The Biggest Bush Lies of 2005

Eleanor Clift has compiled a list of the biggest lies of the Bush mob during 2005.

See: Clift

Highlights include:

1. The White House declaration that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby had nothing to do with leaking the identity of a covert CIA agent.

2. Another favorite—heard all the time from the White House—is that "everybody saw the same intelligence we did."

3. Bush is good at stating the obviously untrue. "We do not torture," he declared despite ample evidence to the contrary from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to secret prisons in Eastern Europe.

4. Cheney's "the insurgency is in its last throes."

5. The revelation that President Bush authorized spying on American citizens without warrants is a late entry to the year’s “Biggest Lies” list. Bush says he bypassed the law because of the need for speed. He may believe that, but the facts say otherwise.


Also, note this:

Conservatives' Conniptions Over Bush's Follies

On Tuesday, December 20, 2005; Page A31 of the WP, George F. Will concludes:

Charles de Gaulle, a profound conservative, said of another such, Otto von Bismarck -- de Gaulle was thinking of Bismarck not pressing his advantage in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War -- that genius sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. In peace and in war, but especially in the latter, presidents have pressed their institutional advantages to expand their powers to act without Congress. This president might look for occasions to stop pressing.

see Why Didn't He Ask Congress?


And Charles Krauthammer starts his column with:

2005 was already the year of the demagogue, having been dominated for months by the endlessly echoed falsehood that the president "lied us into war."

Krauthammer concludes:

Contrary to the administration, I also believe that as a matter of political prudence and comity with Congress, Bush should have tried to get the law changed rather than circumvent it. This was an error of political judgment. But that does not make it a crime. And only the most brazen and reckless partisan could pretend it is anything approaching a high crime and misdemeanor.

Tom Daschle, who was there, contradicts these claims:

In Power We Didn't Grant, Daschle, who was majority leader of the Senate states that Bush asked Congress for power to eavesdrop on Americans in the United States without a judge's permission and the Senate refused such power.

Daschle writes:

If the stories in the media over the past week are accurate, the president has exercised authority that I do not believe is granted to him in the Constitution, and that I know is not granted to him in the law that I helped negotiate with his counsel and that Congress approved in the days after Sept. 11. For that reason, the president should explain the specific legal justification for his authorization of these actions, Congress should fully investigate these actions and the president's justification for them, and the administration should cooperate fully with that investigation.