I don't have one
...lity that declared 'if it feels good, do it' has now embraced a related principle: 'If it sounds good, say it'...The administration's story is falling apart. Bush and Cheney mercilessly attack their opponents and promote a climate of fear because they are finding it increasingly difficult to defend the choices they made and the words they have spoken." (10/14) Walter Brasch: The truth of Joseph Goebbels, The Smirking Chimp, October 12, 2004 "About the only ones who believe Saddam Hussein and Iraq had any connection to the terrorist attacks upon the United States are George W. Bush, Dick Cheney -- and two-fifths of all Americans. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll conducted this month found that 42 percent of all Americans erroneously believe Saddam was involved in the attacks three years earlier. A hard-core one-third of Americans, according to the poll, believe Saddam was directly involved in the planning. More startling is that 61 percent of all persons who identify themselves as Republicans believe Saddam was involved in the attacks, up from 56 percent just three months earlier." (10/14) Richard Ross: The facts just don't seem to get through to President Bush, Kodiak Daily Mirror, October 11, 2004 " 'We were right to make America safer by removing Saddam Hussein from power.' This is a quote from the president, made while campaigning in early September. Well, I have a news flash for you. Just because a politician says something -- even if it's the president -- does not make it true. There is only one reason to believe that the invasion of Iraq is part of the war on terror, and that is because the president and his junta have repeated it endlessly, in every single speech any of them have given in the last two years. Come on, folks, tear yourselves away from Fox News and read the 9/11 Commission report. Let me say this: The war in Iraq had NOTHING to do with the war on terror. I don't know what it was about, but I have my suspicions. (Oil, grudges, oil and -- did I say oil?)" (10/14) Richard Reeves: The true lies of Bush-Cheney, Yahoo, October 9, 2004 " 'Nice one, Dick!' I thought during the vice presidential debate when he questioned Sen. John Edwards' attendance record by saying: "I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight." I was flabbergasted when I learned that was not true. My view of political character is that an honest politician is one who lies only when he has to. In this case, it was more than not true; it was obviously a deliberate and unnecessary lie. You do not forget meeting people who are after your job. . . . [P]olitics happens before history and, as the first Republican president said long ago, you can fool some of the people all of the time. All that takes is a contempt for the idea of democracy. It does not matter what you tell people if you believe they will probably not understand and probably not care when they realize they were deliberately deceived. If you own a television set, you should realize that the people who wanted this war, Cheney prominent among them, were not telling the truth before, are not telling the truth now and will not tell the truth after. . . . Sadly, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were deliberately deceiving the people of the democracy. There are lies, and then there are deliberate lies. They did not trust the people -- and it is for that they deserve to be thrown out of office next year." (10/11) Robert Koehler: Bush's lies feed terrorism, New Hampshire Union Leader, October 10, 2004 "Whenever truth is murdered, the blood at the scene has a high irony content. 'In this young century, our world needs a new definition of security. Our security is not merely found in spheres of influence or some balance of power; the security of our world is found in the advancing rights of mankind. These rights are advancing across the world. And across the world, the enemies of human rights are responding with violence.' Hello? Down is up, you say? War is peace? This was President Bush the other day, deigning to address the world, which by about a three-to-one margin sees him as the number-one destabilizing force on the planet. That didn't stop the landlord of Abu Ghraib from lecturing the U.N. General Assembly about, ahem, human rights. Every time I hear the President speak, I get an anxiety attack that's a lot more complicated than merely disagreeing with him. I become desperate for oxygen." (10/11) Curt Anderson: U.S. officials say no terror threat linked to disk with school data, Associated Press, October 8, 2004 Here's how it works: First there's the front page fright story -- lock up your kids, the Osama boogeyman is comin' to get them -- and days later, there's the correction, buried deep inside the paper. "Federal officials said Friday there is no terrorist connection to a computer disk found in Iraq that contained information about schools in six states. The disk was made by an unidentified Iraqi man who was doing research and had no connections to al-Qaida or the Iraqi insurgents battling U.S. forces, according to the FBI...'It's not about schools, it's about policy,' said FBI Agent William Evanina, spokesman for the FBI field office in Newark, N.J. 'There's no terrorism threat to these schools'.'' (10/11) BuzzFlash News Analysis: Fox Chief Political Correspondent . . . Made up RNC Message Point Quotes . . . , Buzz Flash, October 2, 2004 "The indefatigable journalist and blogger, Josh Marshall, revealed in a series of postings that FOX News had recently posted an article on its Internet site that contained false quotes attributed to John Kerry. Now, these weren’t just any made-up quotes; they were fabricated remarks that were completely consistent with RNC message points that try to portray Kerry as effeminate and indecisive (that’s their gender bias, not ours). And they were written, as FOX has admitted to Marshall, by none other than the Chief FOX Political Reporter, Carl Cameron." (10/4) James Bovard: Lie and You Thrive, AlterNet, September 17, 2004 "Perhaps never before has a president sought a second term by endlessly hyping the catastrophic failures of his first four years in office. On both 9/11 and Iraq, the Bush campaign team long ago decided that truth is a luxury American voters can no longer afford. Instead of admitting that 9/11 was the biggest U.S. intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor, the Bush administration turned 9/11 into a moral Dunkirk. From the first days after 9/11, the Bush administration created a mythology that would spur reverence for both the president and the government. Bush wrapped himself in a flag drenched with the blood of Americans who died due to the failure of the federal government he commanded, and sadly the people bought it – and still continue to buy it. In a September 7-9 national poll, Bush led Kerry on who the people believed would keep the United States safe by 23 points. . . . [B]ecause Americans are continually reminded of their patriotic duty to think well of their rulers, Bush has a good chance to exploit people's trust to further shackle them. If Bush wins re-election after his campaign portrays his greatest failures as his loftiest achievements, then Americans can expect even more debacles in the future. And at some point, the casualties and carnage – and reality – may become so bleak that even Bush supporters will recognize that the president is campaigning on his greatest liabilities." (9/30) David Podvin: Subverting Democracy, Make Them Accountable, September 13, 2004 "The administration of George W. Bush routinely falsifies government statistics for the purpose of achieving political objectives. The most infamous example of numerical legerdemain involved Bush coercing the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the Department of Defense to transform the numeral “zero” – which represented the total stockpile of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction – into an undefined yet terrifyingly large number. The list of statistical con jobs being perpetrated is lengthy because since seizing the presidency, Bush has methodically destroyed the validity of government data. The result has been a growing disconnect between the self-serving fiction released by the administration and the bitter reality that exists in Bush’s America. The overriding theme of the Bush presidential campaign is that he is making America safer. The Department of Justice has consistently promoted that propaganda by releasing phony statistics about its success in identifying and prosecuting terrorists. . . . George W. Bush and his surrogates continue to produce numerical mirages as he observes no moral limits in attempting to keep the office he attained by lying and cheating. For representative government to have any meaning, the electorate must have access to the truth, but the trespasser in the White House knows he can win only if the voters are bombarded with lies. By again subverting American democracy for his own selfish benefit, Bush has verified that the presidential candidate who lacks patriotism is not the one with the three Purple Hearts." (9/16) Cynthia Tucker: Deceptions and Deaths Stacking Up, Baltimore Sun via Common Dreams, September 13, 2004 "You would think Mr. Bush and his minions would be chastened by revelations of their distortions and fabricatio...