I did not have torture with that woman, Ms. Rice

Bush's speech claiming that the "US does not torture" was a preposterous lie in many other ways as well. Kevin Drum lays out a few of the torture techniques used. He doesn't mention the prisoners who were tortured to death, including some who were clearly innocent.

The calculate dishonesty exists at every level: the lumping of anybody he might have a gripe with as "islamofascists" is particularly infuriating from the guy who let the 911 perpetrators escape so he could attack Iraq. Even more cynical is:

Then came Mr. Bush, who used a speech to the same audience to lump disparate groups together as “Islamo-fascists,’’ and then, this week, to warn explicitly that the world had averted its eyes to the rise of Lenin and then of Hitler, propelling the United States into a century of hot and cold wars.

(New York Times)
The references to appeasing Hitler and Lenin would be funny if Americans knew a bit of their history: That both sides of the Bush-Walker clan worked as bankers to Hitler, supplying resources for Germany's re-armament. Meanwhile, their colleagues and collaborators Percy Rockefeller and Averell Harriman were also banking on the Soviet Union.

This President is a liar. His policies are built on lies and corruption, and his many failures reek of both. The 9/11 disaster, the catastrophic mismanagement of the war in Iraq, the ruinous deficits, the bumbling in New Orleans were all propelled as much by profiteering and corruption as by stupidity. Our stupid policies in Iraq owe a lot to the corrupt shenanigans of the Defense Policy board and Chalabi as they do to native stupidity.

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