More Dishonesty from Bush in State of Union

President Bush riddled his State of the
Union speech with dishonest presentations, and he failed to adequately
address the crucial issues facing this country.

The number of attacks against U.S. forces and Iraqi army and police went up last year.

Casualties keep mounting, with 2,237 U.S. soldiers killed and more
than 16,000 wounded. The casualties among Iraqi civilians are
magnitudes higher.

‘We’re on the offensive in Iraq,’ Bush said. But U.S. troops increasingly are retreating to fortified bases.

We are ‘continuing reconstruction efforts,’ Bush said, though the
United States has diverted much of the money earmarked for
reconstruction and used it instead for security purposes (that is, when
the money wasn’t squandered or skimmed).

And, as he is wont to do when he is losing ground, Bush conjured up
the image of bin Laden, saying that Osama and Zarqawi would take over
that ‘strategic country’ if the United States were to pull out suddenly.

This, too, is a falsehood.

‘There is no threat of a government run by Al Qaeda or sympathetic
to it taking over Iraq, or even parts of Iraq, once the Americans
leave,’ writes reporter Nir Rosen, who has spent many months there. In
a trenchant piece in the current issue of the Boston Review,
Rosen notes that the Shiites in the south control the army and the
Kurds in the north have a powerful militia, and neither of them is in
league with Al Qaeda. Quite the contrary. And even ‘the indigenous
Sunni, who constitute the majority of the resistance, are fierce Iraqi
nationalists. . . . Once the Americans leave and the Sunnis are taking
part in the government, which they will no longer view as
collaborationist, they will have no common cause with foreign
mujahideen, only a conflict of interests that will be quickly and
violently solved, resulting in no more foreign fighters enjoying Iraqi
hospitality.’

On the NSA spying scandal, Bush was even more dishonest.

He said: ‘If there are people inside our country who are talking
with Al Qaeda, we want to know about it because we will not sit back
and wait to be hit again.’

But no one is suggesting that the United States ‘sit back.’

All critics want is for Bush to follow the law and to go to the FISA
court to get a warrant to wiretap that call. The FISA court has granted
99.997 percent of Bush’s requests for such warrants. What’s so hard
about asking for a warrant?

But Bush pretended in his speech, just as he has in his actions,
that the FISA law doesn’t even exist. He didn’t mention it at all. He
did say his actions are justified both by the Constitution and by
‘statute,’ but the only statute that explicitly deals with wiretapping
specifies that a FISA warrant is the ‘exclusive means’ by which
domestic wiretapping can occur. (Bush’s lawyers cite Congress’s
authorization of military force against Al Qaeda, but that is a
specious argument, since Bush wanted to include in that authorization
some language that would have given him the power to do warrantless
wiretapping, and Congress refused to go along with that, as former
Senator Tom Daschle has noted.)

Bush also said that ‘appropriate members of Congress have been kept informed,’ but the Congressional Research Service
studied this question and concluded that Bush did not fully inform the
intelligence committees and thus acted in a way ‘inconsistent with the
law.’

On Iran, though pundits have been saying Bush was less bellicose
than he could have been (now there’s a standard!), he did hiss: ‘The
nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear
weapons,’ he said.

And then the snake began to rattle: ‘Let me speak directly to the
citizens of Iran: America respects you, and we respect your country. We
respect your right to choose your own future and win your own freedom.

Our nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran.’

‘One day’ is not exactly comforting, and Bush said similar things to
the people of Iraq in the lead up to the invasion of that country.

On the economy, Bush said it was ‘healthy and vigorous.’ But American workers would beg to differ.
They’ve seen their real wages fall 0.8 percent last year, and total
compensation (including health benefits) fell, as well, by 0.2 percent.

Wages and benefits are simply not keeping up with inflation.

Bush said that ‘America has created 4.6 million new jobs’ in the
last two-and-a-half years. But what he didn’t say was ‘recent job gains
lag far behind historical norms,’ as the Economic Policy Institute notes.

Bush is like a doctor who knows how to write only one prescription:
tax cuts for the rich. When the economy is strong, he proposes tax cuts
for the rich. When the economy is weak, he proposes tax cuts for the
rich. And so in his State of the Union address, he proposed more tax
cuts for the rich.

And he coupled that with a pledge to reduce ‘the growth of
non-security discretionary spending.’ This is government spending that
actually goes toward helping meet some of the crying needs of our
society. Bush wants none of that.

On health care, he had all of two paragraphs, and they amounted to
nothing. He said he wanted to strengthen health savings accounts, but
as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
notes, tax breaks for these accounts will be ‘targeted primarily to
higher-income taxpayers who would have new tax sheltering opportunities
and potentially new tax breaks to cover out-of-pocket medical costs.
The majority of Americans would get little (or nothing) from these tax
breaks.’

What’s more, according to the center, this proposal may actually
increase the number of the uninsured, which now totals 45 million
Americans.

Bush proposed absolutely nothing about another crucial issue: and
that’s the need for campaign finance reform. As Republicans in Congress
quiver over Jack Abramoff’s singing, and as it becomes clearer by the
day that our legislature is up for sale, Bush didn’t go near the only
solution to this problem: full public financing of campaigns.

He also barely mentioned the word the environment. How could he,
when he’s been freeing up one industry after another to pollute? How
could he, when he’s sabotaged every international effort to do
something serious about global warming?

He did wake up to the fact that America is ‘addicted to oil.’

It’s about time.

He’s done nothing about this for five years, with Cheney saying,
back in 2001, that conservation is a lifestyle choice and that we’ll be
as dependent on foreign oil in 2020 as we were in the year 2000.

Yes, we are addicted to oil, but Bush is not making us go to Oil
Guzzlers Anonymous, he’s not making us pay more for our drug, he’s not
forcing those who make the chief drug-dispensing devices, cars and
SUVS, to stop loading their products with engines that abuse this drug.

And that’s the biggest hypocrisy of all.

His energy bill last year did nothing to raise the fuel-efficiency
standards on Detroit. Amazingly, our fuel standards are now lower than
China’s! Our fuel economy standards in 2005 are 21 miles a gallon for
all cars and SUVs. In 1987, they were 22.1 miles a gallon. We’ve been
going in reverse. And when the energy bill was up last year,
Republicans in Congress not only voted down Democratic amendments to
increase fuel-efficiency standards, they actually made it more
difficult to raise those standards in the future.

For a President who has been so openly hostile to science, Bush
turned around and stressed the importance of basic research and the
teaching of science and math in the classroom. Then he turned around
again and demanded the prohibition of ‘human cloning in all its forms,’
citing God: ‘Human life is a gift from our Creator.’

Throughout his speech, he soaked up the applause. But he revealed
his hostility to free speech and dissent when he bristled at Democratic
taunting on Social Security and when he juxtaposed, in the Iraq War
context, ‘responsible criticism’ with ‘defeatism.’

Power has gone to his head.