Wendy takes on...

...the blopic of the day and wins! (or just muses)

Monday, March 24, 2003

 
...Bush's lies.

Thank you, Mike C, for all the links. I followed each of them and read for over an hour. I did not read all the “Bush lies” on bushwatch.com, but I waded through lots of alleged untruths uttered by President Bush, members of his family and staff, and his spokespeople on that site. Here’s some of what I found (it's all from Chatterbox Timothy Noah’s Whopper of the Week on slate.com) and **what I think about it**:

Enron
"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 [italics Chatterbox's]. 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. …"
—President George W. Bush, answering reporters' questions in the Oval Office Jan. 10.

"In distancing himself from Enron, President Bush said that CEO Kenneth Lay 'was a supporter' of Democrat Ann Richards in his first race for Texas governor in 1994... But records and interviews with people involved in the Richards campaign show that he was a far bigger Bush supporter."
—Wayne Slater, "Lay Gave More To Bush," Dallas Morning News, Jan. 12.

**President Bush didn’t say that Ken Lay was never a Bush supporter. He didn’t say he supported Richards, only Richards and no Texas gubernatorial candidate but Richards. He said he was a supporter of Ann Richards. TRUE.**

Climate change
"[W]e must be very careful not to take actions that could harm consumers. This is especially true given the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change. ..."
—March 13 letter from the president to Sens. Hagel, Helms, Craig, and Roberts, explaining why he no longer favors mandatory reduction of CO2 emissions from power plants

**I would be extremely interested to see complete scientific knowledge of the causes of and solutions to global climate change. I spent a great deal of time looking for such scientific knowledge when I was writing about global climate change for the environmental education program I founded in the Czech Republic.**

Taxes
"Most small businesses pay at the 39.6 percent rate."
—President George W. Bush, in a March 22 speech to the National Newspaper Association.

From the Department of Treasury's Office of Public Affairs, March 16, 2001:
From these data it is evident that at least 17.4 million small business owners and entrepreneurs, many of whom currently pay at the 39.6% rate, stand to benefit from the President's tax relief plan. The President's proposal reduces all marginal tax rates, including a reduction in the top rate to 33%.

**Okay, I didn’t bother to reading the entire report. I don’t know if most small businesses pay at the 39.6% rate or not. I know that “many” does not equal “most”. This is an example of President Bush not doing his homework. This is not, however, enough to prove that he lied and I've done enough homework already.**

New York
"I love New York."
—George W. Bush, after swearing in 29 new U.S. citizens on Ellis Island, as quoted in the July 10 Washington Post.

"Mr. Bush has been heard to say privately that he cannot stand New York."
—Editorial in the New York Times, July 10.

**Heard by whom? Have we made any distinctions between New York the state and New York the city? Sorry. Not enough for me. I’m sure he does love New York at least as a symbol of America being a place for people from all over the world who seek an opportunity to live a life of relative liberty.**

**I love Prague. I truly do. But I couldn’t stand that city when I left. I will go back and I will enjoy it, but I needed to get away for a while and I don’t want to live there forever.**

Leadership and polls
"A leader is somebody who is willing to take positions based on principle, not polls or focus groups."
—George W. Bush, as quoted by Bob Kemper in the Chicago Tribune, Oct. 29, 2000.

**Not a lie. Not a lie. Not a lie. This is TRUE, TRUE, TRUE. If you disagree, I, for one, won’t be following you anywhere.**

"A Washington Monthly analysis of Republican National Committee disbursement filings revealed that Bush's principal pollsters received $346,000 in direct payments in 2001. Add to that the multiple boutique polling firms the administration regularly employs for specialized and targeted polls and the figure is closer to $1 million."
—Joshua Green, "The Other War Room," in the Washington Monthly, April 2002.

**Here, Chatterbox has apparently inferred that President Bush was saying that he doesn't make decisions based on polls. That's not what he said. He was defining a leader, the kind he aspires to be. Besides, there are many reasons for polling that have NOTHING to do with making decisions in conflict with principles. I will not go into them here. I’ll write another blog entry about this specific issue.**

[Update, 4/8: Many readers have written in to point out that the Monthly article reports that "while Clinton used polling to craft popular policies, Bush uses polling to spin unpopular ones." But Chatterbox doesn't really believe that Bush uses polling only to sell already- formulated policies; he thinks Bush also uses polling the way other politicians do, i.e., to help figure out what his position should be in the first place. (The alternative—that Bush, for instance, recently made the glaringly unmeritorious policy decision to impose quotas on foreign steel because he thought it was the right thing to do—is too horrible to contemplate.)]

**Issue 1 – Polling: It is possible that Bush uses polling to see whether certain strategies for presenting his positions have worked in winning public support. This is a good way to decide when to change tack on presenting a position. Again, I will get into this in detail in another blog, even though I don’t think most of my readers really need me to explain any of this to them.**

**Issue 2 – steel quotas: Ghastly. One of my first MAJOR disappointments in the Bush administration.**

Education
"I signed a really good education bill. I want to share it with you because it's your responsibility, by the way, to make sure the citizens in this community get educated. …In return for federal money we have said, show us, New Hampshire. You show us. You show us whether our children are learning to read and write and add and subtract. You chart the path to excellence, and you measure. In return for the biggest increase in education spending in a long, long time, we expect every child to be educated."
—President George W. Bush, in an Oct. 5 speech at the National Guard Armory in Manchester, N.H.

"In fact, the 15.8 percent increase in Department of Education discretionary spending for fiscal year 2002 (the figures the White House supplied when asked about Bush's statement) was below the 18.5 percent increase under Clinton the previous year—and Bush had wanted a much smaller increase than Congress approved. "
—Dana Milbank, "For Bush, Facts Are Malleable" in the Oct. 22 Washington Post

[Mathematical literacy note, Oct. 28: Many readers have written in to point out that if you add 18.5 percent of X to X, and then add to that sum (call it Y) 15.8 percent of Y, the numeric increase will be greater the second time around, even though the percentage increase was smaller. That's because you started from a higher base. Ergo, Bush told the truth if he was talking about the dollar increase in education spending. But in budgetary arithmetic, when you talk about the size of a spending increase, it's understood that you're talking about the percentage increase. So Bush's assertion is still a whopper.]

**Budgetary arithmetic? “Bush told the truth if he was talking about the dollar increase in education spending.” Thank you.**

**Also, please not that Bush didn't say that he has increased the education budget more than it's ever been increased in history. He says what he expects for in return. Maybe he was alluding to an even greater increase in the future? I didn't hear the speech in its entirety.**

**As to Bush having wanted a smaller increase than Congress approved, I don’t doubt it and I’m sure he wouldn’t deny it. The quote Chatterbox has called a “whopper” starts with “I signed a really good education bill,” not “I personally pushed really hard for every single dollar in the education bill.”**

Middle East
"Somebody told me there's a story floating around that somehow I am blaming the Clinton administration for what's going on in the Middle East right now. … I appreciate what President Clinton tried to do. He tried to bring peace to the Middle East."
—George W. Bush, at an April 6 press conference in Crawford, Texas with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"Well, we've tried summits in the past, as you may remember. It wasn't all that long ago where a summit was called and nothing happened, and as a result we had significant intifada in the area."
—George W. Bush, in an interview with Britain's ITV, as reported by the Associated Press's Ron Fournier on April 5.

**This is NOT President Bush blaming President Clinton, President Carter, or anyone else for problems in the Middle East. This is President Bush saying that Israeli-PLO summits have yet to end a violent dispute. NOT a lie.**

**There’s so much more, but you all see where I’m going, don’t you? I’m still waiting for someone to “ give me an example of a lie President Bush has told.” I'm sure he hasn't lived up to every single one of his campaign promises. I don't think he's beyond reproach. I just want a clear example of a lie he has told.**
Wendy 11:19 PM