The Great Silence
by paradox
Our national psychosis of accepting political lying crumpled to a sickening new low last week as the President repeatedly lied in his press conference about comity with majority Democrats, even as he gave them the finger behind his back by sending John Bolton’s nomination back to the Senate.
The buzz in the blogs was that Bush admitted right to reporters that he was and is a rank liar, almost an irritating development as the rare mainstream media reports after that incredible press conference Bush is a liar and actually used the word, l-i-e-d.
Well? Bush is breathing, for chrissakes, of course he’s lying, he’s been lying since the Gore debates about social security while Gore had to take it and the media giggled that “sighs matter.” Anything else?
Bush admits it right to their faces because he’s been rankly lying about anything and everything ever since he ran for president and never, not once, paid a penalty for it. Think about it carefully—for anyone else a public admission of lying would be absolutely devastating on a professional and personal level.
Sorry, dear, I lied about sleeping with that perky admin half your age. No big, right? Yeah, boss, I said I delivered all those parts when I actually drank beer for two hours. So?
But for George Bush implacable rules of life just vanish, so he doesn’t care, admit it right out loud on the record, why not? This horrifying national psychosis—words chosen with great attention—was very carefully and deliberately enabled by The Washington Post as they scrubbed their stories to hide the lying.
It’s one thing never to write or mention the President is a liar, quite another to have it codified in their own archives with Bush’s own quotes. That would never do, oh no.
There are even greater obfuscations of truth about Bush, even more layers of denial and obdurate silence from The Washington Post and the media about Bush’s chronic psychotic lying, with the truth just as plainly and starkly present as last week’s open admissions to mendacity.
Bush is a crook. A felon. A total criminal in every possible sense of the definition, our boy from Texas would instantly be shipped to a penitentiary by Christmas if the country wasn’t so sick.
The FISA statue codifies spying upon Americans without a warrant is a felony. One can even spy on an American for three days without a warrant if it’s urgent, but within 72 hours a warrant must be obtained. Warrants were never turned down in the past under FISA, the law worked well.
Bush broke it repeatedly, lied about it repeatedly, and is a felon as surely as the thousands of cons sleeping in San Quentin this very second. As constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald writes:
“It is worth remembering that a federal court has already ruled his eavesdropping program to be both unconstitutional and in violation of the criminal law…”
It should be screamingly obvious why it’s so sick and dangerous to enable a liar as The Washington Post did last week: it produces felons who knowingly inflict great harm, crime and death upon our people. Precisely the same roaring calamity that would occur in our personal lives if we lived in denial and lied repeatedly.
Now that calamity and uproar has been unleashed upon the country: horrifying quagmire lying war, screaming debt of unholy scope, Bill of Rights trashed, global hatred and mistrust.
This is what criminals and felons do. It remains a matter of debate and the future if Bush is ever locked up for his crimes, but the fact implacably, undeniably remains that Bush is a felon. A criminal.
The Washington Post and the rest of the media will never say so, but the Senate FISA hearings by Leahy in January will. After weeks of pounding home the truth, day after day, Leahy will force the reality of Bush’s criminality irrevocably forward. It seems impossible that the national media will continue this sick game of lying, hiding and denial at that point, but they just might. After the Post scrubbed their files last week nothing, obviously, is too low for the American “journalism” corps.