The most consistent problem we face from the outgoing republican administration is their long-held belief that repeating a lie and attacking the messenger is acceptable as the truth. It’s not becoming of people who are supposed to represent us, unless we like being represented by vengeful high school girls who enjoy cruel whispering campaigns. From CNN:

…Liz Cheney, who served in the State Department during the Bush administration, told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that “Nobody who is talking about this in the press has any knowledge of specific detainee treatment.”

“The people that claimed to have been waterboarded in these articles are not any of those people,” she said.

Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, was former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff during the Bush administration’s first term. Since leaving office, he has become an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq.

In an online essay Thursday, he wrote that al Qaeda captive Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was “waterboarded” by Egyptian intelligence until he told interrogators that Baghdad trained terrorists to use chemical and biological weapons — a key element in the Bush administration’s case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

But Liz Cheney told ABC that Wilkerson “has made a cottage industry of out of fantasies about the vice president,” and pointed out that al-Libi was not among the three al Qaeda figures the United States has admitted to subjecting to waterboarding.

And she said the former vice president — who has been publicly defending the interrogation program in recent weeks — “would not substitute his own judgment for the professionals at the CIA.”

What Liz Cheney has done in a few sentences is call everyone who isn’t following the Cheney line a calculated liar, from those tortured to the public servants who’ve been intimately involved in the details of these events.

Now, anyone will concur that there might be liars in the midst, but this pattern is particularly Bush-like. Manipulate intelligence, lie about the path to it while covering up the “ugly” then, when a REAL American decides to step forward and tell the truth about what really happened - or was happening - skewer him (her), call them names, infer that it’s ALL about them making money on this information, or suggest they have mental issues.

Some of the people who suffered through this name calling are people like Scott Ritter, Coleen Crowley, Richard Clarke, Lawrence Wilkerson, Hans Blix, Teresa Chambers, Paul O’Neill, Scott McClellan and others of whom time and truth has been kind to. In the real world, the liars are usually the one’s who are trying to cover up information, not expose it. While there are always exceptions to the rule, take a look at this group and ask yourself: why risk a potential backlash as a traitor or liar on a national level - where your business is Washington and your connections will inevitably suffer or you will be outcast completely if you’re exposed as a fraud - for a few dollars? Here’s another question: Why not go on record with a book saying the opposite - and then be embraced by those who can help you most and get even more money as a shill on Fox News (i.e. Ari Fletcher)?

The other argument from the asshole right is that you have a bone to pick and want revenge against those who did you wrong in the Bush government. Okay. HOW would you get satisfaction if your information is completely fabricated - and, once again, you could be found out and exposed as the bigger fraud? Wouldn’t that justify everything bad they had to say about you? Why take that risk unless you’re telling the truth?

There’s no logic to any of this - and what defies logic further is the extravagant list of “liars” that have exited the Bush inner circle. Can ALL these people be liars? Lets say ONE is telling the truth. What then? The fact of the matter is they are ALL telling the truth and Dick, Liz and George are filthy, miserable liars - some with blood on their hands.

This way of dealing with people has been a Bush trait for quite some time. We remember reading this about his college years (Salon):

Students who challenged and embarrassed Bush in class would then become the subject of a whispering campaign by him, Tsurumi (one of his college professors) said. “In class, he couldn’t challenge them. But after class, he sometimes came up to me in the hallway and started bad-mouthing those students who had challenged him. He would complain that someone was drinking too much. It was innuendo and lies. So that’s how I knew, behind his smile and his smirk, that he was a very insecure, cunning and vengeful guy.

And the event doesn’t have to be as big as a yellowcake reference to set them off. If it was internal and could effect Bush “business”, these brave people were uniformly silenced in other ways (Huffington Post - July 7, 2008):

Ever wonder why more patriotic whistleblowers weren’t blowing the roof off the Bush White House with truths that needed to be told? Now we know that the DOJ rejected or bottled up thousands of whistleblower complaints and reports, and even the ones they accepted, they kept unprocessed for years.

Former Attorney General Gonzales, already proven to be corrupted by partisan operators, inverted the purpose of the DOJ. Instead of rooting out corruption, the Gonzales DOJ intentionally intercepted and silenced thousands more whistleblowers. Unfortunately, this policy apparently continues even today.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that federal officials refuse to investigate corporate corruption cases. More than 900 cases regarding billions of dollars of government contractors and drugmakers have defrauded taxpayers out of billions of dollars have been shelved. It appears that the Bush administration has put a kind of moratorium on fraud investigations.

The simple truth is that people like Bush, Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney are the dregs of society - vengeful, angry, cruel pricks who have never had a moral backbone and look at others as cattle to devour. While the rest of us help our kids and act as good friends and neighbors in this life they see everything, including a soldier’s life, as expendible fodder to make a buck and speak poorly about us all.

What I hope for but never expect to see is a response like the one Joseph McCarthy received from lawyer Joseph Welch, defending his client Fred Fisher, who told him in no uncertain terms what everyone was thinking by that time:

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you …You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

The problem with this hope is that none of these three people have an ounce of decency in them, so all we can truly hope is that when they need help, we can tell them to go fuck themselves.

Verbal Paintball Dick Cheney, Fred Fisher, George Bush, Joseph Welch, Liz Cheney, republican liars, whistleblowers