Customer Reviews

The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

For those of us who have devoured the recent books outlining the depradations of the Bush Administration such as those by Vidal, Ivins, Franken, and Moore you will find little revelatory here. However, David Corn is a fine journalist and serious scholar with evident professional integrity. So, what is rewarding about "The Lies of George W. Bush" is its comprehensive, well documented, and scholarly approach -- making it above reproach in terms of research and accuracy.

Corn's basic point and most poignant observation is at the book's beginning. There is nothing unique about Bush as a politician being a liar; in that respect he is in good company. However, he campaigned on a self righteous, moralistic platform asserting that he would maintain clean campaigns and straightforward, honest leadership. It was on this basis that he proclaimed he was entitled to the mantle of leadership rather than Al Gore, whose occasional bending of the truth the Republicans branded reprehensible and immoral. His constituents also assert that unbending commitment to the truth and morality is their quest, yet they relentlessly lie in their ruthless quest for power and profit as they trample the rights and exploit the majority of Americans, and endanger the safety of the planet.

Probably the best, and most telling chapter in the book deals with Bush's "White Collar Lies". He comprehensively outlines Bush's violations of SEC regulations, outright lies, and theft during his involvement in Harken Energy and substantial profits from insider trading, which foreshadowed the later Enron scandal that mirrored this scandal. Corn skillfully compares the two and, in an understated fashion, points out the glaring irony.

Corn very effectively and eloquently outlines that George W. Bush is a well established liar, and on the basis of his widespread, pervasive, and menacing lies, and his ruthlessness in pursuit of any of his objectives that he is unfit to be the President of the United States.

I completely agree with David Corn's assessment of George W. Bush's struggle with personal honesty, and would go a step further and insist that is his most probably the most dishonest president in the history of our nation. When he writes, "So constant is [Bush's] fibbing that a history of his lies offers a close approximation of the history of his presidential tenure, " he makes as profound a statement about the nature of this administration as is possible. Moreover, I found myself virtually never disagreeing with any statement that he makes in the course of the entire book. Also, as one of the key figures in covering the current (as I write this) story of two White House senior aides blowing the cover of Joseph Wilson's CIA agent wife, I am grateful to his superb journalist efforts over the years.

So why am I not thrilled with the book? Because it is more or less just a laundry list of lies, and not a great deal more. It is a one-note song. My complaint is not with the book that it is, but with the book that it should have been. After cataloging Bush's lies for over three hundred pages, I think only the most partisan of individuals could deny that Bush has a problem with truth telling. The man is patently dishonest, and the book performs a valuable service by articulating all the ways that he engages in dishonesty.

But at the end of the book, I found myself dissatisfied in many ways. Why this enormous reliance on disinformation in the Bush White House? Does it originate from him or from his advisors or from some ongoing movement in the Republican right wing (I believe it is all three)? What does this reliance on distortion and misleading the public say about American culture? Why has the media, until recently, been unwilling to call Bush to the carpet on some of his more outrageous errors? Or why couldn't Corn have discussed the question of whether it is possible to be honest in today's political climate? This is not nitpicking: these are the kinds of questions that would arise for any reasonably intelligent person reading the book.

I also have some trouble with using "lie" when in fact Bush's struggles with the truth are far more multifarious. For instance, often what he says, while wrong, may be things he actually believes, for instance when he calls Ariel Sharon a man of peace. No one who knows anything about Sharon could possibly make that assessment (indeed, his political base in Israel supports him precisely because he is not a man of peace), but when Bush says that, it is a lie, or a belief based either in ignorance or self-deception? For something to qualify as a lie, one must consciously know that what one is saying is not true. In other words, I believe a lot of the untrue things that Bush says is based on an inability to assess the truth of a situation. Not every mistaken statement qualifies as a lie.

Mind you, Bush does lie, but many of his false statements are not, as such, lies. Some are mistakes of fact. Some result from his ability to convince himself that something is true that isn't. A gigantic amount of what he says is simply PR or propaganda, such as calling his deregulation of environmental standards a "Clear Skies" program (whereas it is in fact merely a license to pollute). This is clearly dishonest, and while there is a bit of the lie in all propaganda, it doesn't come up to the level of a lie. Spinning a situation isn't lying so much as attempting to color the facts in a way that is more sympathetic to one's own agenda. Dishonest, yet, but a lie, no. I would have been more comfortable if the title of the book had been THE DISHONESTY OF GEORGE W. BUSH.

Nonetheless, the book is very definitely not without value, but of the recent spate of books critical of the Right and the Bush administration, this is not one of the best. Paul Krugman in THE GREAT UNRAVELING deals with much of the dishonesty inherent in the Bush administration (Krugman was, in fact, the first journalist I know of to explicitly call Bush a liar). Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose in BUSHWHACKED go into great detail about not merely the dishonesty of the Bush policies but the concrete ways in which they harm real human beings. On a humorous level, Al Franken tackles Right wing (including Bush) dishonesty in a way that is both accurate and hysterical. I would recommend all of these before Corn's book.

Though I think the author overstates some things in the book, it is effective in showing a pattern of deception with George W. Bush that preceded his advent to the Whitehouse and characterizes his administration today.

What is most alarming about the book is the lesson that lying actually can work. With a propaganda machine of neocon pundits running interference for him, this President has taken more liberties with the truth than even Nixon.

One thing that would have greatly strengthened the book was the use of footnotes. I find it likely that the author has good sources for his statements, but the lack of footnotes severely weakens book as a means of clearly showing the lies told by George W. Bush.

The only thing wrong with this book is that there is no chance that more than a minuscule percentage of the electorate will read it, and most of them will be the already knowledgeable.
Journalist David Corn, who writes for The Nation and other publications in addition to having appeared on many TV and radio news shows, including NPR and Fox News, begins the book with the words, "George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small. He has lied directly and by omission."

Corn obviously had to get that off his chest and out in the open since that is something he and all the other reporters who have followed the career of George W. know only too well; and yet it is something they have seldom felt free to say in so many words.

Corn recalls all the major Bush prevarications, from the weapons of mass destruction that weren't there, to the tax cuts that emptied the treasury for his buds, back to the 1990 Harken Energy (a kind of mini-Enron) insider trading scandal that saved George W. from what would have been another business failure. He was on the board of directors of Harken when he sold off his shares two months before the company's stock took a 20% nose dive after its losses became public. Bush denied trading on inside information. Because the SEC consisted of mostly friends of his father, George W. was given a clean bill of heath. Imagine what would have happened to him if his name had been, say, Martha Stewart.

In the final chapter, "Conclusion: How He Gets Away with It (So Far)" Corn attempts to explain why Bush's lies haven't hurt him. He blames the press for not having the gumption (maybe I should just say "guts") to contradict the president or to print the unvarnished truth themselves. Instead of a mealymouthed "Analysts Discount Attack by Iraq" (as in the Washington Post headline had it) or "CIA Warns That a US Attack May Ignite Terror" (as in the New York Times), Corn wonders why they didn't write, "CIA Suggests Bush Misleads Public on Threat from Iraq." Furthermore, before Bush was "elected" and was still campaigning, "Howell Raines, then the editorial page editor of the New York Times, ordered Paul Krugman...a harsh Bush critic, not to use the word 'lie' when assailing Bush's proposals."

Clearly the print media abdicated its responsibility to inform the public. In some cases the reporters refrained from asking hard questions and from writing candid stories because they were afraid they might not get their name called during the next presidential press conference, or because they were afraid of criticism that would come from Bush's supporter. But in other cases the direction to go easy on Bush came from higher management and ownership. The press, quite frankly, in a de facto sense was not, and is not, free. I think this is one of the big problems in this country today, and it is getting worse.

Even worse is the sad state of television news where the programs are under the watchful eyes of not only Rupert Murdoch types but also the sponsors of the programs who will not tolerate the president being called a liar. Even worse the news people not only quote Bush's lies, they broadcast him telling them as mini infomercials, often without a word of contradiction or warning that what you are hearing is not the truth.

The question arises, does Bush know he is lying? Maybe he does, but believes it's for a greater good. Or maybe, since no man sees himself as a scoundrel, his hypocrisy is so self-deceptive that he doesn't realize the extent of his mendacity. Corn speculates that Bush is "a binary thinker who views the world in black-and-white terms." (p. 320) Such people inevitably fall into self-deception because the world is not just black and white, and the truth is not, you're either for us or against us. Instead the truth varies according to circumstance and point of view, and there are many shades in-between.
By the way, another even more detailed and forceful book on this exact subject with an almost identical slant is The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)Leads America (2004) by Eric Alterman and Mark Green, which I also highly recommend.

Bottom line: a no-holds-barred look at the mendacious president, a two-faced master of deception and falsification who is doing Machiavelli proud. Our only hope is that the information in this book will somehow trickle down to the larger electorate, and the truth about George W. Bush will become common knowledge.

Bob Dylan wrote "even the President of the United States should sometimes have to stand naked". David Corn's new book, The Lies of George W. Bush, tears off the clothes of the man who calls himself President, leaving nothing but a hanging chad. Make that a dimpled chad. The book accomplishes exactly what it promises to do: to effectively demonstrate that Mr. Bush is regularly deceiving the American public with lies. Mr. Corn regularly states that many Democrats are no saints when it comes to the game of politics either. However, he shows that Bush goes way beyond the realm of just playing politics - he is outright lying to the public. Hopefully this book will be read not just by those who need confirmation of their worst fears about the White House, but by the people who need to read it the most: those who don't know how to read between the lines on their own.

The Bushism's series did a great deal to undermind Bush's claim to any kind of common sense or articulatory grace. Unfortunately, it also unwittingly kept in its shadow for so very long the the other, more dangerous kind of "Bushism:" his flagrant and consistent track record of public deception. Corn's work is nothing if not a concise and astute omnibus of George W. Bushes incessant 30+ year marathon of political dishonesty. This book almost takes the form of a desk reference rather than the contemporary political thesis that many might expect from a book that shares the stand with the labors of Al Franken, James Carville, Molly Ivans and Michael Moore. And though these are all great authors and great "liberal" minds, this book digresses from the pack in one very important way. All of these other authors assemble a number of facts, string them together ins a specific way, intersperse their own commentary and draw the conclusion for the reader. Corn takes a very different approach. He presents facts. Then he presents more facts. And when fact piles on top of fact on top of fact, and so on, only someone in abject denial could avoid seeing the only logical conclusion for himself. I was tempted to dock a star on my rating for the fact that throughout the book (though especially near the beginning) Corn risks losing the reader by detailing all (and I do mean ALL) of the "little white lies" for which anyone except the alleged "angry democrat" would be willing to forgive him. However, I also understood, as you should when you buy this book, that this stalwart loyalty to the format is integral to its spirit. In the same way that a historian has a sacred responsibility to write down everything he sees (and ONLY what he sees) for generational and academic posterity, Corn was fulfilling a sacred responsibility to not only censor everything save the facts, but also to provide all the facts, pertinent or otherwise. I applaud him for being able to achieve this goal and still produce a timely, topical and readable volume for one of the most volatile election-year political climates in history.

I agree with the criticism that Mr. Corn has compiled a book when he might have achieved a more revealing synthesis.

I do not mean to play down the significance of Mr. Corn's compilation. The author documents lie after lie from sea to shining sea. Mr. Corn enables us to marvel at the vituosity of the Bush Campaign in 2000: Al Gore came off as the liar when George W. Bush was already shucking and jiving far more. The author also shows how the Bush Administration assumed, having gotten away with lying during primary and general campaigns and during the tussle over Florida, they could continue to fib and falsify with impunity.

Why did all the President's women and men presume that they could stretch and distort and prevaricate about WMD and not be held to account? Because they had yet to pay any price for any of their mendacity to date. Smash Iraq, drive Hussein underground, and who will care that the Administration was hiding its whims behind whoppers?

Still, with more insight and elbow-grease, Mr. Corn might do more than document the whoppers. First, the author might differentiate among fibs, fables, factoids, folderol, and fantasies. I know of no evidence that President Bush does not believe seven impossible things each day before breakfast. If Mr. Bush believes what he says, then he is not lying in any strong sense of the term. Mr. Corn is not making fundamental distinctions that he must make if some charges of flat-out lying are to stick.

Second, Mr. Corn might have inventoried lies beyond what he did. Does Bush lie more about domestic or foreign matters? Had he lied more about the probable effects of his tax cuts or about the probable consequences of near-unilateralism? Even some elementary categorizations beyond the obvious might have yielded insights.

Third, the author should have related the record of mendacity to context and correlates. When and where does President Bush tell flat-out lies and when and where does he tend to rely on clever phrasings and anecdotes? Does the President mislead more when the press is watching but make it up when the press is less evident?

All the above said, I believe that Mr. Corn provided a valuable service in publishing the list. I assume Mr. Corn will add to the list to make it a cumulative, dynamic reminder of just how cynical the President's handlers are and how gullible any sincere admirers of this president must be. Because I assume that Mr. Corn will augment and perhaps enhance his project, I award four stars for the book that it might become.

Author David Corn is a journalist, with contributions to the Nation, Fox News, and several influential newspapers. He has followed the actions of many important leaders during his time in the media. In this book, he presents and elaborates on some of the numerous lies told by President George W. Bush.

Corn begins this book by explaining to the reader that all U.S. presidents have done their fair share of lying and he provides examples for a few of them, making sure to cover both Republicans and Democrats so that the reader can see that he is not strictly anti- GOP. Then, he gets into the heart of the book by first presenting Bush's lies when he was governor, followed by Bush's countless lies he had told when he was a candidate for president, all the way through his first few years as president.

Corn devotes separate chapters to different areas of lying. There is a chapter or two on the Bush tax plan, one on his position on stem cell research, one on the Enron scandal, and a few others. But the topic that receives the most coverage in this book is that of the military and, more specifically, the war against Iraq. Corn shows the endless barrage of lies that came from the Bush White House during this time, starting with the fibs about the reasons to go to war (like the weapons of mass destruction claim), then leading to the grossly understated cost of the war and the dishonesty about the casualties and the peace process to rebuild the nation of Iraq.

In each chapter, Corn highlights some of the key lies in boldface text, and he places them before the paragraph that the quote appears. There are more lies in this book than just those told by George W. Bush himself. The lies include those told by other members of the Bush administration, like Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others.

Corn does an effective job in his uncovering of these many untruths and with his explanations about each lie. He presents the quote, then he backs up his claim that the quote was false by presenting other quotes and facts that directly contradict what the president or one of his team said. He manages to be respectful throughout the book (as respectful as an author can be, given the subject) and he points out that Bush has told the truth sometimes, too. But the main idea of this book is that Bush is as good of a liar as anyone who has ever held the White House and he will tell any lie necessary if it means getting what he wants.

If there is any complaint that I have about this book, it would have to be the fact that most of what it talks about is now old news. Most people already know about the deceptions and falsehoods surrounding the war against Iraq, the Bush tax plan, and other topics. Thus, for those readers who try to stay in tune with the latest political happenings, there won't be very much new to read in this book. Also, in some instances, Corn really seems to be splitting hairs. With a few of the quotes, he tries to make them out to be something far more radical than their speaker intended them to be.

I like the way Corn ends the book by presenting some possible explanations on why presidents and other politicians tell so many lies and why the media has been so soft on George W. Bush. Corn feels that journalists need to come down harder on the president and force him to admit the truth. This final chapter is good for those who want a little more insight on why lying is so commonplace and why no one does much about it, although it doesn't go very in- depth in finding an answer.

Politicians have always told lies. Nothing is going to change this fact in the foreseeable future. George W. Bush has told more than his share of presidential falsehoods and David Corn exposes many of them in this book, with analysis of each lie, along with facts and quotes to back up his assertion that George W. Bush is one of the greatest liars to ever occupy the oval office. The book isn't perfect, but Corn does present a good resource for the politically misinformed, showing how one man and his administrative team can effectively deceive and mislead the people and change the course of history in the process.

This book has certainly riled some emotions in both directions. Even my sister-in-law, one of the few "liberals" in her family, was turned off by the title, assuming the book was a diatribe from either the left or the right, of little intellectual substance. That it is not. Indeed, the book is more "conservative," i.e., giving Dubya a little more leeway than I think it should--and than some of its detractors who haven't read it think!

Sure, people will tell you, lying is the nature of politics. To that I respond first that it only is if we put up with it. Then there are degrees of lying. Bill Clinton claimed he hadn't had relations with Lewinsky; and George W. Bush said that his former buddy, Saddam Hussein, had an arsenal of weapons he didn't have. And that became the pretext for a preventive war not unlike those the Third Reich staged in Poland, etc. Which is a greater lie?

Corn starts the book with a brief explanation of why he was compelled to write it: when any Democrat--especially Al Gore--said anything even a smidgen out of line, the press attacked him like he was the biggest liar since Nixon. Yet Dubya gets away with enormous lie after enormous lie after enormous lie. Incidentally, the same seems to apply to 2004. Howard Dean--or now John Kerry--says anything and his words are dissected, scrutinized with an eagle eye. In the meantime, Rove's lieutenant Dubya spouts off repeated right-wing diatribes with nary a challenge. It makes a person wonder about the integrity of the mainstream media (nonexistent); in short, how much of what you read is composed by seasoned PR flacks (at least 60 percent.)

Each chapter discusses a particular subject on which Dubya has spewed out some off-the-scale nonsense. The first chapter is simply "A Dishonest Candidate," which covers in eye-opening detail Dubya?s blatant lies even before he ran for president. That was followed by "A Dishonest Campaign." I could go into some detail here as to what those lies are. But that would discourage you from reading the book which will be a weapon against the Bush campaign in 2004.

Each chapter is broken into specific quotes that Dubya has made--and which his actions have contradicted. Well, as I've said to many, if you read yourself to sleep at night, this isn't the book to read. It'll keep you awake, night after night.

What are your major complaints? Huge taxbreaks for the wealthy while we face a multi-trillion dollar deficit? Dubya denying any relationship with Enron's Ken Lay while the close personal and business relationship goes back for years? Childish reflections on why goblin d'jour bin Laden dislikes the old red-white-and-blue? A spoiled brat who got into the Air National Guard while waiting lists were thousands long? Then didn't show up to serve? All this and more are yours with the rhetoric of the Bush people.

Suffice it to say Corn has a lot of information to list and collate. He cleverly and appropriately refers to Bush in a few places as a "serial liar."

Corn completes the book with a question: How does Dubya get away with it? Corn goes over some of the usual accusations with which I agree. For instance, the many representing the media really are quite lazy. But some are also afraid of being locked out of the White House press corps if they challenge even some of Dubya's more blatant nonsense. That at least has more of a level of honor to it than simple laziness, that trait characteristic of the punditocracy, i.e., journalists presumed to be in-the-know because of their credentials or alleged status as a political insider.

I suppose I wish I could say more. But much has been said, and, again, more details may give too much away discouraging you from reading this fine text (and pondering the consequences of the 2004 election.)

There is much to read in the reviews, though, as many an Amazon reader will concede. I'm amused, for example, by some reviewers who'd lose to Dan Quayle in a spelling bee who spout off what they think are articulate comments on something they haven't the IQ to read. Then there's the one who brings attention to my comments--often several times in a row on one book he hasn't the capacity to read let alone understand. Love the capital letters. What he worry?

Read this fine book...AND read the negative comments. Then vote in 2004 based on abstractions like truth. You won't regret it.

We know the President lies. But what this book confirms is far deeper than that.

It is that Bush's ENTIRE RECORD consists of lies.

Consider the self-righteous indignation that greeted Clinton's lie concerning sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky...told in part to protect the office of the President and three women: Lewinsky, Hilary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton...all of whom would be damaged in their personal lives by the truth.

Clinton's record, however, is not a series of lies as is Bush's.

It is an old maxim, from Plato to Kant, that a lie is an offense against truth which damages trust. As a result of Bush's continuous lying, half the country has for its sanity to reside in a fantasy zone, as does the poster below, where his inability to use Google "proves" nothing at all.

Political views become lifestyle, more an expression of a demented personality's desire for attention than anything else.

Grammar and syntax break down, as in the case where Sen. McCain's questioning of Bush's attendance at a Bob Jones University (sic!) function becomes the accusation that MCCAIN is accusing Bush of anti-Catholicism.

The event's text is searched, in other words, for the most convenient charge by crudely rearranging words.

And, the language is damaged by even calling this "mastery".

Basing our political views on methodological individualism and not seeing how groups, including speechwriters and flaks, Manufacture Consent, Bush becomes in the language of old-fashioned mastery a perverted cynosure.

Let's see. The "losers" are men of honor like Sen. McCain and the theodicy searches their resume for "defects of character" in order to avoid the conclusion that yes indeed, there are "conspiracies", the biggest to be a takeover of all three branches of government by corporations.

"Mastery" becomes empirical and measured by the appearance of success and the approbation of fools.

But "mastery" in this context needs to be renarrated as enslavement. There are clear indications (the non-firing of Rumsfeld being one) that Bush is the willing slave of a cabal of evil men, like the Gimp in the box in the basement, in Pulp Fiction.

Needed at this juncture is not Yet Another catalog of Bush's iniquities, and frankly, Peter Singer's book The President of Good and Evil: Taking George Bush Seriously has more depth.

Instead we can usefully regard Bush as a creature of our times, and our dark desires.

For some time in America, real rats and fools have become rich and famous. Because of this, the language changes to accomodate, simultaneously, the Rat Victories and the vastly more predominate cases where Nice Guys Finish Last.

In the 1950s, Sammy Glick and Willy Loman could be narrated as ultimate Losers in the emptiness, whether of Sammy Glick's material success or Loman's failure.

The problem, as stated in the creaky and deductive philosophy of Spinoza, is clear. If we at all admire, esteem, look up to, or even suck up to a Bush clone, whether on the national stage or the office, we are asserting values that contradict our natural instinct to eat bread and salt and speak the truth.

Of course, Puritanism, with its emphasis on unredeemability for most of us smokers, perversely makes space for this admiration in which the unshriven manifest their lack of election by admiring Don Trump.

The problem here is that Bush, unlike Sen.McCain or Howard Dean, refreshing scoffers as they are, proclaims, literally, that he is saved. This is odd, because he seems to feel no need to manifest salvation by any form of charity.

The problem is that today, MOST Americans use each other and the world with a complete lack of common sense or compassion and are gradually descending, one and all, into a Moronic Inferno of psychic chaos. And, they vote.

Bush expresses that chaos in his very syntax and as such is the cynosure of the doomed.


UPDATE 2-2-2005

Thanks to the meta-reviewers for the perfect score. If the people who gave this review a *non placet* are Bush supporters then I am pitching a perfect game in a sense for I displease those who are pleased with lies, damned lies, and George Bush. Of course, to convince them to support my case would be better, and a home run, with the bases loaded, by contrast to the more austere and intellectual pleasures of the perfect game.

The lies continue. In yesterday' column, Paul Krugman shows how the set of arguments used to show that Social Security is "broken" are contradictory with respect to the collection of arguments used to show how it is that rubes, who take their money out of withholding and head for Vegas, will create a sky-high 6.5-7 percent return on equities during the same period of time...a rate of return seen only during the Internet bubble.

Of course, the attraction of such an argument is that in logic and in a sense, arguments with contradictory premises imply anything.

The lies are for many Americans a convenient total substitute for truth on which they feed for mere hope as does the California body builder on supplements alone. The whole shebang, the complete virtual reality, is headed for its next exogenous shock as a result.