An actor, trying to be self-effacing during his acceptance of a Golden Globe Award the other night, said the votes must have been counted in Florida, and the Hollywood audience tittered as expected. Everyone understood the reference — Florida is where George W. Bush stole the 2000 presidential election from Al Gore.
He did no such thing, of course. It’s one of the three big lies about President Bush told along with hundreds of smaller ones as ideologically driven critics have attempted to persuade the public that he is another Hitler, a war criminal, a total, utter, heartless, incurious incompetent, the least able person ever to sit in the Oval Office.
To make the case, these critics repeatedly turn their backs on in-your-face facts, such as how Democratic judges of the Florida Supreme Court had called for a selective, Gore-favored recount using nonuniform standards in the 2000 election. It was so flagrantly unjust a decision that the U.S. Supreme Court had little choice but to intervene, with seven justices outvoting two others in saying this travesty shall not fly.
The vote was closer when the court then ruled the existing count would stand because of a constitutional deadline, but this we now know owing to a careful and seemingly irrefutable study: If there had been the kind of recount the Florida judges arrogantly and anti-democratically had opted for, Gore would still have lost.
So that’s Big Lie Number One. Big Lie Number Two is that the Bush tax cuts favored the rich when anyone willing to look at the numbers can easily discover that the best-off Americans ended up paying a higher share of income tax than previously and that the middle class and the least remunerated workers among us received significant benefits. Some of those repeating this fiction may not know any better, but those conducting the choir absolutely do.
Big Lie Number Three — that Bush knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when using that as a reason for war — requires its perpetrators to ignore others who had made the claim: President Clinton and top officials in his administration, intelligence agencies in the United States, France, Britain and elsewhere and liberal senators who had access to U.S. intelligence.
Saddam Hussein himself wanted us to believe he had these weapons, and said as much before his execution. We now know that he was bribing his way out of sanctions, had the ability to reconstitute many of his WMD programs, and was refusing to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors before the invasion.
Bush had little choice but to do what he did, and a liberal Democrat sitting in his place may well have done the same, as the historian Arthur Herman has persuasively argued.
And by the way, it would have been illogical in the extreme for the Bush administration to have made up the story about WMD when it would then have to have known it would be caught.
There’s plenty of room to have at a retiring Bush and attack many of his policies, even to accuse him of playing politics on some issues, as most politicians do. But it’s a disservice to both our democracy and basic human decency to engage in the kind of virulent, endless, hateful overstatement and misstatement that too many of his critics so enjoy.
More than Bush’s own missteps, they have brought the public to at least an approximation of their point of view, but the truth is the truth, it is out there, it can be found, and those who really care about it will at some point discover it.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington, D.C., opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at [email protected].
