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According
to our dear Yale-educated President, to disassemble means to "not tell the
truth." Imagine the astonishment of all those illiterates out there who
had been long operating under the apparently false impression that to
disassemble meant to take something apart. One hopes that dictionaries are
being revised nationwide.
Nonetheless, and regardless of any
disagreements Webster's might have with his definition, Bush declared last
month that the accusations of torture and abuse by detainees at Guantanamo
weren't credible because they were made by "people who hate America,
people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble."
Sadly, detainees at Guantanamo are not the only haters of America who are
trained to lie. It is clear that the Bush administration hates this
country, those who defend it, and those who call it home. It is also clear
that the Bush administration, notwithstanding all claims about Bush being
a straight-shooter, are well-trained in the art of dissembling.
If Bush & Co. didn't hate America, they wouldn't take advantage of every
opportunity to lie, cheat, and steal in furtherance of their and their
cronies' selfish ends. If they didn't hate this country and those who
defend it, they wouldn't have instituted a war through fraud and sent
thousands of men and women off to be killed and wounded for a lie. If they
didn't hate this country and its citizens, they wouldn't be so hell-bent
to exploit our fears to curtail the very civil rights and liberties that
purportedly distinguish us from the rest of the world.
But they do hate America and they demonstrate their hatred through their
lies, deceit, and manipulation.
The latest examples of the Bush administration's contempt for the truth
and for the U.S. came to light this month. First, the Inspector General of
the Pentagon deleted 45 references to White House officials from his
report to the Senate Armed Services Committee on the incestuous $30
billion air-tanker deal between Boeing and the Air Force. In a letter to
the Committee leading up to the report's release, the Inspector General
revealed that the redactions were made at the White House's behest.
The redaction of White House officials from the report is particularly
telling in light of revelations from the former Secretary of the Air Force
that the White House was "involved in the earliest days [of the Boeing
deal] and frequently along the way." In other words, the White House was
involved early and often in what Committee Chairman John Warner (R-Va.)
characterized as "the most significant defense procurement mismanagement
in contemporary history."
At a press conference following the release of the Inspector General's
redacted report, White House spokesman Scott McClellan proudly clucked,
"The people who were involved in wrongdoing are being held to account."
True, so long as one doesn't count the White House officials whose
identities have been concealed from Congress and the public.
The second example from this month of the Bush administration's contempt
for truth, justice, and the American way (particularly the truth part),
came in the form of revelations that a White House official and former
energy lobbyist doctored reports on global warming to minimize links to
greenhouse emissions. The dissembler-in-chief was Philip Cooney, chief of
staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. By sheer
coincidence, Mr. Cooney's previous job just happened to be as a lobbyist
for the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil-industry trade group
and staunch opponent to limits on greenhouse gasses. Go figure.
Never mind that he's a political hack without any scientific training. Who
better than a shill of the oil industry to "edit" the White House's report
on global warming? How else can the oil industry be expected to make a
(literal) killing, free of pesky governmental regulations?
As if that weren't blatant enough, during his "editing" of the White
House's report on global warming, Mr. Cooney reached out to the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, to help the
White House "clean up the mess" created by the "Climate Action Report
2002." The CEI, as it turns out, just happens to have benefitted from more
than $1.3 million in funding from Exxon/Mobil, the world's largest oil
company. Predictably, two days after CEI agreed to help Mr. Cooney, Bush
repudiated the "Climate Action Report," which inconveniently concluded
that global warming was caused by man-made emissions and would have major
environmental impacts.
In other words, when it comes to the Bush administration's (de)regulation
of the environment, industry money trumps science, and facts are edited
with one hand while the other pockets the cash.
Bush and his henchmen are not the first band of thieves and liars to
occupy the hallowed halls of government. They are merely the current
occupants. Nevertheless, through their willingness to lie, steal, and
kill, Bush & Co. reveal their hatred and contempt for America and its
people, while simultaneously demonstrating their love and passion for
power and riches.
Ken Sanders is
a writer based in Tucson, Arizona. Visit his weblog at:
www.politicsofdissent.blogspot.com/.
Other Articles by Ken Sanders
* Iraq: Bush's
Land of Make-Believe
*
On the Brink
of "Complete Strategic Failure" in Afghanistan
* Red,
White, and Without a Clue
* Shooting
the Messenger
* Touching
Evil: Holding Hands with Uzbekistan
* Crony
Capitalists
* Iraq in
Miniature
* Smoking
Gun Memo Appears, but Where's the Outrage?
* We're Not
Going Anywhere
* What the
Pre-War Intelligence Reports Won't Tell You About Iraq's Nukes
* The
"Freedom" of Afghanistan's Women
* Fallujah:
Dresden in Iraq
* Suffer the
Children
* The
Starving of the Five (Hundred) Thousand
* Iraq: The
Not-So-Proverbial Powder Keg
* Turning
Out the Lights on the Enlightenment
* Bush,
Schiavo, and the Stench of Hypocrisy
* Supporting
the Troops
* Scoffing
the Rule of Law
* Putting
the "Mock" in Democracy
* Torture’s
Our Business ... and Business is Good
* Remember
Afghanistan?
* The United
States’ Hypocritical Nuclear Policy
*
The “Other” Iraqi Conflict
* Cause for
Alarm: Regime Change Redux
* Still
Playing Cute With the Law
* The
Boogeyman and Social Security
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