By Ken Kreps
©2004, all rights reserved
To read more articles and other works
by author Ken Kreps, visit http://www.kenkreps.com.
To send an e-mail to the author, click
here.
The Bush administration has dealt in one lie after another during their reign of error and the weight of all those lies is starting to cascade down around their shoulders.
First, Bush pushed through a huge tax cut, telling us it was going to benefit all of us. He was partially right, as it did help all of us....all of us making over $200,000 per year, that is. It was also the latchpin in wiping out the huge budget surplus inherited from the Clinton administration. Lie, lie, lie.
Next, was his famous lie that Iraq had many weapons of mass destruction
(WMDs). George Bush said we must attack Iraq before they unleashed
a massive wave of destruction against us. He and Dick Chaney also
said Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were in cahoots with each other
in the business of terrorism. In essence, Bush and Chaney said Saddam and Osama were all
part of one big terrorism network and we must strike Iraq immediately, and
that’s exactly what we did. Big surprise…no WMDS were found and no
proven links between secular Saddam and Osama, the poster boy for religious
faith gone bad, were ever established. Lie, lie, lie.
A few days ago, Osama Bin Laden left a video tape to be discovered
just before our presidential election. While it contained the usual inane
prattle from Bin Laden, it did serve to remind the American people how Bush's obsession with
Iraq has severely curtailed our efforts to either capture or kill Bin Laden. Now,
fully three years after 9/11, he is still free and still able to create his tapes of
vicious threats to the United States and to the rest of the world. Only this morning came the tragic
news
that nine more American servicemen were killed just yesterday in Iraq, during raids on their convoy.
Bush still clings to the myth that we are safer because of our invasion of Iraq while the new Bin Laden
tape and the deteriorating situation in Iraq says exactly the opposite. More lies.
In a recent debate with Democratic Party Vice Presidential Candidate,
John Edwards, Dick Chaney said he never said Osama and Saddam were
in league with each other. He further stated that he’d never met
John Edwards until their debate that night. The next day, old news clips
were shown on various news shows in which (1) Dick Chaney was saying there
was a definite connection between Osama and Saddam and (2) clips showing
him sitting in the same room as John Edwards at a dinner were also shown.
Not only was he in the same room…he was sitting right next to Edwards.
Lie, lie, lie.
George Bush said during the recent presidential debates, that he didn’t want Americans to have the right to buy their prescription drugs from Canada (at much lower prices) because he first had to make sure these drugs were safe. Apparently, the fact that Canadians weren’t dropping dead in mass after taking prescriptions purchased in Canada, wasn’t proof enough for the president. Then to compound this lie, he told the American public he was attempting to obtain large quantities of the flu vaccine from Canada to make up for the short fall of the vaccine in the United States. No mention of safety or delay was made. The truth is, Bush is in many business hip pockets and one of those pockets belongs to the pharmaceutical manufacturers. Allowing U.S citizens to buy prescription drugs in Canada would lower the already massive profits enjoyed by these companies. Lie, lie, lie.
And now we come to the Bush administration’s latest lie. It was recently reported that 380 tons (760,000 pounds) of high explosives are missing from their previous storage location in Iraq. Easy to explain says the Bush crowd…."you see they were probably missing before we invaded Iraq." That seems entirely plausible until you consider this fact. These explosives, unlike many other explosives, can be used to trigger nuclear weapons. Since we went to Iraq to find these same nuclear weapons, doesn’t it stand to reason that as soon as we discovered these explosives were missing we would have raised holy hell and mounted an extensive effort to find them? They are not WMDs, but can be used in connection with WMDs as a detonator. Yet, until the news came out that these explosives were missing, the Bush administration didn’t raise a peep about them being gone (or even mention them), even though these explosives were found to be missing just seven weeks after the fall of Baghdad. That was over a year ago and still, until this latest news about them came out, Bush’s people said nothing. Lie, lie, lie.
These examples, of course, represent only the tip of the iceberg that contains the frequent lies told by the Bush administration. Bush says he served in the Alabama National Guard for his last year of duty. Trouble is, no one remembers seeing him there. His complete guard records still have not been produced. More lies.
Bush says he stands behind the men and women in our armed forces. Apparently, he’s a lot farther behind them than he lets on. Why else would he push to cut their benefits at home while getting, to date, over 1,100 of them killed and nearly 10,000 of them wounded in Iraq? With friends like that…..well, I'm sure you’ve heard the old saying.
Bush says he is for the health and well being of all American citizens, but strongly opposes the use of embryos in stem cell research, even though this research could help cure or lessen the symptoms of many dreaded diseases. In essence, it would promote the health and well being of American citizens and others worldwide. Still more lies.
The religious right loves him for this, even though we've all been taught that lying is wrong and is a sin. Seems that lying is OK with the far right religious folks as long as it justifies their means. When Bill Clinton lied about sex, the religious right immediately began verbally pummeling him about the head and shoulders with cries of “liar”, “fornicator”, and “sinner”. Yet, George Bush starts an illegal war, gets over a thousand of our servicemen and women killed and nearly ten times that many wounded, dilutes our ability to go after the real perpetrator of 9/11, and we hear nothing from the pious religious right but silence.
When Bill Clinton lied about sex, no one died, but he nearly lost his presidency. When George Bush lied about the reasons for going to war, thousands on both sides died, and are still dying every day, yet no one mentions the I word (impeachment).
Riding a voter wave of the bible thumping, Middle America religious right, George Bush has been re-elected and is now free to stumble and bumble his way through another four years. The loser, of course in this election was not just John Kerry, but the American people. Bush is already claiming a mandate even though John Kerry received 55,000,000 votes, the highest vote count for a loser of a presidential election that has ever been recorded. This writer, for one, will not forget the massive damage Bush has already done to our country and I will continue to watch him closely and write about his future transgressions (of which there are sure to be many), as needed.
For years after the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on December 7, 1941 the cry of “Remember Pearl Harbor” rang through this nation. The reason behind that cry was so that we, as a nation, could insure that nothing like that ever happened again. I say, “Remember George Bush” and the great harm he has brought on our country, because we can never let anything like him happen again, either.
©2004 by Ken Kreps. This article may not be re-published in electronic or print media without the express written permission of the author. All rights reserved.
Ken Kreps lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife. He has written a number of published articles, essays and short stories, as well as numerous consumer and business pieces. Ken has also written scripts for Imagination Theater, an award winning audio drama series heard on over 150 commercial radio stations across the nation.