The wife John McCain callously left behind

By Sharon Churcher

Now that Hillary Clinton has at last formally withdrawn from the race for the White House, the eyes of America and the world will focus on Barack Obama and his Republican rival Senator John McCain.

While Obama will surely press his credentials as the embodiment of the American dream – a handsome, charismatic young black man who was raised on food stamps by a single mother and who represents his country’s future – McCain will present himself as a selfless, principled war hero whose campaign represents not so much a battle for the presidency of the United States, but a crusade to rescue the nation’s tarnished reputation.

McCain likes to illustrate his moral fiber by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.

But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain’s three eldest children.

And yet, had events turned out differently, it would be she, rather than Cindy, who would be vying to be First Lady. She is McCain’s first wife, Carol, who was a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model when they married in 1965. She was the woman McCain dreamed of during his long incarceration and torture in Vietnam’s infamous ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison and the woman who faithfully stayed at home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news.

But when McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a handshake from Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded on icy roads into a telegraph pole on Christmas Eve, 1969. Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.

When Carol was discharged from hospital after six months of life-saving surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeons had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter. Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when John McCain came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self.

Today, she stands at just 5 ft 4 in and still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering. For nearly 30 years, Carol has maintained a dignified silence about the accident, McCain and their divorce. But last week at the bungalow where she now lives at Virginia Beach, a faded seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington, she told The Mail on Sunday how McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy, 18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, just one month later.

Carol insists she remains on good terms with her ex-husband, who agreed as part of their divorce settlement to pay her medical costs for life. "I have no bitterness," she says. "My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. It was just awful, but it wasn’t the reason for my divorce. My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does."

Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centered womanizer who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to ‘play the field’. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.

McCain was then earning about $50,000 a year as a naval officer, while his new father-in-law, Jim Hensley, was a multi-millionaire who had impeccable political connections. He first met Carol in the Fifties while he was at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. He was a privileged, but rebellious scion of one of America’s most distinguished military dynasties – his father and grandfather were both admirals.

But setting out to have a good time, the young McCain hung out with a group of young officers who called themselves the ‘Bad Bunch’. His primary interest was women and his conquests ranged from a knife-wielding floozy nicknamed "Marie, the Flame of Florida" to a tobacco heiress. Carol fell into his fast-living world by accident. She escaped a poor upbringing in Philadelphia to become a successful model, married an Annapolis classmate of McCain’s and had two children – Douglas and Andrew – before renewing what one acquaintance calls ‘an old flirtation’ with McCain. It seems clear she was bowled over by McCain’s attention at a time when he was becoming bored with his playboy lifestyle. "He was 28 and ready to settle down and he loved Carol’s children," recalled another Annapolis graduate, Robert Timberg, who wrote The Nightingale’s Song, a bestselling biography of McCain and four other graduates of the academy.

The couple married and McCain adopted Carol’s sons. Their daughter, Sidney, was born a year later, but domesticity was clearly beginning to bore McCain – the couple were regarded as ‘fixtures on the party circuit’ before McCain requested combat duty in Vietnam at the end of 1966. He was assigned as a bomber pilot on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin. What follows is the stuff of the McCain legend. He was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967 on his 23rd mission over North Vietnam and was badly beaten by an angry mob when he was pulled, half-drowned, from a lake. Over the next five-and-a-half years in the notorious Hoa Loa Prison he was regularly tortured and mistreated.

It was in 1969 that Carol went to spend the Christmas holiday – her third without McCain – at her parents’ home. After dinner, she left to drop off some presents at a friend’s house. It wasn’t until some hours later that she was discovered, alone and in terrible pain, next to the wreckage of her car. She had been hurled through the windshield.

After her first series of life-saving operations, Carol was told she may never walk again, but when doctors said they would try to get word to McCain about her injuries, she refused, insisting: "He’s got enough problems, I don’t want to tell him." H. Ross Perot, a billionaire Texas businessman, future presidential candidate and advocate of prisoners of war, paid for her medical care.

When McCain – his hair turned prematurely white and his body reduced to little more than a skeleton – was released in March 1973, he told reporters he was overjoyed to see Carol again. But friends say privately he was "appalled" by the change in her appearance. At first, though, he was kind, assuring her: "I don’t look so good myself. It’s fine." He bought her a bungalow near the sea in Florida and another former PoW helped him to build a railing so she could pull herself over the dunes to the water.

"I thought, of course, we would live happily ever after," says Carol.

But as a war hero, McCain was moving in ever-more elevated circles. Through Ross Perot, he met Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California. A sympathetic Nancy Reagan took Carol under her wing. But already the McCains’ marriage had begun to fray. "John started carousing and running around with women," said Robert Timberg. McCain has acknowledged that he had girlfriends during this time, without going into details. Some friends blame his dissatisfaction with Carol, but others give some credence to her theory of a mid-life crisis. He was also fiercely ambitious, but it was clear he would never become an admiral like his illustrious father and grandfather and his thoughts were turning to politics.

In 1979, while still married to Carol, he met Cindy at a cocktail party in Hawaii. Over the next six months he pursued her, flying around the country to see her. Then he began to push to end his marriage. Carol and her children were devastated.

"It was a complete surprise," says Nancy Reynolds, a former Reagan aide. "They never displayed any difficulties between themselves. I know the Reagans were quite shocked because they loved and respected both Carol and John." Another friend added: "Carol didn’t fight him. She felt her infirmity made her an impediment to him. She justified his actions because of all he had gone through. She used to say, “He just wants to make up for lost time." Indeed, to many in their circle the saddest part of the break-up was Carol’s decision to resign herself to losing a man she says she still adores.

Friends confirm she has remained friends with McCain and backed him in all his campaigns. "He was very generous to her in the divorce but of course he could afford to be, since he was marrying Cindy," one observed. McCain transferred the Florida beach house to Carol and gave her the right to live in their jointly-owned townhouse in the Washington suburb of Alexandria. He also agreed to pay her alimony and child support. A former neighbor says she subsequently sold up in Florida and Washington and moved in 2003 to Virginia Beach. He said: "My impression was that she found the new place easier to manage as she still has some difficulties walking." Meanwhile McCain moved to Arizona with his new bride immediately after their 1980 marriage. There, his new father-in-law gave him a job and introduced him to local businessmen and political power brokers who would smooth his passage to Washington via the House of Representatives and Senate.

And yet despite his popularity as a politician, there are those who won’t forget his treatment of his first wife. Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam and is now a leading campaigner for veterans’ rights, said: "I have been following John McCain’s career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There is something wrong with this guy and let me tell you what it is – deceit. When he came home and saw that Carol was not the beauty he left behind, he started running around on her almost right away. Everybody around him knew it. Eventually he met Cindy and she was young and beautiful and very wealthy. At that point McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better. This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his character. He has no character. He is a fake. If there was any character in that first marriage, it all belonged to Carol."

Another old friend of the McCains said: "Carol always insists she is not bitter, but I think that’s a defense mechanism. She also feels deeply in his debt because in return for her agreement to a divorce, he promised to pay for her medical care for the rest of her life."

Carol has remained resolutely loyal as McCain’s political star rose. She says she agreed to talk to The Mail on Sunday only because she wanted to publicize her support for the man who abandoned her. Indeed, the old Mercedes that she uses to run errands displays both a disabled badge and a sticker encouraging people to vote for her ex-husband. "He’s a good guy," she assured us. "We are still good friends. He is the best man for president."

But Ross Perot, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel – even by the standards of modern politics. "McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory," said Perot. "After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history."


Source: The Daily Mail
Published: Jun 8, 2008

Vermont says "Indict Bush"

Despite George Bush's rock-bottom approval ratings and his status as a favourite target of Democrats, the president has eluded attempts to hold him accountable for alleged misdeeds — except in Vermont.

During yesterday's Vermont presidential primary, two small towns in the famously liberal state also approved resolutions indicting Bush and vice president Dick Cheney for "crimes against our Constitution".

No specific crimes are mentioned, but organisers of the anti-Bush effort have referred to perjury, obstruction of justice and war crimes related to the Iraq conflict. The resolutions ask town attorneys in Brattleboro and Marlboro to draft indictments without outlining how to enforce them, giving the charges little practical consequence.

"I have not seen the proposal, and I've done no legal research on any of the issues," Vermont attorney general William Sorrell told the Associated Press before yesterday's vote.

"But at first blush, if this passed, they'd have really uphill sledding trying to have it be legal and enforceable."

That did not stop residents of the two New England towns, where the indictments passed by 18 votes in one public meeting and more than 200 votes in a separate ballot race. Vermont is the only state in America that Bush has yet to visit, according to published tallies.

Meanwhile, a more serious effort is underway in Vermont to rebuke the Bush administration's war policy, as several local legislators push for a vote on legislation recalling the state's national guard troops from Iraq.

George Bush + Climate Change = Global Disaster

Washington, DC — In his recent State of the Union address, Bush made it clear what we've been saying all along: He has no plan to fight global warming, and is set on leaving a legacy of neglect, obstruction and destruction when it comes to climate change. On the eve of Bush’s bogus "Major Emitters Meeting", activists have taken to the US capitol to call attention to Bush’s disastrous policies and his plan to put a wrench in the UN's process.

Major Economies Meeting a Sham

After being booed and jeered in Bali for trying to block a successful outcome at the UN's meeting on climate change there last month, the Bush administration continues to push its alternative Major Economies Meeting (aka Major Emitters Meeting) this week in Hawaii. The administration hopes to use this side meeting as an opportunity to replace the Kyoto Protocol's legally binding emissions reductions with voluntary measures only.

If the President was serious about leading the fight on global warming, he would stop trying to block the success of the UN process and commit to a cap on greenhouse gas emissions in the US. Instead, he continues to keep the United States standing alone as the only industrialized country that refuses to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

Monumental Disaster

Greenpeace activists gathered on the National Mall the night before the Major Economies Meeting and turned the Washington Monument into a memorial to Bush's failed legacy on global warming.

The activists projected on the Washington Monument the message, "U.S. Global Warming Plan: Hell and High Water", accompanied by an image depicting rising sea levels at the base. Ironically, rising sea levels from global warming threaten the very picturesque islands, like Bali and Hawaii, the Bush administration is fond of visiting to talk and do nothing.

Why "volunteerism" is a failed policy

Binding emission targets for industrialized countries are the basis of any meaningful global agreement to fight climate change. Bush just wants to cross his fingers and hope that technological progress saves us. All he is willing to tell the world is: "Hey, guys, we will do our best". That will not be good enough.

As the German Chancellor Angela Merkel observed last year, "I don't believe that it's enough to just agree that everyone will do their best. I don't believe that would yield an impressive result."

And right she is. In 2002, Bush set a voluntary target of reducing US energy intensity 18 percent by 2012. But greenhouse gas emissions are projected to increase by 12 percent over that period. Voluntarism simply doesn’t work.

All of the leading Democratic Presidential candidates and two of the three top Republican candidates support binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions through a cap and trade system. US businesses also support binding emission caps. More than two dozen of the largest US companies - such as Ford, General Electric, GM, Dupont, Duke Energy and Chrysler - are calling for domestic cap and trade legislation to start cutting American emissions now.

Bush is a 'lame duck' and will be out of office when the next global climate agreement will be made in Copenhagen in 2009.

The world can't afford falling for Bush's Hawaii distraction. Countries attending the meeting should resist Bush's ploy and commit to real climate action now.

The countries participating in Bush's meeting are: Japan, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, China, Canada, India, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Australia, Indonesian, and South Africa. While the countries most at risk from impacts of climate change - such as small island developing states like Tuvalu - are not even invited to be at the table.

The dismal state of George W. Bush

By Walter Shapiro

About the only drama in Monday night's State of the Union address was provided by a clever speechwriter's gambit. Rather than offering a verdict on the nation's health in its traditional place at the beginning of the speech, George W. Bush waited a full hour until his penultimate sentence to declare, "So long as we continue to trust the people, our nation will prosper, our liberty will be secure and the state of our union will remain strong."

This was scant reason to miss the debut of HBO's "In Treatment" or to delay the thrill of cleaning out the medicine chest. The poignancy of the president's final State of the Union night was hard to detect, except when the network anchors needed to fill dead airtime by talking about it.

Bush was ballyhooed in advance as planning to speak of his guiding philosophy. But all he offered was the banal sentiment: "As Americans, we believe in the power of individuals to determine their destiny and shape the course of history. We believe that the most reliable guide for our country is the collective wisdom of ordinary citizens."

That ode to the genius of the American people invites a look at the president's popularity ratings. Bush came into this State of the Union address on a statistical roll that it will be difficult, if not impossible, for his successor to match. Beginning with the president's first formal State of the Union in 2002, each year he has stood before Congress with a lower approval rating (courtesy of the Gallup poll) than the year before. In January 2007, it seemed a daunting challenge to drop below his 36 percent approval rating. But Bush -- a president who fantasizes that he will be absolved by history -- was up to the task, falling below the one-third mark.

Any major Bush speech carries the built-in danger that the president will suddenly sound the drums of war by adding a new member to the Axis of Evil. Luckily, the citizens of places like Costa Rica and Estonia could go to bed feeling secure Monday evening.

But when it came to Iran, a charter member of the trio of evildoers, Bush waxed amnesiac. There was no reference to the latest National Intelligence Estimate that found that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program. Instead, Bush warned that Tehran "continues to develop its capability to enrich uranium, which could be used to create a nuclear weapon." He also demanded that the leaders of Iran "come clean about your nuclear intentions and past actions."

There is little that Bush could say at this point about Iraq that has credibility. And it seems almost unsporting to waste time parsing his words for omissions, misstatements and contradictions. Yet it was dizzying Monday night to hear Bush invoke Osama bin Laden -- he who shall not be named -- to justify his Iraq policy. It was a feat of presidential logic to argue, in essence, that multiplying two failures together (bin Laden and Iraq) equals success. As Bush put it, "Last month, Osama bin Laden released a tape in which he ... admitted that coalition forces are growing stronger in Iraq. Ladies and gentlemen, some may deny the surge is working, but among the terrorists there is no doubt."

On a day in which Senate Republicans failed to thwart the filibuster against the FISA bill, Bush limited his discussion of the topic to just nine sentences near the end of the speech. There was no public threat of a veto if Congress sends the president a 30-day extension for the eavesdropping legislation that will expire Feb. 1. And compared with possible Bush complaints about weak-kneed Democrats obstructing the war on terror, the president sounded positively muted when he said to Congress, "If you don't act by Friday, our ability to track terrorist threats would be weakened and our citizens will be in greater danger."

As the clock runs down on his presidency, Bush cannot avoid fostering the soft bigotry of low expectations. It was not much, but Bush does deserve a teaspoon's worth of credit for reiterating his humane approach to immigration, even if that sentiment would get virtually anyone else excommunicated from the Republican Party. On the eve of Tuesday's Florida primary, John McCain, a moderate on immigration, would not have dared to say as Bush did, "We must also find a sensible and humane way to deal with people here illegally." In GOP circles these days, "humane" is a fighting word.

Bush's new cause is to bravely battle against congressional earmarks. (In this case, he is a weak echo of McCain.) It is interesting -- and surely coincidental -- that the president only recognized the budget-busting folly of these pork-barrel projects after the Democrats took over Congress in 2006. Yet Barack Obama appeared to be cheering when Bush declared, "If you send me an appropriations bill that does not cut the number and cost of earmarks in half, I will send it back to you with my veto."

Alone among the three senators still in the race for president, McCain had the wisdom to skip the synthetic spectacle entirely and remain in Florida. Hillary Clinton would have been entitled to give one of her signature laughs when the president crowed that his "budget will keep America on track for a surplus in 2012." Bill Clinton, of course, bequeathed a balanced budget to his spendthrift successor in 2001.

The best rhetorical flourish of the evening, though, was not a product of the Bush speech-writing team but came from Obama. In a video released by his campaign, Obama said, "Each year, as we watch the State of the Union, we see half the chamber rise to applaud the President and half the chamber stay in their seats ... Imagine if next year was different. Imagine if next year, the entire nation had a president they could believe in."

A year from now, a different president (probably a woman, an African-American, a Mormon or a former POW) will be giving a maiden speech from the well of the House of Representatives. The nation will still be mired in Iraq and may well be battling to emerge from a recession. But one thing is certain: Nostalgia for the good old days when George W. Bush gave a State of the Union will be muted if not nonexistent.

Bush and 9/11: what we need to know

By Joe Klein
Time Magazine

George W. Bush's most memorable day as President was Sept. 14, 2001, when he stood in the rubble of the World Trade Center, holding a bullhorn in one hand, his other arm slung over the shoulder of a veteran fire fighter from central casting. Bush was pitch perfect that day: the common-man President, engaged and resolute. This is the image the Bush campaign is probably saving for the last, emotional moments of the election next fall. It is the memory the Republicans want you to carry into the voting booth. It is why the Republican Convention will be held in New York City this year. And it may also be why the White House has been so reluctant to cooperate with the independent commission investigating the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

The commission, which will finish its work in midsummer, on the eve of the conventions, will soon question the President about his response to the terrorist threat in the months before 9/11. I asked a dozen people last week—some intimate with the commission's thinking, some members of the intelligence community, some members of Congress who have investigated 9/11—what they would ask the President if they could. Their questions fell into three broad categories.

Why didn't you respond to the al-Qaeda attack on the U.S.S. Cole? The attack occurred on Oct. 12, 2000; 17 American sailors were killed. The Clinton Administration wanted to declare war on al-Qaeda. An aggressive military response was prepared, including special-forces attacks on al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. But Clinton decided that it was inappropriate to take such dramatic action during the transition to the Bush presidency. As first reported in this magazine in 2002, Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and counterterrorism deputy Richard Clarke presented their plan to Condoleezza Rice and her staff in the first week of January 2001.

Berger believed al-Qaeda was the greatest threat facing the U.S. as Clinton left office. Rice thought China was. What were President Bush's priorities? Was he aware of the Berger briefing? Did he consider an aggressive response to the bombing of the Cole or to the al-Qaeda millennium plot directed at Los Angeles International Airport—which was foiled on Dec. 14, 1999? Did he have any al-Qaeda strategy at all? Rice, who has not yet testified under oath, decided to review counterterrorism policy; the review wasn't completed until Sept. 4. A related question along the same lines: Why didn't you deploy the armed Predator drones in Afghanistan? The technology, which might have provided the clearest shot at Osama bin Laden before 9/11, was available early in 2001. But the CIA and the Pentagon squabbled about which agency would be in charge of pulling the trigger. The dispute wasn't resolved until after 9/11. Were you aware of this dispute, Mr. President? Why weren't you able to resolve it?

Indeed, the second category of questions revolves around the President's interest in and awareness of the al-Qaeda threat. As late as Sept. 10, after the assassination of Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, Bush was asking in his national-security briefing about the possibility of negotiating with the Taliban for the head of bin Laden. "If he had studied the problem at all," an intelligence expert told me, "he would have known that was preposterous." As early as Aug. 6, Bush had been told that al-Qaeda was planning to strike the U.S., perhaps using airplanes. What was his response to that? How closely was he following the intelligence reports about al-Qaeda activity, which had taken an extremely urgent tone by late spring? Another intelligence expert proposed this question: "Did he ever ask about the quality of the relationship between the CIA and the FBI?"

Obviously, the President couldn't be responsible for knowing that the FBI was tracking suspicious flight training in Arizona or that the CIA had an informant close to two of the hijackers, but was he aware of the friction between the two agencies? Was he aware that John Ashcroft had opposed increasing counterterrorism funding for the FBI?

Finally, there are the questions about the President's actions immediately after 9/11. Specifically, why did he allow planeloads of Saudi nationals, including members of the bin Laden family, out of the U.S. in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks? Who asked him to give the Saudis special treatment? Was he aware that the Saudi Arabian government and members of the royal family gave money to charities that funded al-Qaeda?

It is easy to cast blame in hindsight. Even if Bush had been obsessed with the terrorist threat, 9/11 might not have been prevented. But the President's apparent lack of rigor—his incuriosity about an enemy that had attacked American targets overseas and had attempted an attack at home—raises a basic question about the nature and competence of this Administration. And that is not a question the Republicans want you to take to the polls in November.

The lies of George Bush

Adapted from the book, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers).

George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small, directly and by omission. His Iraq lies have loomed largest. In the run-up to the invasion, Bush based his case for war on a variety of unfounded claims that extended far beyond his controversial uranium-from-Niger assertion. He maintained that Saddam Hussein possessed "a massive stockpile" of unconventional weapons and was directly "dealing" with Al Qaeda--two suppositions unsupported then (or now) by the available evidence. He said the International Atomic Energy Agency had produced a report in 1998 noting that Iraq was six months from developing a nuclear weapon; no such report existed (and the IAEA had actually reported then that there was no indication Iraq had the ability to produce weapons-grade material). Bush asserted that Iraq was "harboring a terrorist network, headed by a senior Al Qaeda terrorist planner"; US intelligence officials told reporters this terrorist was operating ouside of Al Qaeda control. And two days before launching the war, Bush said, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Yet former deputy CIA director Richard Kerr, who is conducting a review of the prewar intelligence, has said that intelligence was full of qualifiers and caveats, and based on circumstantial and inferential evidence. That is, it was not no-doubt stuff. And after the major fighting was done, Bush declared, "We found the weapons of mass destruction." But he could only point to two tractor-trailers that the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded were mobile bioweapons labs. Other experts--including the DIA's own engineering experts--disagreed with this finding.

But Bush's truth-defying crusade for war did not mark a shift for him. Throughout his campaign for the presidency and his years in the White House, Bush has mugged the truth in many other areas to advance his agenda. Lying has been one of the essential tools of his presidency. To call the forty-third President of the United States a prevaricator is not an exercise of opinion, not an inflammatory talk-radio device. Rather, it is backed up by an all-too-extensive record of self-serving falsifications. While politicians are often derided as liars, this charge should be particularly stinging for Bush. During the campaign of 2000, he pitched himself as a candidate who could "restore" honor and integrity to an Oval Office stained by the misdeeds and falsehoods of his predecessor. To brand Bush a liar is to negate what he and his supporters declared was his most basic and most important qualification for the job.

His claims about the war in Iraq have led more of his foes and more pundits to accuse him of lying to the public. The list of his misrepresentations, though, is far longer than the lengthy list of dubious statements Bush employed--and keeps on employing--to justify his invasion and occupation of Iraq. Here then is a partial--a quite partial--account of the other lies of George W. Bush.

Tax Cuts

Bush's crusade for tax cuts is the domestic policy matter that has spawned the most misrepresentations from his camp. On the 2000 campaign trail, he sold his success as a "tax-cutting person" by hailing cuts he passed in Texas while governor. But Bush did not tell the full story of his 1997 tax plan. His proposal called for cutting property taxes. But what he didn't mention is that it also included an attempt to boost the sales tax and to implement a new business tax. Nor did he note that his full package had not been accepted by the state legislature. Instead, the lawmakers passed a $1 billion reduction in property taxes. And these tax cuts turned out to be a sham. After they kicked in, school districts across the state boosted local tax rates to compensate for the loss of revenue. A 1999 Dallas Morning News analysis found that "many [taxpayers] are still paying as much as they did in 1997, or more." Republican Lieutenant Governor Rick Perry called the cuts "rather illusory."

One of Bush's biggest tax-cut whoppers came when he stated, during the presidential campaign, "The vast majority of my [proposed] tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum." That estimate was wildly at odds with analyses of where the money would really go. A report by Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal outfit that specializes in distribution analysis, figured that 42.6 percent of Bush's $1.6 trillion tax package would end up in the pockets of the top 1 percent of earners. The lowest 60 percent would net 12.6 percent. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, ABC News and NBC News all reported that Bush's package produced the results CTJ calculated.

To deal with the criticism that his plan was a boon for millionaires, Bush devised an imaginary friend--a mythical single waitress who was supporting two children on an income of $22,000, and he talked about her often. He said he wanted to remove the tax-code barriers that kept this waitress from reaching the middle class, and he insisted that if his tax cuts were passed, "she will pay no income taxes at all." But when Time asked the accounting firm of Deloitte & Touche to analyze precisely how Bush's waitress-mom would be affected by his tax package, the firm reported that she would not see any benefit because she already had no income-tax liability.

As he sold his tax cuts from the White House, Bush maintained in 2001 that with his plan, "the greatest percentage of tax relief goes to the people at the bottom end of the ladder." This was trickery--technically true only because low-income earners pay so little income tax to begin with. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it, "a two-parent family of four with income of $26,000 would indeed have its income taxes eliminated under the Bush plan, which is being portrayed as a 100 percent reduction in taxes." But here was the punch line: The family owed only $20 in income taxes under the existing law. Its overall tax bill (including payroll and excise taxes), though, was $2,500. So that twenty bucks represented less than 1 percent of its tax burden. Bush's "greatest percentage" line was meaningless in the real world, where people paid their bills with money, not percentages.

Bush also claimed his tax plan--by eliminating the estate tax, at a cost of $300 billion--would "keep family farms in the family." But, as the New York Times reported, farm-industry experts could not point to a single case of a family losing a farm because of estate taxes. Asked about this, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said, "If you abolish the death tax, people won't have to hire all those planners to help them keep the land that's rightfully theirs." Caught in a $300 billion lie, the White House was now saying the reason to abolish the tax--a move that would be a blessing to the richest 2 percent of Americans--was to spare farmers the pain in the ass of estate planning. Bush's lies did not hinder him. They helped him win the first tax-cut fight--and, then, the tax-cut battle of 2003. When his second set of supersized tax cuts was assailed for being tilted toward the rich, he claimed, "Ninety-two million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money." The Tax Policy Center of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute found that, contrary to Bush's assertion, nearly 80 percent of tax filers would receive less than $1,083, and almost half would pocket less than $100. The truly average taxpayers--those in the middle of the income range--would receive $265. Bush was using the word "average" in a flimflam fashion. To concoct the misleading $1,083 figure, the Administration took the large dollar amounts high-income taxpayers would receive and added that to the modest, small or nonexistent reductions other taxpayers would get--and then used this total to calculate an average gain. His claim was akin to saying that if a street had nine households led by unemployed individuals but one with an earner making a million dollars, the average income of the families on the block would be $100,000. The radical Wall Street Journal reported, "Overall, the gains from the taxes are weighted toward upper-income taxpayers."

The Environment

One of Bush's first PR slip-ups as President came when his EPA announced that it would withdraw a new standard for arsenic in drinking water that had been developed during the Clinton years. Bush defended this move by claiming that the new standard had been irresponsibly rushed through: "At the very last minute my predecessor made a decision, and we pulled back his decision so that we can make a decision based upon sound science and what's realistic." And his EPA administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, said the standard had not been based on the "best available science." This was a harsh charge. And untrue.

The new arsenic standard was no quickie job unattached to reasonable scientific findings. The EPA had worked for a decade on establishing the new, 10-parts-per-billion standard. Congress had directed the agency to establish a new standard, and it had authorized $2.5 million a year for studies from 1997 through 2000. A 1999 study by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) had concluded that the existing 50-ppb standard "could easily" result in a 1-in-100 cancer risk and had recommended that acceptable levels be lowered "as promptly as possible." EPA policy-makers had thought that a 3-ppb standard would have been justified by the science, yet they took cost considerations into account and went for the less stringent 10 ppb.

Bush's arsenic move appeared to have been based upon a political calculation--even though Bush, as a candidate, had said he would not decide key policy matters on the basis of politics. But in his book The Right Man, David Frum, a former Bush economic speechwriter, reported that Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser, had "pressed for reversal" of the arsenic standard in an attempt to win votes in New Mexico, one of a few states that have high naturally occurring levels of arsenic and that would face higher costs in meeting the new standard.

Several months after the EPA suspended the standard, a new NAS study concluded that the 10-ppb standard was indeed scientifically justified and possibly not tight enough. After that, the Administration decided that the original 10 ppb was exactly the right level for a workable rule, even though the latest in "best available science" now suggested that the 10-ppb level might not adequately safeguard water drinkers.

The arsenic screw-up was one of the few lies for which Bush took a hit. On the matter of global warming, he managed to lie his way through a controversy more deftly. Months into his presidency, Bush declared that he was opposed to the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 global warming accord. To defend his retreat from the treaty, he cited "the incomplete state of scientific knowledge." This was a misleading argument, for the scientific consensus was rather firm. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body of thousands of scientists assembled by the UN and the World Meteorological Organization, held that global temperatures were dramatically on the rise and that this increase was, to an unspecified degree, a result of human-induced emissions.

In early June 2001 the NAS released a report Bush had requested, and it concluded global warming was under way and "most likely due to human activities." Rather than accept the analysis it had commissioned, the Bush White House countered with duplicity. Press secretary Fleischer maintained that the report "concludes that the Earth is warming. But it is inconclusive on why--whether it's man-made causes or whether it's natural causes." That was not spinning. That was prevaricating. The study blamed "human activities" while noting that "natural variability" might be a contributing factor too.

Still, the Bush White House wanted to make it seem as if Bush did take the issue seriously. So on June 11, he delivered a speech on global warming and pledged to craft an alternative to Kyoto that would "reduce" emissions. The following February he unveiled his plan. "Our immediate goal," Bush said, "is to reduce America's greenhouse-gas emissions relative to the size of our economy."

Relative to the size of our economy? This was a ruse. Since the US economy is generally growing, this meant emissions could continue to rise, as long as the rate of increase was below the rate of economic growth. The other industrialized nations, with the Kyoto accord, were calling for reductions below 1990 levels. Bush was pushing for slower increases above 2000 levels. Bush's promise to lower emissions had turned out to be no more than hot air.

September 11

As many Americans and others yearned to make sense of the evil attacks of September 11, Bush elected to share with the public a deceptively simplistic explanation of this catastrophe. Repeatedly, he said that the United States had been struck because of its love of freedom. "America was targeted for attack," he maintained, "because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world." This was shallow analysis, a comic-book interpretation of the event that covered up complexities and denied Americans information crucial for developing a full understanding of the attacks. In the view Bush furnished, Osama bin Laden was a would-be conqueror of the world, a man motivated solely by irrational evil, who killed for the purpose of destroying freedom.

But as the State Department's own terrorism experts--as well as nongovernment experts--noted, bin Laden was motivated by a specific geostrategic and theological aim: to chase the United States out of the Middle East in order to ease the way for a fundamentalist takeover of the region. Peter Bergen, a former CNN producer and the first journalist to arrange a television interview with bin Laden, observes in his book Holy War, Inc., "What [bin Laden] condemns the United States for is simple: its policies in the Middle East." Rather than acknowledge the realities of bin Laden's war on America, Bush attempted to create and perpetuate a war-on-freedom myth.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush was disingenuous on other fronts. Days after the attack, he asserted, "No one could have conceivably imagined suicide bombers burrowing into our society and then emerging all in the same day to fly their aircraft--fly US aircraft--into buildings full of innocent people." His aides echoed this sentiment for months. They were wrong. Such a scenario had been imagined and feared by terrorism experts. And plots of this sort had previously been uncovered and thwarted by security services in other nations--in operations known to US officials. According to the 9/11 inquiry conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees, the US intelligence establishment had received numerous reports that bin Laden and other terrorists were interested in mounting 9/11-like strikes against the United States.

Fourteen months after the attack, Bush said, "We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of September the 11th." But his actions belied this rhetoric. His White House refused to turn over information to the intelligence committees about a pre-9/11 intelligence briefing he had had seen, and the Bush Administration would not allow the committees to tell the public what intelligence warnings Bush had received before September 11. More famously, Bush would not declassify the twenty-seven-page portion of the committees' final report that concerned connections between the 9/11 hijackers and Saudi Arabia. And following September 11, Bush repeatedly maintained that his Administration was doing everything possible to secure the nation. But that was not true. The Administration did not move--and has not moved--quickly to address gaping security concerns, including vulnerabilities at chemical plants and ports and a huge shortfall in resources for first responders [see Corn, "Homeland Insecurity," September 22].

It did not start with Iraq. Bush has been lying throughout the presidency. He claimed he had not gotten to know disgraced Enron chief Ken Lay until after the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. But Lay had been one of Bush's larger contributors during that election and had--according to Lay himself--been friends with Bush for years before it. In June 2001, Bush said, "We're not going to deploy a [missile defense] system that doesn't work." But then he ordered the deployment of a system that was not yet operational. (A June 2003 General Accounting Office study noted, "Testing to date has provided only limited data for determining whether the system will work as intended.") His White House claimed that it was necessary to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to "secure America's energy needs." But the US Geological Survey noted that the amount of oil that might be found there would cover up to slightly more than two years' worth of oil consumption. Such a supply would hardly "secure" the nation's needs.

Speaking for his boss, Fleischer in 2002 said, "the President does, of course, believe that younger workers...are going to receive no money for their Social Security taxes." No money? That was not so. A projected crunch will hit in four decades or so. But even when this happens, the system will be able to pay an estimated 70 percent of benefits--which is somewhat more than "no money." When Bush in August 2001 announced he would permit federal funding of stem-cell research only for projects that used existing stem-cell lines--in a move to placate social conservatives, who opposed this sort of research--he said that there were sixty existing lines, and he asserted that his decision "allows us to explore the promise and potential of stem-cell research." Yet at the time--according to scientific experts in the field and various media reports--there were closer to ten available lines, not nearly enough to support a promising research effort.

Does Bush believe his own untruths? Did he truly consider a WMD-loaded Saddam Hussein an imminent threat to the United States? Or was he knowingly employing dramatic license because he wanted war for other reasons? Did he really think the average middle-class taxpayer would receive $1,083 from his second tax-cut plan? Or did he realize this was a fuzzy number cooked up to make the package seem a better deal than it was for middle- and low-income workers? Did he believe there were enough stem-cell lines to support robust research? Or did he know he had exaggerated the number of lines in order to avoid a politically tough decision?

It's hard to tell. Bush's public statements do suggest he is a binary thinker who views the world in black-and-white terms. You're either for freedom or against it. With the United States or not. Tax cuts are good--always. The more tax cuts the better--always. He's impatient with nuances. Asked in 1999 to name something he wasn't good at, Bush replied, "Sitting down and reading a 500-page book on public policy or philosophy or something." Bush likes life to be clear-cut. And perhaps that causes him to either bend the truth or see (and promote) a bent version of reality. Observers can debate whether Bush considers his embellishments and misrepresentations to be the honest-to-God truth or whether he cynically hurls falsehoods to con the public. But believer or deceiver--the result is the same.

With his misrepresentations and false assertions, Bush has dramatically changed the nation and the world. Relying on deceptions, he turned the United States into an occupying power. Using lies, he pushed through tax cuts that will profoundly reshape the US budget for years to come, most likely insuring a long stretch of deficits that will make it difficult, perhaps impossible, for the federal government to fund existing programs or contemplate new ones.

Does Bush lie more than his predecessors, more than his political opponents? That's irrelevant. He's guiding the nation during difficult and perhaps perilous times, in which a credible President is much in need. Prosperity or economic decline? War or peace? Security or fear? This country has a lot to deal with. Lies from the White House poison the debates that must occur if Americans are going to confront and overcome the challenges of this century at home and abroad.

Presidential lying, in fact, threatens the country. To render informed and wise choices about the crucial and complicated controversies of the day, people need truthful information. The President is generally in a position to define and dominate a debate more than other political players. And a lie from the White House--or a fib or a misrepresentation or a fudged number--can go a long way toward distorting the national discussion.

Bush campaigned for the presidency as the fellow who would bring honesty back to the White House. During his first full day on the job, while swearing in his White House staff, he reminded his cadre, "On a mantelpiece in this great house is inscribed the prayer of John Adams, that only the wise and honest may rule under this roof." But Adams's prayer would once more go unanswered. There has been no restoration of integrity. Bush's promise was a lie. The future of the United States remains in the hands of a dishonest man.

Time for a new direction in Iraq

It's too bad members of Congress haven't met Sgt. Erik Botta of Port St. Lucie. He is the Army reservist who is being recalled to active duty in Iraq even though he already has served three tours of duty there and one in Afghanistan. The 26-year-old sergeant thinks this is unfair -- and he's right. His plight reflects the consequences of our government's wrongheaded war policy and the huge burden being shouldered by a relative few who wear the uniform. This is why Congress should seize the initiative to change course in Iraq.

The progress report that Congress received last week from President Bush offers little comfort either to soldiers like Sgt. Botta who are being recycled into the war zone or to lawmakers who want to wait before beginning a draw-down of forces. Iraqi leaders have failed to make satisfactory progress on 10 of 18 benchmarks for political, military and economic reform. They have shown little willingness to assume the burden of defending Iraq from sectarian violence and terrorism, and there's little reason to hope for a sudden change of heart. In terms of security, few Iraqi battalions, if any, can stand alone insofar as logistics, intelligence and firepower in heavy combat. Political reconciliation is lagging and there is no sign of agreement on a plan to govern the distribution of oil revenues. U.S. military leaders are giving valiant support to the president's policy, but in candid moments they have to admit that results are disappointing.

In the face of this dismal showing, President Bush stubbornly, and increasingly alone, clings to the idea that progress is being made. On Tuesday, in Cleveland, he resorted to a standard line from old stump speeches -- ''I strongly believe that we will prevail.'' But even his sometime-advisor Henry Kissinger believes victory is out of the question: 'If you mean by `military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible,'' Mr. Kissinger said last November.

It is hard to quarrel with this assessment, and no amount of spin can hide the truth. The war in Iraq has lasted longer than U.S. participation in World War II, from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day. The latest report by the Congressional Research Service is that the war is costing $10 billion per month. Yet President Bush can offer neither a plausible end-game scenario nor a realistic strategy for anything resembling victory. The question that Congress has to ask is whether there is any reason to believe that continued expenditure of manpower and money will produce a better outcome. On the evidence of the last four years, it seems highly unlikely.

U.S. armed forces' sacrifice

Lately, Mr. Kissinger has been warning against the dire consequences of mandating a ''precipitate withdrawal.'' He believes it would lead to a greater disaster. Even if he's right, Congress should still provide a plan to begin disengaging. This is the only way to avoid a Vietnam-style collapse. Between the futility of staying the course and the panic of a sudden rush to the exits, there is much lawmakers can do to protect U.S. interests without prolonging this war. We could limit the U.S. role to training and safeguarding vital installations, instead of running combat operations all over Iraq.

If Mr. Bush won't do it, Congress must. It is important to let Iraq's leaders know that we no longer are in the business of buying time for a people who seem to care more for revenge than for national reconciliation. It is important to let Americans know that Congress is responding to their frustration. It is important to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers like Sgt. Botta. The members of the U.S. armed forces have done everything that has been asked of them. It is time to let them know that they are not expendable pawns in a failed war policy.

© 2007, The Miami Herald