I spent some time today--okay, a bit too much time--researching the history of Bush's dishonesty since the presidential campaign to today, and put it all together in a letter which I sent to a number of members of the press, both sympathetic and not to our viewpoint. Here's what I came up with, for your amusement and/or information:

It’s likely that every president lies once in a while, about matters large or small. Whether it’s Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” or Ronald (The Great Prevaricator) Reagan, for whom even his own military service was grounds for untruth, we can all find examples of lying in the White House.

But George W. Bush is working hard on being the champion presidential liar, and the Washington press corps, with occasional exceptions, seem inclined to let him achieve that lofty goal. There are times when it appears that he is unable to speak the truth if there’s a lie that he can wrap his mangled syntax around. And unlike some previous speakers of half truth (or none at all), Mr. Bush’s lies tend to be about matters of serious national import, issues that affect all Americans.

What follows is just a short list of some notable whoppers. I haven’t bothered to compile lies told on his behalf, by folks like Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and other administration sources, except for a few by Ari Fleischer who confirmed that anything he says has been approved by Bush and reflects his views. Mr. Bush is quite capable of holding the throne with no help from those lesser imaginations that surround him.

Perhaps it’s time for the press corps to start questioning the man a bit more closely—at least, those of you for whom access is limited anyway have nothing to lose, and an honest, informed nation to gain.

Inarguably the most important national event in many years were the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Even about these attacks, Bush has famously lied.

In a press conference on that afternoon, Ari Fleischer was specifically asked about warnings. From the White House transcript comes this exchange:

Q Had there been any warnings that the President knew of?

MR. FLEISCHER: No warnings.

Mr. Bush repeated this basic mantra until earlier this year, when it was learned that, in fact, there were dozens, if not hundreds, of warnings, all of which went ignored.

Mr. Bush’s account of the morning of the attacks is also a model of misinformation. In a CNN transcript from December 4, 2001, he remembered it this way.

“Well, Jordan, you're not going to believe what state I was in when I heard about the terrorist attack. I was in Florida. And my chief of staff, Andy Card—actually I was in a classroom talking about a reading program that works. And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower—the TV was obviously on, and I use to fly myself, and I said, ‘There's one terrible pilot.’ And I said, ‘It must have been a horrible accident.’ But I was whisked off there—I didn't have much time to think about it, and I was sitting in the classroom, and Andy Card, my chief who was sitting over here walked in and said, ‘A second plane has hit the tower. America's under attack.’”

Never mind the sheer confusion of this account—is he inside the classroom? Is he outside? Who knows? But there are numerous instances in this single paragraph of Bush’s predilection for prevarication, so let’s start at the top. He really was in Florida, inside or outside a classroom. But if he was inside the classroom talking, the TV wasn’t on. If he was outside a classroom, it’s unlikely, though not impossible, that a TV would have been on. The first plane hitting the tower was not shown on TV, though, until well after the second plane hit, when some amateur footage of the first attack was located. So he couldn’t have seen the planes hit the tower in order. Maybe he did make a joke about the pilot’s abilities—as we’ve seen, he’s fairly notorious for finding humor in the death and misfortune of others. But it seems unlikely, since we now know that he had been briefed about possible terrorist attacks, with airplanes used as weapons, and surely would have suspected from the moment it happened what the real story was.

The New York Times, on September 12, had a very different description of Mr. Bush’s morning:

“Mr. Bush was informed that a plane had hit the World Trade Center in a telephone conversation with Ms. Rice shortly before walking into a second-grade classroom at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla. White House officials said he knew only that it was a single aircraft and not necessarily a terrorist attack. The president did not appear preoccupied until a few moments later, around 9:05 a.m., when his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., entered the room and whispered into the president's ear about the second plane attack. At that moment Mr. Bush's face became visibly tense and serious.”

In response to the terror attacks, Bush promised to provide $20 billion to New York City for emergency aid. Congress appropriated the $20 billion immediately. The administration has only sent $9.8 billion and now says New York isn't getting the rest.

While September 11 can’t be blamed exclusively for the economic problems that were already under way at that time, Bush continues to try to pretend that the terror attacks are the sole reason for the sour economy. On this lie, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post did some excellent reporting on June 24, 2002: “President Bush often tells the story these days about the time, during the campaign, when he vowed he would keep the federal budget balanced unless the nation found itself in a war, a national emergency or a recession. ‘Never did I dream we'd have a trifecta,’ Bush then says, to audience laughter. Sometimes, he adds that he made this statement to a reporter while campaigning in Chicago.

“Problem is, nobody can find evidence that he actually said this during the campaign. (In fact, Bush often said his tax cut could be done without causing a deficit even in a downturn.) The New Republic magazine first pointed out the problem, and NBC's Tim Russert earlier this month told Bush budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. that NBC could find no evidence Bush said such a thing. Daniels replied that he's ‘not the White House librarian.’

“A group called Spinsanity did some library research of its own and found that the president, who first mentioned the mysterious Chicago campaign interview last Oct. 3, has used the ‘trifecta’ joke at least 13 times since Feb. 27—even after Russert put Daniels on the spot—and the war, emergency and recession lines another two dozen times. But Spinsanity found no recorded mentions from the campaign.

“Asked about this, the White House press office referred your correspondent to a Sept. 6, 2001, Bush appearance at the White House with President Vicente Fox of Mexico. ‘I have repeatedly said the only time to use Social Security money is in times of war, times of recession or times of severe emergency,’ Bush said. That was before war and emergency, but already in an economic downturn—and it was well after the campaign.

“The White House also suggested supporting evidence might be found in GOP presidential primary debates on Jan. 7 and Jan. 10, 2000. But a search of the transcripts of those debates finds no exculpatory information.”

September 11, obviously, is not the only topic on which Mr. Bush considers his version of things to be more true than the truth. Last year he decided, by presidential fiat, to overturn the Presidential Records Act, the law that Congress passed and Reagan signed to initiate into action giving relatively unrestriced access to presidential papers. This came after he held back the lawful scheduled release of the first batch of Reagan Presidential papers by several months. According to USA Today on November 11, 2001, “Both Bush and his staff pretend they're increasing access to the documents. In introducing the rules, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that under existing law and procedures a former president has the right to withhold any documents for any reason. ‘But thanks to the executive order more information will be forthcoming,’ he said. That's true only if you pretend that the 1978 law isn't already in effect, implemented through Reagan's executive order.”

Does global warming exist? Yes and no, according to Mr. Bush, but mostly no. He unilaterally withdrew from the Kyoto Accord, saying the issue needed more study, despite the fact that virtually every serious scientist on the planet has already declared that it’s a major problem. Then his administration released a study saying the exact same thing. Bush distanced himself from that Environmental Protection Agency's report, saying, “I read the report put out by the bureaucracy.” If you suspect that Bush didn’t actually read the 268 page report, you’re right. Ari Fleischer has since confessed that ‘Whenever presidents say they read it, you can read that to be he was briefed.’ By “presidents” we may assume that Fleischer means ones for whom he’s worked, since known policy wonk Bill Clinton probably did read a goodly share of the reports that crossed his desk.

Enron, of course, continues to be an embarrassment for Mr. Bush, although perhaps not as much of one as it would be it the press corps did their job and really investigated the ties between the scandalized company and the president’s political career. Bush, of course, tried to pull off his own version of “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” denying that he and Ken Lay had been in bed together since 1978.

“He was a supporter of Ann Richards in my run in 1994,” Bush said. “And she did name him the head of the Governor's Business Council, and I decided to leave him in place just for the sake of continuity. And that's when I first got to know Ken and worked with Ken, and he supported my candidacy."

The Houston Chronicle begs to differ. “But Texans for Public Justice, an Austin-based campaign finance reform organization, said Lay and Enron financially favored Bush in the 1994 race and said Bush had "revised history."

The group said Richards received $12,500 from Enron sources during the 1994 election cycle. But contributions from Enron's political committee and executives totaled $146,500 for Bush, including $47,500 directly from Lay and his wife, Linda.”

In fact, there has been no company that has given Bush more money throughout his political career than Ken Lay’s Enron. Lay first contributed to Bush during his failed run for Congress in 1978. He donated $100,000 to Bush’s gubernatorial campaign. During the Presidential campaign of 2000, he allowed Bush to use a corporate jet for campaign travel, and Enron donated $100,000 to Bush’s inaugural committee. Lay and CEO Jeffrey Skilling tossed in $100,000 of their own—each.

When PBS’s “Frontline” asked Lay about Bush on March 27, 2001, Lay said, “When Governor Bush, now President Bush, decided to run for the governor’s spot, [there was] a little difficult situation. I’d worked very closely with Ann Richards also, the four years she was governor. But I was very close to George W. and had a lot of respect for him, had watched him over the years, particularly with reference to dealing with his father when his father was in the White House and some of the things he did to work for his father, and so did support him.”

Mr. Bush has sung the praises of tax cuts his whole political life, but he has been less-than-forthright about the costs associated with them, and who benefits. According to Paul Krugman of the New York Times, on August 8, 2001, “Dishonesty in the pursuit of tax cuts is no vice. That, in the end, will be the only way to defend George W. Bush's deceptions. Let's remember the way the debate ran during the spring. Back in May, The New Republic's cover showed a picture of Mr. Bush, with the headline ‘He's Lying.’ Inside were two articles about the tax cut. One, by Jonathan Chait, showed that—contrary to administration claims—the tax cut would mainly go to the richest few percent of the population. The other was an excerpt from my own book ‘Fuzzy Math,’ refuting the administration's claims that it could cut taxes, increase military spending, provide prescription drug coverage and still avoid dipping into the Social Security surplus. The New Republic cover caused much tut-tutting; the magazine's editors were accused of hyperbole, of rabble-rousing. But the headline was a simple statement of fact. Mr. Bush was lying. It was obvious from the start that the administration's numbers didn't add up. And in case you were wondering, the administration is still lying. I could explain at length how the Office of Management and Budget has cooked the books so that it can still claim a surplus outside of Social Security over the next two years. But here's an easy way to see that the numbers are bogus: O.M.B. claims that the budget will show a surplus of $1 billion this year, and another $1 billion next year. Ask yourself how likely it is that revenues and outlays in a $2 trillion budget would line up that exactly. Then ask yourself how likely it is that they would line up that exactly two years in a row. The O.M.B. numbers are the result of desperate backing and filling—shift some revenue from this year to next year, then move some of it back, then change accounting rules that have been in place for 65 years, then bump up the estimate of economic growth—all so that the administration can pretend that it is keeping its promise.”

The opposition charge about Bush’s proposed tax cut had always been that 40% of the benefit went to the wealthiest 1% of population. Bush usually claimed that wasn't true (more on that in a moment), but when the budget was finally released, with it all down in black and white, Paul O'Neill and Mitch Daniels went out to sell it to Congress and the public. They echoed Bush's claim, and the White House even released a much-vaunted chart explaining the “truth.”

But the title showed you why it seemed to support the administration's claim—it only showed the tax burden, by income, through 2005. As you'll remember if you read through the info on the Bush plan, many of the biggest cuts didn't take effect until 2006. There was also a little footnote explaining that the estimations excluded cuts in estate tax and R&E credit. How honest is it to release a document purporting to explain tax cuts, when that selfsame document chooses not to include all the data?

Speaking of the tax cut, during the debates Al Gore made that same 40% to 1% claim, and Bush accused him of exaggerating. The next morning, on Good Morning America, I was stunned to see Charlie Gibson interviewing Bush, and he asked Bush if the 40% to 1% statistic really was accurate, and Bush said that it was. But then, the next time it came up in debate, he was denying it. As we now know, it was right all along.

Speaking of the debates, he threw out some whoppers there.

He claimed that Gore was planning to add 200 new federal programs and 20,000 new federal employees. In fact, that number didn't come from Gore's own proposals, it turned out, but from a report by the Republicans (not even the full committee) on the Senate Budget Committee—who confessed that they had not bothered to do a similar report on Bush's own economic plans.

Bush claimed that Gore had outspent him during the campaign. Blatant lie—Bush had spent far more ($93 million)in the primaries than Gore ($46 million) or any candidate in history, and he outspent Gore overall.

Maybe he “misspoke” here but it's pretty lame excuse: “I've had a record of appointing judges in the state of Texas. That's what a governor gets to do. A governor gets to name Supreme Court judges."

No, in Texas during his governorship, judges, even Supreme Court judges, were elected.

During a debate, he claimed, “I do support a national patients' bill of rights. As a matter of fact, I brought Republicans and Democrats together to do just that in the state of Texas, to get a patients' bill of rights through. It requires a different kind of leadership style to do it, though.” In fact, he had fought that legislation aggressively, vetoing it in 1995, and when he couldn't beat it he let it become law without his signature.

Remember the DUI incident? Bush had been specifically asked by a reporter if he’d had other arrests in his past, and he denied any. When the truth came out, of course, he said he'd simply been trying to “protect his daughters,” as if teaching them to lie were protection or good parenting. Then Karen Hughes compounded the lie, saying, on his behalf, that he'd been spotted by the cop because he was driving too slowly (which sounds safe, right?). In fact, he was spotted by the cop because he had driven off the road.

During the campaign he told a Jewish group that “as soon as” he was President, he would begin the process of moving the U.S. ambassador to “the city Israel has chosen as its capital.” Not only hasn't the move to Jerusalem happened yet, but in June of last year, he released a statement saying that it wouldn't be happening any time soon.

He said in his budget, the largest increase of any department would be for the Dept. of Education. It wasn't—it was for the State Department. His budget tried to hide the lie partially by claiming responsibility for $2 billion appropriated the previous year.

He also said, “Expanding the aims of the Tropical Forest Conservation Act, I will ask Congress to provide $100 million to support the exchange of debt relief for the protection of tropical forests.” You’d almost think that was an environmentalist talking. But in his final budget, the number was $13 million.

Also during the first debate with Gore, on October 3, 2000, he defended his Social Security privatization plan. According to the CNN transcript, he said, “Same with Social Security. I think there was a good opportunity to bring Republicans and Democrats together to reform the Social Security system so the seniors will never go without. Those on Social Security today will have their promise made.

“But also to give younger workers the option, at their choice, of being able to manage some of their own money in the private sectors to make sure there's a Social Security system around tomorrow.”

He continues to make similar claims today. The truth he’s never addressed is that, since today’s contributors are paying for today’s users of Social Security benefits, any amount that a contributor today stops paying in and puts into a private account is either going to disappear from the fund from which Social Security recipients withdraw their money, or have to be replaced from some other source. If there were still a budget surplus, then that might have been sufficient to make up the difference. But there’s not, and given the nature of Bush’s proposed tax cut that eliminated the surplus in the first place, there never was. The only way Bush’s privatization plan could work seamlessly was through deficit spending.

I’m sure I’ve barely scratched the surface on Bush’s lies at this point, but I’m just a private citizen who isn’t paid to do this kind of thing. The Washington press corps, on the other hand, is. Maybe they’ll grow some stones and start asking questions. It’s not that hard to do. Here’s a hint in the form of an old joke: How do you know when the president is lying?

That’s right. His lips are moving.

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