Klurfeld's column from Newsday - the 2nd breathtaking utterance of unvarnished truth today in a major Op-Ed.
<<There are times when government officials lie so baldly to the public that the essential untruth of what they are asserting is lost. It's called the Big Lie technique. George W. Bush's State of the Union/campaign kickoff speech Tuesday night had at least two major examples. The first was the declaration that "America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people."<p>
Great rhetoric, but what in the world is he talking about? Let's grant the case that the world and the United States are better off without Saddam Hussein than with him. But Bush's feisty line directly suggests that Hussein was a direct threat to the security of the American people, as if he was about to launch weapons of mass destruction against the homeland. That was never the case.
At the heart of the credibility case against the Bush administration is its blatant and dishonest exaggeration of intelligence information about the nature of the threat Hussein represented. Vice President Dick Cheney and the president himself more than once suggested that Hussein posed an imminent and direct threat to the United States. Bush is still dangling that specter to justify the war.
As it turns out, even the reasonable case for invading Iraq doesn't hold up that well. That was the contention that Hussein was determined to develop weapons of mass destruction and could have a nuclear weapons capability within five to seven years. At that point, he would be a threat to the Persian Gulf region and the industrialized nations' supply of oil. The point was: Why wait for that to happen? Indeed, that is the basis on which most Democrats in Congress and other experts reluctantly supported the war.
But the postwar search for weapons of mass destruction or programs to produce them has come up empty so far. Even what seemed a reasonable case for going to war seems to have been exaggerated. One of the chief backers of war as the only option, Kenneth Pollack, an Iraqi expert and former CIA official in the Clinton administration, now says he was wrong based on the latest information from weapons inspectors. He examines the intelligence failure in an article in the current Atlantic Monthly and says the intelligence community relied too much on a worst-case scenario approach.
But Bush wouldn't give an inch Tuesday night. He was right, most of the world was wrong. And we don't have to ask permission to defend ourselves. That he was even raising the issue suggests that his polls show he has a real vulnerability there. But how is widening his credibility gap a solution? The American people were fooled once. He's playing with fire if he thinks they can be fooled again.
The second lie is his assertion that he will narrow the budget deficit by half if we follow his program, even as he calls for making his tax cuts permanent. This is a bit like a pyromaniac claiming he can put out half the fire he started himself. The Bush tax cuts are an insane policy. The result will eventually be even more unfair and more biased in favor of the wealthy. In a few years the alternative minimum tax will hit more middle-class taxpayers, dramatically increasing their share of the burden while the wealthy enjoy the benefits of the upper bracket cuts.
It appears that the tax cuts in the short term have stimulated the economy out of a recession, even if job creation lags the recovery. But Bush wants tax cuts as far as the eye can see, even as he increases government spending on defense for his war and for his new health-care initiatives. And he says he wants to privatize Social Security. But every study shows that it would take billions of dollars in additional revenue to transition from the current Social Security system to a privatized one without wrecking the current system.
The Bush numbers just don't add up. And neither does his defense of the war. Yes, it's a campaign year and the first victim of a campaign, to borrow a phrase, is the truth. But sooner or later the truth will out. The Big Lies are going to catch up with Bush. >>
My Q is this - have the media FINALLY started exposing Bush's use of the methods of Stalin and....you know who?