http://www.misleader.org/in_the_spotlight/
The Misleader
Robert L. Borosage
September 14, 2003
The scandals surrounding President Bush's lies about Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction in his State of the Union address to the nation have
overlooked the full scope of his duplicity that night. The White House
claims that State of Union addresses are carefully vetted, suggesting
that the distortions on Iraq were some kind of rare bureaucratic
snafu. In fact, for George Bush, the State of the Union address is a
form of presidential performance art. The president's pollsters
pre-test key words and phrases. His handlers preview each practiced
gesture, dramatic whisper, narrowed eye. The speech is vetted, but as
much for message and image as for fact. And in his last State of the
Union address, the gulf between word and reality was immense and
purposefully misleading.
Mr. Bush devoted the first half of his address to domestic issues, no
doubt to prove his concern about rising unemployment and falling
wages. But this placed some of the most mendacious portions of the
speech first. Consider:
"We will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other
presidents and other generations," the president began, while peddling
a plan of top hat tax breaks and wartime spending that has taken the
federal government from record surplus to record deficit in less than
two years. The president's own figures project deficits as far as the
eye can see, adding $1.9 trillion to the federal debt over then next 5
years, while vital public investments -- in schools, in energy
independence, in health care and homeland security - are starved for
funds. In fact, he will pass on to the next generation the burden of
both the fiscal debt and the investment deficit.
His "first goal," he said, is "an economy that grows fast enough to
employ every man and woman who seeks job," but his own economic
advisors project that his economic plan - if everything goes well -
will create fewer jobs this year than were lost in the last. In fact,
George Bush is the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside
over an economy that has lost jobs, not created them - more than 2.9
million lost since 2001.
In selling his tax breaks, the president was at his most disingenuous.
"This tax relief is for everyone who pays income taxes…Ninety-two
million Americans will keep this year an average of almost $1,100 more
of their own money." This is a perfect example of the old caution
about "lies, damn lies and statistics." As Citizens for Tax Justice
reported, 80% of Americans get less than the president's "average."
More than half of all taxpayers get less than $100. Almost a third get
nothing at all. Millionaires will enjoy tax breaks averaging $90,000 a
year, while middle income Americans will pocket an average of $256.
Together they make up the president's "average."
The president promised "we continue to work together to keep Social
Security sound and reliable…" But the costs of his tax cuts alone
exceed by three times the entire projected shortfall in Social
Security - the shortfall the president invokes to justify cutting
benefits by privatizing the program.
His "second goal," he announced, is "high quality, affordable health
care for all Americans," that will put doctors not "bureaucrats and
trial lawyers and HMOS" in charge of American medicine. But in fact,
his plan does nothing to extend health insurance or to control the
soaring prices. His prescription drug plan requires seniors to move
into an HMO in order to receive a drug benefit. More than one-third of
all seniors wouldn't even have that option since HMOs aren't available
in most rural areas. Worse, the president's plan provides no check on
soaring drug prices, and would prohibit Medicare from negotiating the
best price for seniors. In essence, the president would provide a $400
billion subsidy not to seniors but to drug companies, giving them a
fine return on the investment they made in Republican campaigns last
year.
Incredibly, President Bush declared that his "third goal" was "to
promote energy independence for our country while dramatically
improving our environment." In fact, the president has proposed a Big
Oil energy program that treats conservation with disdain and, by the
administration's own estimates, would only increase our reliance on
Persian Gulf oil. It was Enron and the oil lobby that Vice President
Cheney met with to draw up his plan, not the Sierra Club.
On environmental issues, the president became simply Orwellian in his
inversion of the truth. "I have sent you Clear Skies legislation that
mandates a 70 percent cut in air pollution from power plants over the
next 15 years," he declared to applause. In fact, his plan does
nothing to regulate carbon emissions, allows 50% more sulfur emissions
and five times more mercury emissions than enforcement of current law.
Compared to alternative legislation developed by the Environmental
Protection Agency, the National Resources Defense Council estimates
that the Bush "clear skies" legislation will result in 100,000
additional premature deaths by 2020.
Similarly, his "healthy forests" initiative used the recognized need
to clear out flammable underbrush as an excuse for giving timber
companies the writ to cut down wide swaths of protected forest.
On education, the president vowed that his mandated testing reforms
would "be carried out in every school and in every classroom." But he
did not bother to mention that he broke his own promise to fund the
reforms, shorting them by $8 billion, while cutting after-school
programs by 40%. Worse, the president mocked his pledge to "leave no
child behind" by insisting that the Congress pass tax cuts for the
wealthy rather than avoid debilitating cuts in school and university
budgets imposed by states and localities struggling with the worst
fiscal crisis in fifty years.
And on Iraq, the president's distortions went far beyond the lies
about the purchase of uranium in Africa, the discredited aluminum
tubes, the laughable mobile labs and flying drones. The heart of his
case against Hussein was that the secular dictator of Iraq might slip
his mythical secreted weapons to the stateless Islamic terrorists that
he despises. The president did not mention that the CIA's official
estimate was that this was likely to happen only if Hussein saw war as
inevitable and sought to exact revenge for his demise. Nor did the
president mention that this threat is surely far more likely to be
posed by the communist North Koreans who have booted out international
inspectors and have nuclear weapons, by the nuclear-armed Pakistani
dictatorship that harbors al Queda's remnants and by the US-fortified
Saudi Arabia emirate which was the source of the funds and the
terrorists of 9/11. Yet the White House chooses to talk with the North
Koreans, embrace the Pakistanis, and defend the Saudis.
In his speech, Mr. Bush scorned the alternative of continued
containment, air occupation, embargo and inspection as "trusting in
the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein." This distortion was at
the heart of the case for launching a war against a country without
waiting "until the threat is imminent." The president did not deign to
provide Americans with any estimate of the cost, scope and duration of
the coming invasion and occupation, much less warn of the potential
hatreds and terrorist retributions it could engender, nor the
distraction of scarce resources and expertise from the war on terror
that it inevitably required. We were left to discover those realities
only after the fact.
Mr. Bush's distortions were and are the product not of oversight or
editing error, but of political calculation. The president has pursued
policies that are designed to reward special private interests or
placate his right-wing base. If admitted, these policies would not be
popular. So the president packages them in appealing wrapping, labels
them with popular names, and peddles them as something they are not.
He misleads Americans because they don't want to go where he would
take them.
Some suggest this represents the normal counterfeits and distortions
of politics. But as the president says, this is a time of large
consequence and great sacrifice. When he delivered his State of the
Union address, in the midst of recession on the eve of a war, surely
the American people deserved a president who would level with them.
Instead the president chose not to lead but to mislead. And in doing
so, he squandered the trust of a nation that came together as one
after the horrors of September 11.
__________________
fwd//Starman
"Instead of concocting a new excuse everyday for launching an
unprovoked war that is certain to cause massive death and carnage, the
government should be pre-occupied with addressing corporate corruption
and greed, and it's consequences for working people; lay-offs, an
assault on wages, health and retirement benefits, job security and
union contracts." --Maryland Trade Unionists, 10/26/2
.. "The EPA knew that spewing all that asbestos into New York's air was
a horrific event, and that lives could be saved by taking certain
public precautions. Bush stopped that from happening. Lives would have
been saved, but Bush decided they were less valuable than those
competing considerations [re-opening the stock exchange, limiting
clean-up costs and liability claims]. This man [George W. Bush] has
horribly wronged the people of New York, whose terrible tragedies he
continues to exploit. He puts us all at risk in exchange for campaign
contributions." --Harvey Wasserman, freepress.org, 9/2/03
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