Honesty is not their policy

Dan Simpson: Honesty is not their policy
The Bush administration, in manifold ways, shows a consistent lack of acquaintance with truth
Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

It is probably fair to say that one of the qualities that in-the-middle voters in 2000 and 2004 found appealing in both halves of the Bush-Cheney ticket was the apparent honesty of the two men.

Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney came across as straight-shooters, both in themselves and in contrast to their opponents. Mr. Bush was the tall, slim Texan who had quit drinking, who was known for being plain-spoken, and was a businessman most closely associated with baseball, the quintessential all-American sport. Mr. Cheney's career didn't bear as close scrutiny, and he still looks like a prosperous banker who would enjoy foreclosing your mortgage, but he is after all from Wyoming, which has a cowboy on a bucking bronco on its license plate.

The Democrats put up against them in 2000 Al Gore, a little too closely associated with The Great Prevaricator, Bill Clinton, in spite of Mr. Gore's best efforts, and Joe Lieberman, whose well-known "flexibility" is currently being illustrated by rumors putting him as Mr. Bush's Secretary of Defense in place of Don Rumsfeld.

In 2004 it was John Kerry for president, from New England and with a foreign-born wife -- definitely not to be trusted -- and John Edwards, in spite of his common man background a little too reminiscent of a tent preacher and a malpractice lawyer to boot.

read on (list of Republican scandals)...

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05341/618125.stm

I posted a Newsweek article in GD (sank) about Bush's lack of candor. Interesting the media is just finding out that Bush is dubious.

of honesty. This is definitively the most important thing of all and of course, it stays untouched.

And in context, look at how silly the media's depictions of Kerry, Teresa and Gore really are.

For example, we were told in both 2000 and 2004 what a personable, likeable regular guy Bush was. But then after Katrina, we were told his STAFF was so concerned that he would become furious and angry that they didn't tell him NO was in the middle of disaster. Bush, to me, sounded inexplicably angry whenever he spoke - that he is a nasty angry man is no surprise.

We've had way too many threads where a response to a Kerry story or picture, has mentioned that it rebuts the aloof, distant weird image the media pinned to Kerry. His staff might find him demanding, but I seriously doubt they would avoid giving him bad news or fear that he would do anything but calmly start working on the problem.

That this was written in Pittsburg, they probably expect the reader to know the type of person Teresa is and they know how she was slandered.

The big problem is that they almost imply that there was something in the people that led to the stereotypes, but it really was the media.

The media does it all the time: pretend that it had nothing to do with what was previously reported as fact.

Don't forget Wilkerson's comment about Bush's aloofness. I'm sure that characterization didn't pop out of thin air.

"Those pictures have the capacity to destroy whatever may remain of the Bush-Cheney imagery of the honest Westerner, speaking plainly, telling the truth."

Because I really do hope that voters will wake up to the fact that just because you can act like "a regular guy" (whatever the hell that means) doesn't mean you're a good person or a capable leader.

Thanks for posting this.