Bush explains his Rumsfeld lie

November 8, 2006

Just a week ago, in an Oval Office interview with the AP, the president was unambiguous. Asked about Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, Bush said he wants both of them to remain with him until the end of his presidency. “Both those men are doing fantastic jobs and I strongly support them,” Bush said.

Today, however, the president admitted that he’d already decided to replace Rumsfeld when he said that. In other words, Bush was quite obviously lying to the reporters. Unfortunately for the president, the subject came up during today’s press conference.

Q: Thank you, Mr. President. Last week you told us that Secretary Rumsfeld will be staying on. Why is the timing right now for this, and how much does it have to do with the election results?

THE PRESIDENT: Right. No, you and Hunt and Keil came in the Oval Office, and Hunt asked me the question one week before the campaign, and basically it was, are you going to do something about Rumsfeld and the Vice President? And my answer was, they’re going to stay on. And the reason why is I didn’t want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question and to get you on to another question was to give you that answer.

In other words, Bush admitted that he lied to change the subject. It’s hardly the most important, or dramatic, or even shocking, lie he’s told reporters with a straight face, but it is a rather startling admission for reporters to keep in mind in the future — the president will knowingly repeat obvious untruths if it’ll help get him through an interview.

I have a hunch reporters already knew this, but it’s nice of the president to explain it so succinctly today.

I don’t think he lied a week ago; he was still in command of a rubber-stamp Congress at the time—and who give a clusterf*** about a handful of cobweb-covered generals-that-were?

He’s lying through his teeth today, though—because Rummie resigned no later than Tuesday morning—and the initial rebukes of the Army Times’ editorial came from DoD “underlings” on Friday—and not from Rumsfeld himself.

It also seems as if Friday was the day that the shadow of the Dem “Tsunami” finally drifted over Pennsylvania Avenue—which is why Bush was busy with his whirlwind tour plans. Rove didn’t want his Little Lord Fauntelroy to see that great big menacing shadow….

What—math, again? I say we go for Shakespeare quotes!

  • A more deft politician might have parried the question without telling an outright lie. (“At this time I’m not about to change my leadership team, who I have confidence in.”) Too bad the reporters don’t follow up with the obvious question “If you are willing to tell a baldfaced lie in order to get through an interview, why should we (or the American people) give any credence to anything you say to us now?”

    This little episode does suggest why this President has such stubbornly low approval ratings, and why he and his party were so thoroughly repudiated yesterday. It doesn’t even occur to him (or to the press people talking to him) that open dishonesty from the President is an incredibly corrosive thing, and that if no one trusts him, then the President has lost one of his most powerful tools, namely his bully pulpit.

  • Been waiting to post this one up.

    Sung to the tune (?) of One Tin Soldier
    Listen, children, to a story
    That was written long ago,
    ‘Bout a nation in a desert
    And a loud mouthed NeoCon-think tank

    In the deserts was a WMD Gas Shell
    Buried deep beneath the sand,
    And the NeoCon-people swore
    They’d use it to start a war

    Go ahead and bomb your neighbor,
    Go ahead and shoot a friend.
    Do it in the name of quick profits,
    You can justify it in the end.
    There won’t be any pages blowing
    Come the judgement day,
    On the election morning after….
    One old geezer runs away.

    So the people of the NeoCon
    Sent a message to Saddam,
    Asking for the buried WMD Gas Shell,
    Plus oil for which they’d kill.

    Came an answer from the kingdom,
    “Have no nukes we can use”
    There’re no secret new WMD programs,
    No centrifuges buried there.”

    Go ahead butt pyramid your neighbor,
    Go ahead waterboard a friend.
    Do it in the name of Haliburton,
    You can justify it in the end.
    There won’t be any Gannons blowing
    Come the judgement day,
    On the election morning after….
    One old geezer runs away.

    Now the NeoCons cried with anger,
    “Mount your Abrahms! Draw your M-16s!”
    And their proxies killed the desert-people,
    So they “won” their little war.

    Now they stood beside the WMD Gas shell,
    In the bloody desert, all rusty red.
    Opened the Gas Shell and looked deep into it…
    “Love from Rummy” was all it said.

    Go ahead and demonize Muslims,
    Go ahead shit on the law.
    Do it in the name of Power,
    You can justify it in the end.
    There will be lots of lawyer plea bargining
    Come the judgement day,
    On the election morning after….
    That old geezer runs away.

    Go ahead use negative ads,
    Go ahead abandon loser friends
    Do it in the name of Exxon,
    You can justify it in the end.
    There’ll be some angry folks voting
    Come the judgement day,
    On the election morning after….
    Old man Rummy goes away.

  • I agree with #2’s jimBOB, if President George W. Bush admits to having lied to the American public and press to “get through an interview,” than, I hope, the American media and public will not believe him again and let him know he has lost any and all credibility in the future. He has lost his bully pulpit for all time.

    Let him be truly held accountable by the newly elected-Democratic majority Congress and the general American press for the remainder of his term and restore true democracy to our shores.

  • In Shrublandia, expediency is everything. If the goal is to stay in power and lying is perceived to forward that goal, then people should understand the need for the lie and rest easy.

    And after keeping Dems out in the rain for the last six years, today he expressed a willingness to work with Dems in a bipartisan fashion. That’s a nice lie too which he thinks people should want to swallow. But he doesn’t yet realize how irrelevant he’s become.

    As I watched election returns last night between batches of ballots we were counting at my county Registrar of Voters, a co-worker muttered, “Now he’s all alone”. Indeed he is and it couldn’t happen to a more appropriate prick.

  • I think we should just stop listening to him. No more speaches, no more press conferences, no more interviews. Stop airing the State of the Union address.

    The man lies. What are we going to do, ask him after every answer “Is that the truth or are you just lying so we’ll leave you along?”

    Let him rot in his lame duck status.

  • When a liar tell you, “Everything I say is a lie!”, is he then telling you the truth?

    I think Bush is telling only part of the truth about lying about his lie.

  • Somebody on NBC was asking McCain about ramifications of a Democratic victory, this was Monday I think. He said something to the effect that if it didn’t result in a storm of subpoenas, then he thought we could all be one big hap-py fam-i-ly. I was waiting for someone in the press corps to ask Bush what he thought McCain might have meant by that.

  • After a few giddy hours, I find my reality-based cynicism creeping back (or maybe it’s just a habit that’ll take time to break?). Did anyone else find the timing of Bush’s announcement more than coincidental? Without a blockbuster news story, the ususal talking heads would have been opining over the meaning of the election — is the R party in decline, who’s responsible for the losses, what will the Ds do with a majority, etc. Bush just took one of the biggest political stories of the year and diliuted it by half.

  • “Did anyone else find the timing of Bush’s announcement more than coincidental?” – beep52

    Nope, he did it to undermine the effect of the election and to take an issue away from the Democrats.

    This is a surprise?

    That said, Allen is keeping the election fresh for us (his last great service to the country before joining K Street) so we’ll trump Boy George II in the end.

  • Bush has diluted the post-mortem of the elections, but if he had axed Rumsfeld last week he could probably have saved the Senate and a bunch of house seats for the Republicans.

  • If I may play devil’s advocate for a moment:

    It seems Bush is trying to insinuate that he lied for “noble reasons”; i.e.: to have asked for Rumsfeld’s resignation in the weeks preceding the election, would have been construed (and rightly so) as politically motivated.

    Is he saying that he withheld his trump card and sacrificed the mid-term elections to the gods of integrity?

    Or is/are he/they (Rove et. al.) really that out of touch? I find this particularly fascinating as it seems this might have been the one thing the Republicans could have done to hold onto power.

    • Comments are closed.