Democrats and Republicans and Washington media walk on eggshells when characterizing the reprehensible conduct and policies of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. They dodge using accurate, more descriptive words that're commonplace among ordinary folks outside the nation's capital.
Such as "liars."
It was one thing to lie about Saddam Hussein's nonexistent doomsday weapons and still another to lie about the real costs of the Iraq war.
But it's quite another when the president who claims Jesus as his inspiration and invokes the name of God at every turn lies about the most disgusting, wanton program of his reign.
"We do not torture," the president insists with all the contrived sincerity of a carnival snake oil salesman.
Except for the 30 percent "base" of rightwing lemmings that swallow anything George Bush claims, Americans long ago gave up believing Bush or his agents.
Now, the most damning of all evidence of this presidency's impeachable offenses has been unmasked in a three-month investigation by The New York Times. The administration claimed to have ended a well-documented program of kidnapping and torture of terror "suspects" in foreign jails, but the Times' reporting revealed that the black art of tyrants had been resumed with secret legal rulings by Bush's lackluster and disgraced former attorney general, Alberto Gonzales.
Of course, Bush will not share these documents with Congress. He vouches for the legality of detainee treatment because Gonzales, with the help of Cheney, simply redefined torture to be non-torture.
For generations, U.S. presidents of conscience denounced the brutality of overseas regimes that confined prisoners without legal counsel and without charges in secret prisons and dungeons--such as Soviet despot Josef Stalin's Siberian gulags--as immoral and inhumane.
Bush, Cheney and unthinkably cruel interrogators hired by the CIA have reduced the United States to just another regime that inflicts pain and debasing treatment on humans in the deranged belief that torture will lead to confessions useful in the war on terror.
U.S. reporters and our Iraqi ally also have exposed another atrocious Bush-Cheney policy: outsourcing security in Iraq to anything-goes gunslingers of private security firms. The most notorious of these, Blackwater, has been accused of employing trigger-happy guards that shoot unarmed and innocent Iraqis. The fact that Blackwater's founder is a favored political campaign donor perhaps explains White House indifference.
Instead of calming troubled Middle East waters among Muslims, Bush-Cheney policies of overt brutality and mistreatment of Muslim prisoners plus mercenaries mowing down innocent Iraqis have only blackened the already darkened U.S. reputation abroad and helped al-Qaeda recruit more insurgents to step up the street war against American troops.
