President Bush did his best to salvage his legacy during his last State of the Union Speech Monday night, a legacy that will be defined primarily by two events, his response the events of September 11th 2001 and the invasion, and subsequent occupation of Iraq.

The President spent a large chunk of time pleading with the American people that the surge of American troops is working, that things are getting better and that history will show we’d done the right thing by invading the country and ridding it of Saddam Hussein.  

"We must do the difficult work today, so that that years from now people will look back and say that this generation rose to the moment, prevailed in a tough fight, and left behind a more hopeful region and a safer America," said President Bush during the State of the Union while speaking about Iraq.

What cosmic forces came together, what asteroid-sized dice rolled a seven, to have former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld come out - the day a quantified and detailed report was released (and with a searachable database) on laying out the Bush Grindhouse's documented lying - and make a call for a new, U.S. Propaganda Agency, ostensibly, to win the hearts and minds of people who, presently, don't like us very much?

You can't just let stuff happen, you have to make stuff happen.

For the past six years, activists, progressive bloggers and a handful of traditional media pundits have accused Mister Bush, Richard Bruce Cheney and others in the cronyfest running the executive branch of lying us into Iraq. The relentless response - everybody from Condoleeza Rice to Bill Kristol to the least-read right-wing pundithug - has been to say we're the liars, and traitors as well, for daring suggest such a thing at a time when the nation faces the most dire threat since Adolf Hitler gave the go-ahead to heavy-water experiments, blah, blah, blah.

Eventually - without apologies, of course - there were a few admissions delivered in the passive-aggressive tense popularized decades ago by Richard Nixon: "mistakes were made."

Now, thanks to the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, everybody can check out those lies for themselves at The War Card: Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War.

Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith at CPI write:

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.

It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. ...

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.

Those 935 lies, by the way, do not include "indirect false statements" such as that Iraq had possession of "dangerous weapons."

No single lie is going to surprise anybody who has been following the fabrications of the Cheney-Bush administration. But CPI has done a real service to place nearly 1000 of these in one easy-to-access location.

Mister Bush told the most lies: 259. Colin Powell clocked in second with 244 lies.

As for the administration response, the Boston Globe reports:

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel did not comment on the merits of the study Tuesday night but reiterated the administration's position that the world community viewed Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, as a threat.

"The actions taken in 2003 were based on the collective judgment of intelligence agencies around the world," Stanzel said.

   
Uh-huh. Time to start a new database.

More than $20 billion in U.S. Government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan has gone to "... foreign companies whose identities – at least so far – are impossible to determine, according to a new study from the Center for Public Integrity.

That’s markedly more than even the $16 billion earned by former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, and next on the list, private security firm DynCorp, raked in $1.8 billion between 2004 and 2006. Comparably, BlackwaterUSA, whose guards were just subpoenaed by a federal grand jury, managed a paltry $485 million in contracts.

Oh this new report from the Center for Public Integrity should be required reading. It tracks the privately sponsored trips that members of Congress and their aides have made during the Bush administration. This is the kind of information that will make voters angry this fall. Quite angry. And unless Democrats drop the ball badly, that anger will be directed mainly at Republicans, whose corruption is fully on display here in the most tawdry way.

The bottom line? During the last five and a half years, our Representatives and Senators, and their spouses and aides, have taken over 23,000 trips sponsored privately, by corporations and other groups "with business on Capitol Hill". The total value of these trips was some $50 million. Many were to top vacation destinations, and hundreds of these trips cost in excess of $10,000.

Lawmakers are prohibited by law from accepting trips from lobbyists. The trips in question are paid for by non-lobbyists, a practice that remains legal if dubious ethically. What will voters think of these junkets?

The Washington Post picks up a story that I posted on Daily Kos and on my personal blog on November 16th.

A report by the Center for Public Integrity finds that Vice President Dick Cheney's office has developed the practice of concealing certain travel costs.  This practice is a circumvention of federal laws requiring annual reports on travel expenses of more than $250 received from outside groups.

The Post writes:

Has Dick Cheney gone rogue?  A new report says the vice president is making his own rules when it comes to government travel regulations.  

The Center for Public Integrity reports that Cheney and his staff have exempted themselves from the travel disclosure laws that other White House officials and staff adhere to.

The vice president's office appears to have stuck taxpayers with millions of dollars in travel costs and has avoided disclosing its expenses and destinations.

The private sector routinely covers the travel expenses associated with government officials' appearances - of which Cheney himself has made more than 275 since 2001 - at think tanks, trade organizations and universities around the world. When the private sector picks up the tab, however, federal law requires that officials report where they went, how much it cost, and who paid.

"Lobbyist". Is it just me, or does the term itself have a greasy sound? While I am certain that there is some small number of Washington lobbyists that are simply in it to make the world a better place, it is my belief that the overriding majority would, if pressed, admit that they are subscribers to a code of conduct which falls somewhere between the eviction attorney and the repo man.