Bush kicks off 2006 with more lies

robert parry at consortium news kicks off his own 2006 by continuing to stay focused on the truth that george w. bush seems determined to skirt at all costs...

George W. Bush’s dysfunctional relationship with the truth seems to be shaped by two complementary factors – a personal compulsion to say whatever makes him look good at that moment and a permissive environment that rarely holds him accountable for his lies.

How else to explain his endless attempts to rewrite history and reshape his own statements, a pattern on display again in his New Year’s Day comments to reporters in San Antonio, Texas? In that session, as Bush denied misleading the public, he twice again misled the public.

Bush launched into a defense of his honesty by denying that he lied when he told a crowd in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2004 that “by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires – a wiretap requires a court order.”

Two years earlier, Bush had approved rules that freed the National Security Agency to use warrantless wiretaps on communications originating in the United States without a court order. But Bush still told the Buffalo audience, “Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.”

On New Year’s Day 2006, Bush sought to explain those misleading comments by contending. “I was talking about roving wiretaps, I believe, involved in the Patriot Act. This is different from the N.S.A. program.”

However, the context of Bush’s 2004 statement was clear. He broke away from a discussion of the USA Patriot Act to note “by the way” that “any time” a wiretap is needed a court order must be obtained. He was not confining his remarks to “roving wiretaps” under the Patriot Act.

In his New Year's Day remarks, Bush further misled the public, by insisting that his warrantless wiretaps only involved communications from suspicious individuals abroad who were contacting people in the United States, a policy that would be legal. Bush said the eavesdropping was “limited to calls from outside the United States to calls within the United States.”

all of that's bad enough but here's the really ugly, viciously manipulative part...

[A]t a crucial political juncture – before the Nov. 2, 2004, election – the Bush administration kept its secret wiretapping operation under wraps by misleading senior editors of the New York Times. The Times, which had been fooled about Iraq’s WMD, was fooled again.

This tendency to always give George W. Bush the benefit of every doubt raises serious questions about the health of American democracy, which holds that no man is above the law. It’s also hard to imagine any other recent president getting away with so much deception and paying so little price.

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