Welcome to trollville.  You are one of the mentally insane that need to be
locked up to keep you away from the normal people.  I'd like to see you point
to some evidence to back up your mental illness.

No, it's his own buisiness, and that of his wife.  End of story.
<snip>

No, you're just another sad example of the ignorant sheeple that
follow this clod.

Suck on this, if you even have the vocabulary to understand it, which
I seriosuly doubt:

The Other Lies of George Bush
by David Corn

George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small, directly and by
omission. His Iraq lies have loomed largest. In the run-up to the
invasion, Bush based his case for war on a variety of unfounded claims
that extended far beyond his controversial uranium-from-Niger
assertion. He maintained that Saddam Hussein possessed "a massive
stockpile" of unconventional weapons and was directly "dealing" with
Al Qaeda--two suppositions unsupported then (or now) by the available
evidence. He said the International Atomic Energy Agency had produced
a report in 1998 noting that Iraq was six months from developing a
nuclear weapon; no such report existed (and the IAEA had actually
reported then that there was no indication Iraq had the ability to
produce weapons-grade material). Bush asserted that Iraq was
"harboring a terrorist network, headed by a senior Al Qaeda terrorist
planner"; US intelligence officials told reporters this terrorist was
operating ouside of Al Qaeda control. And two days before launching
the war, Bush said, "Intelligence gathered by this and other
governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess
and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Yet former
deputy CIA director Richard Kerr, who is conducting a review of the
prewar intelligence, has said that intelligence was full of qualifiers
and caveats, and based on circumstantial and inferential evidence.
That is, it was not no-doubt stuff. And after the major fighting was
done, Bush declared, "We found the weapons of mass destruction." But
he could only point to two tractor-trailers that the CIA and the
Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded were mobile bioweapons labs.
Other experts--including the DIA's own engineering experts--disagreed
with this finding.

But Bush's truth-defying crusade for war did not mark a shift for him.
Throughout his campaign for the presidency and his years in the White
House, Bush has mugged the truth in many other areas to advance his
agenda. Lying has been one of the essential tools of his presidency.
To call the forty-third President of the United States a prevaricator
is not an exercise of opinion, not an inflammatory talk-radio device.
Rather, it is backed up by an all-too-extensive record of self-serving
falsifications. While politicians are often derided as liars, this
charge should be particularly stinging for Bush. During the campaign
of 2000, he pitched himself as a candidate who could "restore" honor
and integrity to an Oval Office stained by the misdeeds and falsehoods
of his predecessor. To brand Bush a liar is to negate what he and his
supporters declared was his most basic and most important
qualification for the job.

His claims about the war in Iraq have led more of his foes and more
pundits to accuse him of lying to the public. The list of his
misrepresentations, though, is far longer than the lengthy list of
dubious statements Bush employed--and keeps on employing--to justify
his invasion and occupation of Iraq. Here then is a partial--a quite
partial--account of the other lies of George W. Bush.

Tax Cuts

Bush's crusade for tax cuts is the domestic policy matter that has
spawned the most misrepresentations from his camp. On the 2000
campaign trail, he sold his success as a "tax-cutting person" by
hailing cuts he passed in Texas while governor. But Bush did not tell
the full story of his 1997 tax plan. His proposal called for cutting
property taxes. But what he didn't mention is that it also included an
attempt to boost the sales tax and to implement a new business tax.
Nor did he note that his full package had not been accepted by the
state legislature. Instead, the lawmakers passed a $1 billion
reduction in property taxes. And these tax cuts turned out to be a
sham. After they kicked in, school districts across the state boosted
local tax rates to compensate for the loss of revenue. A 1999 Dallas
Morning News analysis found that "many [taxpayers] are still paying as
much as they did in 1997, or more." Republican Lieutenant Governor
Rick Perry called the cuts "rather illusory."

One of Bush's biggest tax-cut whoppers came when he stated, during the
presidential campaign, "The vast majority of my [proposed] tax cuts go
to the bottom end of the spectrum." That estimate was wildly at odds
with analyses of where the money would really go. A report by Citizens
for Tax Justice, a liberal outfit that specializes in distribution
analysis, figured that 42.6 percent of Bush's $1.6 trillion tax
package would end up in the pockets of the top 1 percent of earners.
The lowest 60 percent would net 12.6 percent. The New York Times, the
Los Angeles Times, ABC News and NBC News all reported that Bush's
package produced the results CTJ calculated.

To deal with the criticism that his plan was a boon for millionaires,
Bush devised an imaginary friend--a mythical single waitress who was
supporting two children on an income of $22,000, and he talked about
her often. He said he wanted to remove the tax-code barriers that kept
this waitress from reaching the middle class, and he insisted that if
his tax cuts were passed, "she will pay no income taxes at all." But
when Time asked the accounting firm of Deloitte & Touche to analyze
precisely how Bush's waitress-mom would be affected by his tax
package, the firm reported that she would not see any benefit because
she already had no income-tax liability.

As he sold his tax cuts from the White House, Bush maintained in 2001
that with his plan, "the greatest percentage of tax relief goes to the
people at the bottom end of the ladder." This was
trickery--technically true only because low-income earners pay so
little income tax to begin with. As the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities put it, "a two-parent family of four with income of $26,000
would indeed have its income taxes eliminated under the Bush plan,
which is being portrayed as a 100 percent reduction in taxes." But
here was the punch line: The family owed only $20 in income taxes
under the existing law. Its overall tax bill (including payroll and
excise taxes), though, was $2,500. So that twenty bucks represented
less than 1 percent of its tax burden. Bush's "greatest percentage"
line was meaningless in the real world, where people paid their bills
with money, not percentages.

Bush also claimed his tax plan--by eliminating the estate tax, at a
cost of $300 billion--would "keep family farms in the family." But, as
the New York Times reported, farm-industry experts could not point to
a single case of a family losing a farm because of estate taxes. Asked
about this, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said, "If you
abolish the death tax, people won't have to hire all those planners to
help them keep the land that's rightfully theirs." Caught in a $300
billion lie, the White House was now saying the reason to abolish the
tax--a move that would be a blessing to the richest 2 percent of
Americans--was to spare farmers the pain in the a.s of estate
planning. Bush's lies did not hinder him. They helped him win the
first tax-cut fight--and, then, the tax-cut battle of 2003. When his
second set of supersized tax cuts was assailed for being tilted toward
the rich, he claimed, "Ninety-two million Americans will keep an
average of $1,083 more of their own money." The Tax Policy Center of
the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute found that, contrary
to Bush's assertion, nearly 80 percent of tax filers would receive
less than $1,083, and almost half would pocket less than $100. The
truly average taxpayers--those in the middle of the income
range--would receive $265. Bush was using the word "average" in a
flimflam fashion. To concoct the misleading $1,083 figure, the
Administration took the large dollar amounts high-income taxpayers
would receive and added that to the modest, small or nonexistent
reductions other taxpayers would get--and then used this total to
calculate an average gain. His claim was akin to saying that if a
street had nine households led by unemployed individuals but one with
an earner making a million dollars, the average income of the families
on the block would be $100,000. The radical Wall Street Journal
reported, "Overall, the gains from the taxes are weighted toward
upper-income taxpayers."


The Environment

One of Bush's first PR slip-ups as President came when his EPA
announced that it would withdraw a new standard for arsenic in
drinking water that had been developed during the Clinton years. Bush
defended this move by claiming that the new standard had been
irresponsibly rushed through: "At the very last minute my predecessor
made a decision, and we pulled back his decision so that we can make a
decision based upon sound science and what's realistic." And his EPA
administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, said the standard had not been
based on the "best available science." This was a harsh charge. And
untrue.

The new arsenic standard was no quickie job unattached to reasonable
scientific findings. The EPA had worked for a decade on establishing
the new, 10-parts-per-billion standard. Congress had directed the
agency to establish a new standard, and it had authorized $2.5 million
a year for studies from 1997 through 2000. A 1999 study by the
National Academy of Sciences (NAS) had concluded that the existing
50-ppb standard "could easily" result in a 1-in-100 cancer risk and
had recommended that acceptable levels be lowered "as promptly as
possible." EPA policy-makers had thought that a 3-ppb standard would
have been justified by the science, yet they took cost considerations
into account and went for the less stringent 10 ppb.

Bush's arsenic move appeared to have been based upon a political
calculation--even though Bush, as a candidate, had said he would not
decide key policy matters on the basis of politics. But in his book
The Right Man, David Frum, a former Bush economic speechwriter,
reported that Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser, had
pressed
for reversal" of the arsenic standard in an attempt to win votes in
New Mexico, one of a few states that have high naturally occurring
levels of arsenic and that would face higher costs in meeting the new
standard.

Several months after the EPA suspended the standard, a new NAS study
concluded that the 10-ppb standard was indeed scientifically justified
and possibly not tight enough. After that, the Administration decided
that the original 10 ppb was exactly the right level for a workable
rule, even though the latest in "best available science" now suggested
that the 10-ppb level might not adequately safeguard water drinkers.

The arsenic screw-up was one of the few lies for which Bush took a
hit. On the matter of global warming, he managed to lie his way
through a controversy more deftly. Months into his presidency, Bush
declared that he was opposed to the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 global
warming accord. To defend his retreat from the treaty, he cited "the
incomplete state of scientific knowledge." This was a misleading
argument, for the scientific consensus was rather firm. The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international
body of thousands of scientists assembled by the UN and the World
Meteorological Organization, held that global temperatures were
dramatically on the rise and that this increase was, to an unspecified
degree, a result of human-induced emissions.

In early June 2001 the NAS released a report Bush had requested, and
it concluded global warming was under way and "most likely due to
human activities." Rather than accept the analysis it had
commissioned, the Bush White House countered with duplicity. Press
secretary Fleischer maintained that the report "concludes that the
Earth is warming. But it is inconclusive on why--whether it's man-made
causes or whether it's natural causes." That was not spinning. That
was prevaricating. The study blamed "human activities" while noting
that "natural variability" might be a contributing factor too.

Still, the Bush White House wanted to make it seem as if Bush did take
the issue seriously. So on June 11, he delivered a speech on global
warming and pledged to craft an alternative to Kyoto that would
"reduce" emissions. The following February he unveiled his plan. "Our
immediate goal," Bush said, "is to reduce America's greenhouse-gas
emissions relative to the size of our economy."

Relative to the size of our economy? This was a ruse. Since the US
economy is generally growing, this meant emissions could continue to
rise, as long as the rate of increase was below the rate of economic
growth. The other industrialized nations, with the Kyoto accord, were
calling for reductions below 1990 levels. Bush was pushing for slower
increases above 2000 levels. Bush's promise to lower emissions had
turned out to be no more than hot air.


The Other Lies of George Bush

September 11

As many Americans and others yearned to make sense of the evil attacks
of September 11, Bush elected to share with the public a deceptively
simplistic explanation of this catastrophe. Repeatedly, he said that
the United States had been struck because of its love of freedom.
"America was targeted for attack," he maintained, "because we're the
brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world." This was
shallow analysis, a comic-book interpretation of the event that
covered up complexities and denied Americans information crucial for
developing a full understanding of the attacks. In the view Bush
furnished, Osama bin Laden was a would-be conqueror of the world, a
man motivated solely by irrational evil, who killed for the purpose of
destroying freedom.

But as the State Department's own terrorism experts--as well as
nongovernment experts--noted, bin Laden was motivated by a specific
geostrategic and theological aim: to chase the United States out of
the Middle East in order to ease the way for a fundamentalist takeover
of the region. Peter Bergen, a former CNN producer and the first
journalist to arrange a television interview with bin Laden, observes
in his book Holy War, Inc., "What [bin Laden] condemns the United
States for is simple: its policies in the Middle East." Rather than
acknowledge the realities of bin Laden's war on America, Bush
attempted to create and perpetuate a war-on-freedom myth.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush was disingenuous on other fronts. Days
after the attack, he asserted, "No one could have conceivably imagined
suicide bombers burrowing into our society and then emerging all in
the same day to fly their aircraft--fly US aircraft--into buildings
full of innocent people." His aides echoed this sentiment for months.
They were wrong. Such a scenario had been imagined and feared by
terrorism experts. And plots of this sort had previously been
uncovered and thwarted by security services in other nations--in
operations known to US officials. According to the 9/11 inquiry
conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees, the US
intelligence establishment had received numerous reports that bin
Laden and other terrorists were interested in mounting 9/11-like
strikes against the United States.

Fourteen months after the attack, Bush said, "We must uncover every
detail and learn every lesson of September the 11th." But his actions
belied this rhetoric. His White House refused to turn over information
to the intelligence committees about a pre-9/11 intelligence briefing
he had seen, and the Bush Administration would not allow the
committees to tell the public what intelligence warnings Bush had
received before September 11. More famously, Bush would not declassify
the twenty-seven-page portion of the committees' final report that
concerned connections between the 9/11 hijackers and Saudi Arabia. And
following September 11, Bush repeatedly maintained that his
Administration was doing everything possible to secure the nation. But
that was not true. The Administration did not move--and has not
moved--quickly to address gaping security concerns, including
vulnerabilities at chemical plants and ports and a huge shortfall in
resources for first responders [see Corn, "Homeland Insecurity,"
September 22].

It did not start with Iraq. Bush has been lying throughout the
presidency. He claimed he had not gotten to know disgraced Enron chief
Ken Lay until after the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. But Lay had
been one of Bush's larger contributors during that election and
had--according to Lay himself--been friends with Bush for years before
it. In June 2001, Bush said, "We're not going to deploy a [missile
defense] system that doesn't work." But then he ordered the deployment
of a system that was not yet operational. (A June 2003 General
Accounting Office study noted, "Testing to date has provided only
limited data for determining whether the system will work as
intended.") His White House claimed that it was necessary to drill for
oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to "secure America's energy
needs." But the US Geological Survey noted that the amount of oil that
might be found there would cover up to slightly more than two years'
worth of oil consumption. Such a supply would hardly "secure" the
nation's needs.

Speaking for his boss, Fleischer in 2002 said, "the President does, of
course, believe that younger workers...are going to receive no money
for their Social Security taxes." No money? That was not so. A
projected crunch will hit in four decades or so. But even when this
happens, the system will be able to pay an estimated 70 percent of
benefits--which is somewhat more than "no money." When Bush in August
2001 announced he would permit federal funding of stem-cell research
only for projects that used existing stem-cell lines--in a move to
placate social conservatives, who opposed this sort of research--he
said that there were sixty existing lines, and he asserted that his
decision "allows us to explore the promise and potential of stem-cell
research." Yet at the time--according to scientific experts in the
field and various media reports--there were closer to ten available
lines, not nearly enough to support a promising research effort.


The Other Lies of George Bush

Does Bush believe his own untruths? Did he truly consider a WMD-loaded
Saddam Hussein an imminent threat to the United States? Or was he
knowingly employing dramatic license because he wanted war for other
reasons? Did he really think the average middle-class taxpayer would
receive $1,083 from his second tax-cut plan? Or did he realize this
was a fuzzy number cooked up to make the package seem a better deal
than it was for middle- and low-income workers? Did he believe there
were enough stem-cell lines to support robust research? Or did he know
he had exaggerated the number of lines in order to avoid a politically
tough decision?
It's hard to tell. Bush's public statements do suggest he is a binary
thinker who views the world in black-and-white terms. You're either
for freedom or against it. With the United States or not. Tax cuts are
good--always. The more tax cuts the better--always. He's impatient
with nuances. Asked in 1999 to name something he wasn't good at, Bush
replied, "Sitting down and reading a 500-page book on public policy or
philosophy or something." Bush likes life to be clear-cut. And perhaps
that causes him to either bend the truth or see (and promote) a bent
version of reality. Observers can debate whether Bush considers his
embellishments and misrepresentations to be the honest-to-God truth or
whether he cynically hurls falsehoods to con the public. But believer
or deceiver--the result is the same.

With his misrepresentations and false assertions, Bush has
dramatically changed the nation and the world. Relying on deceptions,
he turned the United States into an occupying power. Using lies, he
pushed through tax cuts that will profoundly reshape the US budget for
years to come, most likely insuring a long stretch of deficits that
will make it difficult, perhaps impossible, for the federal government
to fund existing programs or contemplate new ones.

Does Bush lie more than his predecessors, more than his political
opponents? That's irrelevant. He's guiding the nation during difficult
and perhaps perilous times, in which a credible President is much in
need. Prosperity or economic decline? War or peace? Security or fear?
This country has a lot to deal with. Lies from the White House poison
the debates that must occur if Americans are going to confront and
overcome the challenges of this century at home and abroad.

Presidential lying, in fact, threatens the country. To render informed
and wise choices about the crucial and complicated controversies of
the day, people need truthful information. The President is generally
in a position to define and dominate a debate more than other
political players. And a lie from the White House--or a fib or a
misrepresentation or a fudged number--can go a long way toward
distorting the national discussion.

Bush campaigned for the presidency as the fellow who would bring
honesty back to the White House. During his first full day on the job,
while swearing in his White House staff, he reminded his cadre, "On a
mantelpiece in this great house is inscribed the prayer of John Adams,
that only the wise and honest may rule under this roof." But Adams's
prayer would once more go unanswered. There has been no restoration of
integrity. Bush's promise was a lie. The future of the United States
remains in the hands of a dishonest man."

Waiting patiently for a rebuttal,

-L.

Would you rather Saddam was still in power?