If President Bush wants to understand why skeptics reject his Social Security "reforms," he needs only look to the culture of deceit nurtured in the White House.
Within weeks of taking office in his first term in 2001, George Bush set the stage for a presidency built on broken promises, secrecy and, yes, outright falsehood.
In March 2001, he informed a bewildered Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman that he'd changed his mind and would abandon a promise of tougher carbon dioxide controls on smokestack industries.
In that moment of political treachery, Whitman also learned that Idaho's U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, always a reliable friend of polluters, had helped persuade Bush to break his word and become a patsy to electric power generation utilities.
Whitman has resigned and written a searing insider's account, "It's My Party, Too," of rightwing dogma that drives Bush policies.
In rapid order, other deceptions followed the carbon dioxide retraction that fit the dictionary definition of lies--"statements that deviate from or pervert the truth."
Medicare costs were callously understated by several hundred billion dollars to bamboozle a reluctant Congress. War in Iraq was declared over non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Promises of quick victory and troops returning home were hollow. Estimates of astronomical war costs were pooh-poohed only to become true.
War costs have been conveniently omitted from the president's budget. The Bush energy "policy" concocted by Vice President Cheney and dozens of energy industry cronies was forged in secret.
As recently as this month, more new evidence of shenanigans with facts have been revealed: the office of EPA Inspector General Nikki Tinsley found EPA brass pressured scientists to cook numbers on mercury emissions to benefit industry, and 200 scientists employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service say they've been ordered to alter findings so protection of wildlife could be reduced. Shades of Enron.
And is it mere coincidence that no color-coded terrorist alerts to jangle Americans' nerves have been sounded since President Bush's re-election?
Which brings us to the frenetic Bush campaign to panic Americans about a nonexistent Social Security crisis and convince them life would be rosier with his blueprint for investing in Wall Street.
But why should Americans believe President Bush? Americans have learned the hard way the president has hoodwinked them for four years with fiction when facts and truth wouldn't make his case.
The president and grasping men and women around him are determined to rule rather than govern. Such desperation inevitably leads to justifying any means, no matter how dishonorable, to achieve their ends.
Pat Murphy
