How Bad Is The Bush Problem?

How big is the “Bush Problem”?

As follow-up to my last post about lying presidents, I wanted to elaborate on where we need to go.

Here we sit, in 2005. We should all agree that presidents have lied throughout history. Some have lied for good things, some have lied for not-so-good things. When Bush senior lied about taxes, he did the right thing by going back on his pledge, and being fiscally conservative. When Reagan lied about things like Iran-Contra, he was probably both wrong and criminal, and we should be ashamed of him. When Clinton lied about when his zipper was up and when it was down, we should frankly be ashamed of a media that covered such a personal (if shameful) act, and do our best to judge the man on what he did for the country rather than what he did to shame his marriage. And when Bush junior continues to lie about things of such great importance as why our children are dying in Iraq, and what our real objectives in being there are, we should be shocked and ashamed. He continues to lie by failing to pay for the war – hiding the financial cost by keeping if off of the budget and refusing to ask us to pay for it, and continues to lie by failing to ask us to make the sacrifices that are a NECESSARY part of waging war, (things like a draft in order to maintain a sufficient army).

These lies he commits in order to avoid a dip in his support by the American public, and in order to maintain public support for the war. This is some of the worst sort of lying! He knows that if the American people were asked to sacrifice and pay for the war – the same way that every president in our history has done UNTIL Bush – that people would quickly begin to question why it was that we went there, and what is it that we hope to accomplish by staying. And when we ask these questions, he knows that we aren’t going to like the answers.

So he continues to lie by hiding the cost of the war, and misusing Guard and Reserve troops in order to hide the need for an army to fight a war – an army that would come from the ranks of your children and mine.

I’m no lawyer – I don’t know if these terrible lies are “criminal” or not – whether they measure up to “high crimes and misdemeanors” as defined in the constitution. If we compare his lies and omissions to the bar that we put in place by impeaching the last president because he lied about who he slept with, then impeachment for this guy would not go nearly far enough.

What I do know as an American Citizen with strong moral convictions is that what he has done and is doing is immoral, unethical, and shameful.

Without a doubt, we should fire him and anyone who has supported him. We should not fire him because he lied – they all lie. We should fire him because he is running our country into the ground!

But what would impeachment do? Do we want Cheney in the chair? I would expect him to be worse by a long shot.

No, the thing to do is to shake this mess up next year. We need to cut this bunch of liars off at the knees by removing their supporters in congress at the next election. We need to send a message to the Republican party that we are not willing to put up with liars and thieves running for office. If this means that we end up giving control of congress back to the Dems for a while until the Republican party gets the message, so be it. They can’t do a worse job than this bunch is doing.

Most of all, those of us who are truly conservative should demand that one party or the other begin running candidates that will actually run this country in a conservative manner – balancing the budget, being honest with us, maintaining a better future for our children than we have had, and keeping us out of the business of trying to run the rest of the world!