Abstract

Lies...and Lies

Editorial. The article looks at lying in United States politics as of July 2004. When presidents use lies, repeated over and over, to deceive their own people, democracy is at risk. The U.S. went through a week of celebration of the life of former president Ronald Reagan--a celebration that itself was a kind of lie, since it left out any mention of Reagan's own lies during the Iran/contra crisis, which was a grave assault on the Constitution. Now another ex-President, Bill Clinton, is back in the limelight flogging his bestselling book. Clinton also misled the nation. But he was lying not on matters of war and peace, or subverting the Constitution, but about a private sexual affair. Also in the news have been the lies the President George W. Bush Administration fashioned to sell the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The latest ABC/Washington Post poll shows that 52 percent of U.S. citizens say the Iraq war was not worth fighting. Approval of Bush's campaign against terrorism has plunged, and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is running neck and neck with Bush on who can be trusted to fight terrorism. When Vice President Dick Cheney denied three times that he had claimed there was a meeting in Prague in April 2001 between 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and the head of Iraqi intelligence, he was unambiguously lying.