Lying For Votes

I'm sure you've already seen these snippets on the news but I just wanted to preserve them here for posterity. Here's Bush's reaction to the "thumping" his party got at the mid-terms.

I thought we were going to do fine yesterday. Shows what I know.

He really is one in a million.

And why did he lie last week when he said Rumsfeld would stay on as Defense Secretary?

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.

That's right, he lied to reporters and to the American people because there were elections on the way and he was worried that the truth might lose his party votes (you might have spotted that he almost certainly got that wrong too). This, from the free world's self appointed guardian of democracy. There comes a point when you just can't come up with any new ways to express the ironies which surround Bush and Blair. I may have to start using "You Couldn't Make It Up" as a sort of running slogan.

And now that the Republicans have lost both Houses, the most partisan President of the most partisan party in living memory has called for members of Congress to "rise above partisan differences" and said that his administration will do the same. This, while simultaneously issuing Congress with a series of instructions, the most obvious (and controversial) example being this:

Another important priority in the war on terror is for the Congress to pass the Terrorist Surveillance Act.

Yes, Bush wants the Democrats to put aside partisan differences and do what they're bloody well told.

You really couldn't. What else is there to say?

Tags: News, Politics, President Bush, Pepublicons