unemployment rate of 5.25 to 5.5% by late 2003 (the rate is now 6.4%). Maybe tax cuts mainly for the affluent aren't as effective as the models say.

Let's not forget that back in 2001, Mr. Greenspan lent crucial political aid to the first Bush tax cut, arguing that such a cut was necessary to prevent, yes, excessive budget surpluses and too rapid a payoff of the federal government's debt. He should have known better - it wasn't hard, even then, to figure out that those huge projected surpluses were largely fantasy. But he tied himself in knots to find a way to give his political friends what they wanted.

"Ronnie always liked to be high."

- Nancy Reagan, on C-SPAN, Dec. 17, 1999

By: Stephen Crockett and Al Lawrence  

Outright lies are not uncommon or unimportant. Distortions in language and reframing debate in order to avoid real issues are both fairly common. False national security claims and secrecy helps the Bush Republicans deceive the public by denying information to our citizens that they need to make correct political decisions. Controlling the timing of the release of information is one of the most widely used "deceit" tactics.

The 9-11 ties and WMD threats promoted by the Bush White House and Vice President Cheney seem to be outright lies according to worldwide media reports. The campaign promises by George W. Bush that tax cuts would only come after paying down the national debt and after fully funding our unmet domestic needs of the American people certainly seems to be outright lies. Assurances that the extreme powers of the US Patriot Act would only be used to combat terrorism seem to be untrue.

"I think the burden is on those people who think [Saddam] didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are."

- Ari Fleischer

By: J.G. Schwam  

It's the newly coined art of the Re-Spin. If the first spin doesn't float well then all you have do is re-spin it. Simply determine that old intelligence can now be dug up, re-hashed, reassessed, and re-spun.

What great new concept this is. It means that you don't to really have to do any hard work. All you have to do is brush the dust of last year's work, or the year before and say that you've decided that this old data has re-emerged as a newly enhanced cause for concern. It's even better than just lying. In fact it makes lying obsolete. It's no longer a lie it's still true. It is just a newly renewed reassessment of old evidence. Good old obfuscation and mendacity will never be the same. Among it's other accomplishments the Bush administration has solved the age-old political problem of how to lie without having to recant mendacious or exaggerated prior statements thus allaying any concern of getting caught in a lie.

By: William Rivers Pitt  

Bush and the White House told the American people over and over again that Iraq was in possession of vast stockpiles of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Bush and the White House said over and over again that this was a direct threat to the United States. Bush and the White House told the American people over and over again that Iraq was directly connected to al Qaeda terrorism, and would hand those terrible weapons over to the terrorists the first chance they got. Bush and the White House told Congress the same thing. Very deliberately, Bush and the White House tied a war in Iraq to the attack of September 11.

It was all a lie. All of it.

The Bush administration knew full well that their evidence was worthless, and still stood before the American people and told them it was fact. Bush sent the Director of the CIA to the Senate under orders to use the same worthless evidence to cajole that body into war.

That is not being "incorrect". That is lying. In the context of Bush's position as President, and surrounded by hundreds of dead American soldiers piled alongside thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, that is a crime.

They know it too.

By: Joseph Arrieta  

Just two and a half years into Bush's term the United States is greatly weakened, its voice effectively muted and its democracy vastly more vulnerable than it was in 2000.

Consumption of disgracefully sycophantic United States journalism would leave the average American completely unaware of current American feebleness. Are we not the biggest bad-asses on the planet? Don't ICBM's, aircraft carriers, troops with night vision, and invisible bombers that span the globe with one refueling abound?

All very true. Yet with all that amazing technology, why is Iraq quickly sliding into a state of anarchy, violence, and death? Why hasn't one spent nuclear fuel storage pool been secured against an airplane attack? Why is the Taliban back in the game in Afghanistan? Why are gas prices still so high? Why aren't more Americans employed?

"This week, on July 6, George W. Bush turned 57. William White was born the same day in 1946. I mention this because, if you're old enough, you'd remember that young men were drafted for Vietnam based on a grim lottery - if your birthday was picked out of a hat, you went. I got White's name off a black wall in Washington. He went to Vietnam when George W went to the Air Guard in Houston. White never came back. Happy birthday, Mr. President."

- Greg Palast, from this article (see excerpt below)

By: Greg Palast  

BBC thought it worth a look into our Commander-in-Chief's Vietnam war record after the White House staged our President's dramatic landing by fighter jet on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abe Lincoln to announce our victory over Iraq. Hey, Churchill never did that. (And kudos to Tom Brokaw and the other U.S. network performers for maintaining their patriotically solemn expressions - even when our President, unlike experienced flyers, kept his parachute clips fastened under his crotch, making him look a little less like Tom Cruise and more like that first chimp in space.)

In 1968, to qualify for the single available pilot spot in the Air Guard, young George took a test. He scored, out of a possible 100, only 25. (Word is that the chimp scored 26.) How then, did our future President - opponent of affirmative action, who believes no one should get their post except through merit - leap over thousands of other applicants and cinch the get-out-of-'Nam post?

Here's what you won't see on U.S. TV...

"It never occurs to the media whores to point out that when an unqualified, incompetent, callow, yet self-certain election thief is installed into office - one who, despite the mythology, has never exhibited any sign of honor, dignity, trustworthiness, or character - a country ends up with a liar and an embarrassment who runs its economy into the ground, discredits the nation around the world, and gets hundreds (and counting) of its sons and daughters murdered in unnecessary 'wars'."

- MWO

By: Tucker Lelykoff  

While a reader interested in a historical accounting of the various legal and political battles that plagued the Clinton administration in the 90's might deem Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars a good place to begin his search for insight and information about the geneses and progression of the seemingly endless scandals and pseudo-scandals of that tumultuous era - he will soon discover that the 800-page tome is nothing more than a collection of facts, names, background, and anecdotes that paint a grim picture of the culprits and actions behind a series of what are, admittedly but not so importantly, extreme abuses of power and violations of privacy committed by President Clinton's political enemies.

In truth, anyone who picks up Mr. Blumenthal's 800-page book expecting to read an insider's historical account of how a President and his supporters defeated his determined and powerful political opponents will be in for a grave disappointment. Instead, that unsuspecting reader will find 800 long pages of a White House advisor's impressions and narration of events he witnessed as a member of the Clintons' inner circle during the old, tired political battles of the 1990's.

"We now know that the administration went to war without a thorough plan to win the peace. It is time to face that truth and to change course - to share the post-war burden internationally - for the sake of our country, for our standing in the world, and most of all for the young Americans in uniform who cannot be protected from enemy attack by an announcement, no matter how well staged, that hostilities are over."

- Sen. John F. Kerry, (D-MA)

Editorial from:  

President Bush made the Iraq-uranium connection in his State of the Union speech laying out his case for going to war. It was an explosive revelation that made Americans worry that Saddam Hussein might be closer to getting the Bomb than we had previously suspected. The polls reflected that support for the war grew after the President's speech, and we all know what happened next.

Now we learn that the very intelligence agencies Mr. Bush cited as the source of his information had serious doubts about it and were shocked to hear the President recite it as fact. And along comes one Joseph C. Wilson IV, the man the Central Intelligence Agency, at the behest of Vice President Dick Cheney, sent to the central African nation of Niger to check out these Iraq-uranium reports, to say that he found no evidence to support them and that he told his handlers at the CIA so when he got back. He says he also told officials in the State Department and in the Vice President's office.

The White House makes the incredible claim that Mr. Cheney never heard of Mr. Wilson's mission until he read of it in the papers. Presumably, the Vice President is also reading in the papers that the intelligence community accuses the White House of making inflated claims about Iraq's much-rumored chemical and biological weapons program.

  Bush Knew Iraq Info Was False  

By: David Martin  

Senior administration officials tell CBS News the President's mistaken claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa was included in his State of the Union address - despite objections from the CIA.

CIA officials warned members of the President's National Security Council staff the intelligence was not good enough to make the flat statement Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa.

The White House officials responded that a paper issued by the British government contained the unequivocal assertion: "Iraq has... sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." As long as the statement was attributed to British Intelligence, the White House officials argued, it would be factually accurate. The CIA officials dropped their objections and that's how it was delivered.

By: Dick Meyer  

Before there was WMD-Gate, before we became experts on nonexistent uranium from Niger and the kinds of aluminum tubes needed to make nukes, our intelligence wizards faced a much simpler and scarier question: Could 9/11 have been prevented?

The White House never wanted an independent commission established to answer that question. Calls for a heavyweight inquest came from both parties. The administration fought the bad fight and eventually lost. Thankfully.

And you haven't heard much about the 9/11 Commission since. The deadline for its final report: May 2004, nearly three years after 9/11/01.

Now the 9/11 Commission has made some real news and it's not good. In its first Interim Report, Kean and Hamilton warned that the commission is not getting the cooperation it needs from the executive branch (surprise, surprise). The report was especially critical of John Ashcroft's Justice Department (surprise, surprise) and the Pentagon.

"To put it plainly, Rumsfeld treats people like crap. Working for him is like working for Leona Helmsley, except that Leona is less self-centered. Unless you are one of his sycophants, equipped with a good set of knee-pads and plenty of lip balm, you can expect to be booted down the stairs on a regular basis... [S]ome senior officers deserve to be treated that way, because that is how they always treated their subordinates. But Rummy does not discriminate between perfumed princes and the real thinkers and leaders."

- William S. Lind, Military.com columnist, on the Secretary of Defense's leadership style

From:  

The number of Americans claiming jobless benefits late last month hit its highest in more than 20 years, the government said on Thursday in a report underscoring persistent weakness in U.S. labor markets.

The number of idled workers on the benefit rolls jumped by 87,000 in the week ended June 28 to 3.82 million, the highest level since Feb. 1983, the Labor Department said.

By: Jay Bookman  

Contrary to what the President told the American people, the Iraqi government had not recently attempted to acquire uranium from Africa. But that false assertion was fundamental to backing the President's larger claim that Iraq posed a nuclear threat to the United States, which we now know it did not.

The Bush administration's subsequent handling of the issue has served to compound suspicion. It had earlier tried to defend the President's statement by suggesting that it was also backed by some unspecified evidence in addition to the forgeries, a line it abandoned only this week. Even then it did so grudgingly, only after it had been cornered by Wilson's decision to go public.

Furthermore, it seems rather odd that the administration has demonstrated no curiosity whatsoever about how such a misleading statement could have made its way into such an important speech. If the CIA knew that the documents were frauds but failed to share that data with the White House, Bush officials ought to be outraged by that incompetence and should be scrambling to trace exactly how such an embarrassment could have occurred. But they are not.

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