George W. Bush, Defender of the United States Constitution

a page right of the karl rove playbook... portray yourself as the unequaled champion of the very thing you have worked so hard to destroy...

greenwald...

It's genuinely hard to believe that the writers of George Bush's speech last night to the Federalist Society weren't knowingly satirizing him. They actually had him say this:

When the Founders drafted the Constitution, they had a clear understanding of tyranny. They also had a clear idea about how to prevent it from ever taking root in America. Their solution was to separate the government's powers into three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. Each of these branches plays a vital role in our free society. Each serves as a check on the others. And to preserve our liberty, each must meet its responsibilities -- and resist the temptation to encroach on the powers the Constitution accords to others.

Then they went even further and this came out:

The President's oath of office commits him to do his best to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." I take these words seriously. I believe these words mean what they say.

To top it all off -- by which point they must have been cackling uncontrollably -- they had him say this:

Others take a different view. . . . They forgot that our Constitution lives because we respect it enough to adhere to its words. (Applause.) Ours is the oldest written Constitution in the world. It is the foundation of America's experiment in self-government. And it will continue to live only so long as we continue to recognize its wisdom and division of authority.

and then we have robert parry...

To many Americans who have been aghast at Bush’s six-plus years of trampling the Constitution, such pronouncements might represent a textbook case of “cognitive dissonance,” a psychological term describing the uncomfortable tension when one’s stated principles are at odds with one’s actions.

For Bush, however, this divergence of words from behavior may be closer to the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, when the monarch strutted about in invisible garments while his terrified subjects kept quiet about his nakedness.

In this case, the Washington press corps reported on Bush’s speech as if the President were entirely sincere and left out contradictory facts.

parry, in his usual fine fashion, goes on to define the tactic bush used in his speech, a tactic i will forever associate with karl rove...

In a broader sense, Bush’s Nov. 15 speech reflected what has been a core rhetorical device of the modern American Right, the clever use of cognitive dissonance – the confident assertion of positions that fly in the face of reality.

[...]

Bush has proved to be a master of this technique because he shows even fewer scrupples than the average politician in making claims that are at clear variance with the truth.

For instance, in his last two addresses to the United Nations General Assembly, Bush has hailed the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights although its tenets are in contradiction of his claims that he can kill, kidnap, detain, torture and spy on anyone of his choosing anywhere in the world.

Nevertheless, Bush displayed a well-founded confidence that the U.S. press corps wouldn’t challenge him on these obvious hypocrisies – and he was right. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush to World: Up Is Down.”]

Indeed, one of the most successful features of Bush’s presidency may be his ability to exploit cognitive dissonance to avoid accountability for his actions. While Bush doesn’t blush when his actions belie his words, the American political system can’t seem to cope, incapable of either reconciling Bush’s dishonesty or enforcing any accountability upon him.

god, what a loser... i simply don't know how our country is going to survive with this man at the helm and, worse, if the mechanisms of unfettered executive power that he has put in place aren't dismantled and rendered inoperative by the time the next president takes the oath of office on 20 january 2009...

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