Wampum

Little Lies, Part I

Lots of people have noted that the Bush administration lies a lot on big issues.

Support for the war in Iraq was built on a foundation of lies, distortions, exaggerations and misrepresentations. No less an admirer of the administration than Mickey Kaus has acknowledged that Mr. Bush’s tax plan was “based on lies.” Paul Krugman has noted that Mr. Bush’s proposed Social Security reform is based on the proposition that two minus one equals four. Joe Conason devoted and entire book to the Big Lies used by conservatives to attack liberals.

Those are all Big Lies. I wish to focus on little lies. Do not underestimate the power of little lies. The allegation that Al Gore was in the habit of telling little lies cost him the presidency. In 2000, the GOP argued that Al Gore was not to be trusted because he told lies about unimportant things. Perhaps the best statement of the GOP argument circa 2000 comes from America’s scold, William Bennett.
Bennett called Mr. Gore a “habitual liar” and went on to write that:

James Madison famously wrote that men are not angels, and nobody is insisting that the president be a saint. But with Mr. Gore, one begins to suspect that his lies are symptomatic of something fundamentally disquieting, and quite relevant.

The true irony of the GOP case against Mr. Gore is that it is itself based on lies, embellishments, distortions and half truths. In fact, the “evidence” they used to paint Gore as a “habitual liar” tells us far more about the honesty of the GOP than of Mr. Gore.

Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler has relentlessly and incomparably documented the lies, distortions and misrepresentations used by Republicans to paint Gore as a serial exaggerator.

Since Republicans in 2000 argued that an alleged pattern of lying about small issues disqualified Gore from being president, it seems appropriate to investigate whether or not the current administration has a pattern of telling untruths about small things. I will not concern myself with weighty matters of war and peace or trillion dollar tax cuts. Instead, I will examine a number of instances in which the Bush administration has told “little lies.” If a pattern of lying about small matters emerges, will Republicans conclude that are “symptomatic of something fundamentally disquieting, and quite relevant” about George W. Bush. Will issues of President Bush’s character then be central to the 2004 election? The first five examples of the administration's "little lies" are below.

Aircraft Carrier Landing

Many folks have discussed Mr. Bush’s stunt of wearing a flight suit while riding in a fighter jet during a tail hook landing on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. Why did he choose to do so rather than simply take a helicopter to the ship or wait at the dock for the ship to dock?

Like most things, the motives were mixed. Certainly, the President and his advisors thought that the stunt would provide a perfect campaign photo-op. The fact that a Democratic Presidential candidate is now using the images in a TV commercial suggests that Karl Rove was mistaken.
In addition to the political motive, the President also wanted to take a joy ride in a jet fighter. The President seemed to relish the experience. He took time from what I assume is a very busy schedule to take underwater survival training in the White House swimming pool before the flight. His Press Secretary, Ari Fleisher eventually admitted that Mr. Bush wanted:

to see an aircraft landing the same way that the pilots saw an aircraft landing. He wanted to see it as realistically as possible. And that's why, once the initial decision was made to fly out on the Viking, even when a helicopter option became doable, the president decided instead he wanted to still take the Viking.

The White House could have acknowledged Mr. Bush’s desire without shame. He is a former fighter pilot himself. He was intimately involved in the planning and execution of a war in which he was about to declare victory. His desire for a “Walter Mitty” moment is certainly understandable and I suspect that most people would have understood it if he had been candid about it. He could have gotten the video footage for the campaign and have been honest about his motives.

Instead the White House decided to dissemble. It announced that the ship was too far from shore for a helicopter to reach the carrier. That was false.

The White House said that Mr. Bush’s motive was to avoid inconveniencing the servicemen by delaying the ship even though the ship. That was false. The carrier was ahead of schedule and could not dock until scheduled anyway. The White House said that a tail hook landing on an aircraft carrier at sea was the safest way to get aboard. I have no expertise in that area but that seems laughable to me. The tail hook landing was the first time a sitting President had ever pulled such a stunt. One would expect that if it was actually the safest method of transport, it would have been used before.

The President could have gotten his photo op and his joy ride while leveling with the American people. He chose instead to dissemble.

Now admittedly, Mr. Bush’s reason for wanting to participate in a tail hook landing is a “little lie.” What difference does it make?

In 2000, the GOP claimed that telling small lies showed a defect in character. If Al Gore lied about doing farm chores, the argument went, he was not qualified to be President. If President Bush lies about his reasons for a tail hook landing on an aircraft carrier, what does that say about him?

Reading the EPA report

Republicans have long been on the defensive on the issue of the environment. The American people, by and large, support environmentally friendly policies. Those policies frequently conflict with the interests of large, important Republican constituents.

Republican pollster Frank Luntz has provided advice to Republicans on how to neutralize the Democratic advantage on environmental issues. With regard to the issue of global warming, one report describes Mr. Luntz advice as follows:

One section of the memorandum, "Winning the Global Warming Debate," asserts that many voters believe there is a lack of consensus about global warming among scientists. "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly," it says. "Therefore you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue."

Among the ways to "challenge the science," the memorandum says, is to "be even more active in recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view and much more active in making them part of your message" because "people are more willing to trust scientists than politicians."

Republicans appear to have taken Mr. Luntz’s advice to heart. Republicans repeated argued that conclusive evidence of global warming and of the role played by human activities in that warming was never quite certain.

Into that backdrop came the 2002 Climate Action report produced by the Environmental Protection Agency. That report concluded that global warming is real and is caused, in part by human activity. That report cut into the heart of the Luntz strategy. It was prepared by Mr. Bush’s administration. It was based on science and not politics. It had the potential to collapse the GOP strategy on the environment.

Clearly, it was in Mr. Bush’s political interest to undercut the credibility of the report. When a reporter asked Mr. Mr. Bush about the report, he replied:

I read the report put out by the bureaucracy.

That response was made in a dismissive manner (Slate described it as a sneer).

President Bush’s response was well calculated to undercut the credibility of the report and keep the Luntz strategy alive. If Mr. Bush could casually dismiss the report, perhaps the American people could as well. The use of the term “bureaucracy” was also artful. It was not scientists or even politicians who had concluded that the debate over global warming was over. It was simply faceless, mindless bureaucrats.

There was only one problem. Mr. Bush’s statement was not true.

At a June 10, 2002 Press briefing, Ari Fleischer fessed up. The President had not read the report at all. He had been briefed on it.

Q: Ari, I just would like to set the record straight on something the president said last week, when he was up at the NSA, when he was asked about the report on global warming by the EPA. He said he read the report. I believe the report is 260-some pages—he meant he read the full report?

Fleischer: I think the president—whenever presidents say they read it, you can read that to be he was briefed.

While we are on the subject of “little lies,” Fleischer’s confession is particularly interesting. While it may be true that when Mr. Bush says he read a report, it means he has not read it but someone told him about it, the same is not true, as Fleischer implied, of other presidents As Brad DeLong has written:

Gee. When Clinton said he'd read something, he'd read it. When Carter said he'd read something, he'd read it. When Nixon said he'd read something, he'd read it...

Now admittedly, the difference between the President having read the report and having been briefed on it is very small. It is as smaller even than, say, the difference between having grown up in a ritzy Washington hotel and have spent part of your life living in a middle class apartment in a residence hotel while your Dad’s job required you to be away from home.

Nonetheless, the question remains, why did the President choose to tell a fib when the truth would have served his purpose equally well. Perhaps we will never know why the President was not honest and instead, as Dick Cheney said of Al Gore, we will have to remain “puzzled and saddened.”

Universal Consensus

When President Bush proposed his 2003 tax cut package, he put the elimination of the individual income tax on corporate dividends at the top of his list. Last July, I
reported on a Newsweek article (link now broken) about the White House position on elimination of the dividend tax. Newsweek reported as follows:

Bush wanted some answers from his team: the then Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, the then economic adviser Larry Lindsey, Commerce Secretary Don Evans and chief economist Glenn Hubbard. In the instant history that the White House put out last week, Bush’s question elicited a “universal consensus,” even from O’Neill and Lindsey, who would both shortly be fired. According to a senior administration official, all the men said their top priority was to end the double taxation of dividends. Not just to cut the tax on dividends paid by individuals. To end it.

That spin was not true. The Pennsylvania Post Gazette reported the following:

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, in his first public comments since being forced out of the Bush administration in December, said money from the president's $674 billion tax-cut plan would be better spent on shoring up the nation's ailing Social Security system.

In an interview Friday for the KD/PG Sunday Edition television show and in comments afterward, O'Neill said he saw minor value in eliminating taxes on corporate dividends as proposed by Bush but added, "I would not have done it."

Would Mr. Bush’s push to end the dividend tax have really been harmed if the White House had reported “broad consensus” instead of “universal consensus” among his economic advisors? Did anyone really care what about the position of a fired Treasury Secretary? Is that the type of lie that led Donald Lambros of the Washington Times to write that Al Gore “deeply dishonest?”

Trifecta

One of the central proposals of Candidate Bush was a large tax cut. When Al Gore attacked the plan as risking the fiscal health of the country, Mr. Bush assured us that we could have it all. We could have a huge tax cut, run endless surpluses, reserve the Social Security surplus for Social Security, pay down all of the publicly held debt and have a large reserve in case of emergency.

Mr. Bush’s claims helped pass his 2001 tax cut. By the summer of 2002, Mr. Bush’s promises were not coming true. He had already invaded the Social Security trust fund to pay for the normal operations of government. Instead of running a surplus and paying down the national debt to prepare for the fast approaching retirement of the baby boom generations, Mr. Bush was well on the road to running record budget deficits. Mr. Gore’s claims that Bush’s policies risked our fiscal position were ringing true while Mr. Bush’s blithe assurances that we could have it all were beginning to ring hollow. How was Mr. Bush to square his campaign rhetoric with the governing reality? What was Mr. Bush to tell the people who believed him during the campaign?

Mr. Bush’s solution was the “trifecta” joke. Mr. Bush began
telling the faithful the following joke:

You know, when I was one time campaigning in Chicago, a reporter said, `Would you ever have a deficit?' I said, `I can't imagine it, but there would be one if we had a war, or a national emergency, or a recession.' Never did I dream we'd get the trifecta."

No reporters who covered the campaign could recall Mr. Bush ever putting the qualifiers on his promise not to run a deficit. When reporters asked the White House for details of when the President made that statement “in Chicago,” the White House referred them to GOP debates. No record of any debate contained the qualifiers. In May of 2002, Jonathan Chait of The New Republic ran an article pointing out that no record of the “trifecta” statement could be found.

When Mitch Daniel, then the OMB Director, appeared on Meet the Press, Tim Russert pointed out that no record of any such statement made in the campaign could be found. Daniel responded that he was "not the White House librarian."

Even after the fact that the story had no support became public, Mr. Bush continued to tell it. Mr. Bush told the joke at least thirteen times and mentioned the qualifiers an additional couple of dozen times.

The true irony of the “trifecta joke” is that the qualifiers had been mentioned previously. In a 1988 speech in Detroit, Al Gore said:

Barring an economic reversal, a national emergency, or a foreign crisis, we should balance the budget this year, next year, and every year."

It would not have been difficult to Mr. Bush to make the same point while remaining truthful. It really would not have too difficult to say something like “When we made our economic projections, we thought we could maintain a balanced budget even if we had a recession, a national emergency or a war. We did not anticipate that we would have all three simultaneously.” Is that really so hard?

What are we to make of the fact that Mr. Bush continued to tell his dishonest “trifecta” story long after it has been exposed as false both in the New Republic and on Meet the Press?

America’s scold, William Bennett, knows the answer:

This is, after all, an individual who has been warned repeatedly to take care not to lie, embellish, or misstate the facts … Yet the problem persists. His lying appears to be incorrigible. And it is a matter of public record…
Character matters in a president. … As the public considers for whom it will vote … it should recall the old adage: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

Ken Lay was an Ann Richards Supporter

The corporate scandals of 2001 were a matter of some political concern to the Bush administration. Not only had President Bush and Vice President Cheney engaged in some questionable business practices themselves but some of their supporters were reveled to have been less and honest.

First and foremost among the corporate scandals was Enron. Enron’s collapse was particularly dangerous to the President because of his close relationship with Enron’s Ken Lay. Enron affiliated persons had given more than half a million dollars to Bush over the years. That made Enron George W. Bush biggest contributor. Lay was a Bush Pioneer. George W. Bush had even christened Lay with a nick name, “Kenny Boy.” Lay met with Vice President Cheney to help develop the administration’s energy policy. Mr. Bush and Mr. Lay had much personal correspondence.

Thus, when reporters asked Mr. Bush about Enron and Mr. Lay, there was a long history of a close relationship between them. Despite that evidence, Mr. Bush decided to tell a small lie:

And I got to know Ken Lay when he was the head of the -- what they call the Governor's Business Council in Texas. He was a supporter of Ann Richards in my run in 1994. And she had named him the head of the Governor's Business Council. And I decided to leave him in place, just for the sake of continuity. And that's when I first got to know Ken, and worked with Ken, and he supported my candidacy.

While it is true that Mr. Lay gave money to Ann Richards’ 1994 campaign, as Slate has pointed out, he gave three times as much to Mr. Bush. In addition, Mr. Lay has shown the President’s statement to be false. PBS quotes Mr. Lay as follows:

I've been a strong financial and political supporter of, first, President Bush Sr. when he was running for president, and even when he ran for president a time or two and failed. And then certainly when he ran for president and was elected in 1988. [I'm] very close to the family, to Barbara Bush and the kids.

When Governor Bush--now President Bush--decided to run for the governor's spot, [there was] a little difficult situation--I 'd worked very closely with Ann Richards also, the four years she was governor. But I was very close to George W. and had a lot of respect for him, had watched him over the years, particularly with reference to dealing with his father when his father was in the White House and some of the things he did to work for his father, and so did support him.

Why would President Bush resort to dishonesty on a matter that could easily be checked? I do not know, but perhaps we should ask Professor Chris Wetzel of Rhodes College. In a New York Times article by Richard Berke about Al Gore, Profesor Wetzel is quoted as follows:

Why would someone say something like this when it can be so blatantly discovered?" asked Mr. Wetzel, who has taught a research course called Detecting Impostors and Con Artists. "I think it's like the false memory syndrome when people end up believing that they were abducted by aliens."

Does Mr. Bush suffer from false memory syndrome? Does he think he has been abducted by aliens? Has such an implication about Mr. Bush ever been posed in a major media outlet? If not, why not?

To be continued….

(Note: This is the first of a series of planned posts on Mr. Bush’s “Little Lies.” I have collected a large number of examples of Mr. Bush or his administration telling “little lies.” If you know of any that should be included, please leave a comment or send an email).

Posted by Dwight Meredith at November 23, 2003 12:12 PM | TrackBack