Texas two-step

Look at the misdeeds and misdoings of the Bush Administration, and a pattern emerges, time and again. There is the lie, and there is the lie about the lie. There is the incompetence, and there is the incompetent response to the incompetence.

There is the crime, and there is the cover-up.

This pattern holds in cases as diverse as intelligence abuse, Plame-gate, Katrina and its aftermath, and numerous instances throughout the Iraqi war and occupation. But, perhaps, case one in the list of lies told by President Bush are the lies told to Congress in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq—because lying to Congress is an impeachable offence.

Murray Waas writes this week of two instances—with regard to the “aluminum tubes” and with regard to the threat Saddam Hussein posed to the United States, either directly or through aiding terrorists—where Bush was told, in advance of his public statements to the contrary, that intelligence did not support the administration’s position. Waas reports on two classified documents that prove on paper that Bush knowingly lied in his 2003 State of the Union (an on numerous other occasions) while fanning the flames for war.

Waas also details how other officials, such as Condi Rice, lied afterwards when claiming the President had never seen these classified reports.

Whether you believed in the necessity of invading Iraq or not, it is incontrovertible that you can’t go to war in this way—a president can’t lie to Congress, period. And, whether you support the war or not, it is hard to deny that it is, at present, going very badly. Can anyone trust these habitually dishonest leaders—the liar-in-chief, himself—to help it go any better?