Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [18]
Maybe someday we will learn what that was all about. To me and millions of others, it just looked chickenshit. And I guess by late afternoon you figured it looked like that, too, and you knew you had better hightail it back to the White House where you could look presidential.96 From the moment your chopper landed on the south lawn that evening, your “presidency” was something no one would or should dare question again.
Two nights later, according to a New Yorker article written by Elsa Walsh, you went out on the Truman Balcony of the White House to relax and smoke a cigar. It had been a horrific forty-eight hours, and you needed to wind down. In that private moment, you asked one close friend to join you. As he came in the White House the two of you embraced, and then you took him out to the balcony where he had a drink that you offered him. The two of you then lit up your cigars and stared out across the Ellipse toward the Washington Monument. You told him that “if we can’t get them [any al Qaeda operatives who may have been involved in the attack] to cooperate, we’ll hand them over to you.” It was an offer that I am sure he appreciated. After all, he was your good friend “Bandar Bush,” the prince from Saudi Arabia.97
As the smoke from the ashes still billowed through the air over Manhattan and Arlington, the smoke from the Saudi prince’s cigar wafted through the balmy night air of Washington, D.C., with you, George W. Bush, by his side.
These are my seven questions, Mr. Bush—seven questions that I believe you should answer. The 3,000 dead and their surviving loved ones deserve no less, and a nation of millions is sooner or later going to want to know the truth and demand you come clean, or leave.
CHAPTER
2
Home of the Whopper
WHAT IS the worst lie a president can tell?
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
Or . . .
“He has weapons of mass destruction—the world’s deadliest weapons—which pose a direct threat to the United States, our citizens and our friends and allies.”
One of those lies got a president impeached. The other lie not only got the liar who told it the war he wanted, but also resulted in huge business deals for his friends and virtually assures him a landslide victory in the next election.
Sure, we’ve been lied to before. Lots of lies: big lies, little lies, lies that brought us down in the eyes of the world. “I am not a crook” was a lie, and it sent Richard Nixon packing. “Read my lips: No new taxes” wasn’t so much a lie as a broken promise, but it nonetheless cost the first Bush his presidency. “Ketchup is a vegetable” was technically not a lie, but it was a good example of the Reagan administration’s whacked view of the world.
Other presidents lied about Vietnam, lied about Korea, lied about the Indians, lied about all men being equal (as they kept their personal slaves chained up in the backyard). Boatloads of lies for hundreds of years. And, when caught in their lies, they were disgraced, punished, or removed. Sometimes.
Maybe the reason Bush is still here is that he proved the old adage that if you tell a lie long enough and often enough, sooner or later it becomes the truth.
As the lies that led us into the Iraq War started to unravel and be exposed, the Bush administration went into survival mode with their only defensive maneuver: Keep repeating the lie over and over and over again until the American people are so worn down they’ll scream “uncle!” and start believing it.
But nothing can hide this indisputable fact: There is no worse lie than one told to scare mothers and fathers enough to send their children off to fight a war that did not need to be fought because there never was any real threat at all. To falsely tell a nation’s citizens that their lives are in jeopardy just so you can settle your own personal score (“He tried to kill my daddy!”) or to make your rich friends even richer, well, in a more just world, there would be a special prison cell in Joliet reserved