By Mark Morford <mmorford@sfgate.com>
SF Gate Columnist
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/nothinglefttolieabout17jul03.shtml
July 17, 2003

Nothing Left To Lie About With BushCo reaming the nation on just about every possible front, is implosion imminent?

And the lies, the flagrant GOP bitch slappings of the American public, the maniacal jabs straight in eye of truth with the icepick of utter BS, have just reached some sort of critical mass, some sort of saturation point of absurdity and pain and ridiculousness and you just have to stand up and applaud.

Really. It's almost as if you should cheer the invidiousness, it is so spectacular, unprecedented, the tower of lies reaching the point where you, Jaded and Benumbed American Citizen, are forced to either recoil and ignore and deny, succumb and scream and laugh, or, like Bush himself, just sort of stand there, wide eyed, dumfounded, blinking hard, looking more blank and confused than ever, as the unified BushCo front begins to gloriously unravel.

This much we now know, as compiled by the CIA and the U.N. and U.S. military leaders and Bush's own teams of experts and scientists and lackeys and pretty much anyone with any sort of common sense or astute observation as yet unclouded and unmisled by the raging masturbatory pro-war gropings of, say, Fox News. A brief summary:

* Saddam was all over 9/11. Funny how U.S. intelligence never found a single connection. Funny how BushCo knowingly led the nation on to believe there was one. Funny how the only role Saddamn actually played in 9/11 was to watch it unfold on CNN and exclaim, "Holy Allah with a case of Cuban cigars, Hashim, a million dinars says BushCo uses that as an excuse to come swipe our oil and pump up Halliburton and build a Starbucks in downtown Baghdad! Prepare the escape pod!"

* Iraq was al Qaeda's bitch. See above. Fact is, U.S. intelligence found no proven link between Iraq and any recent terrorism threats against the U.S. Fact is, bin Laden hated Saddam and denounced his socialist Baath party as "infidels.". Fact is, BushCo worked extremely hard to manipulate the media to make you think the two were so close they might as well have been gay lovers. Curiously, this sinister obfuscation is still not clear to millions of Americans most of whom tend to live in Texas and/or anywhere near major military manufacturing plants. Go figure.

* Those 9/11 terrorists? Buncha snarling Iraqis. Well, no. Most were, in fact, Saudi. There were no Iraqis at all. Saudi Arabia remains a desperately important American ally, one that provides billions in U.S. investment and hence BushCo loves them and kisses their rings and doesn't say a peep about the millions they also give to terrorist cells -- like, say, those of al Qaeda -- to protect their oil fields. Shhh.

* Saddam has millions of drumfuls of scary chemicals ready at a moment's notice to poison the entire world and most of EuroDisney. Not even close. Huge chunks of "proof" of Iraq's purported chemical-weapons and nuclear-weapons programs have already been dismissed by U.N. inspectors and weapons experts. Saddam did, however, possess large quantities of bootlegged Britney Spears posters, which, if dropped on Israel, would have certainly caused pandemonium if not outright giggling and many heavy longing sighs.

* Saddam scored uranium from Niger to make nukes. This is so cutely wrong it's painful. The document stating this was forged and bogus and BushCo knew it and referenced it anyway in the State of the Union address to help justify the war, and now he's all flustered and denying everything and the CIA director is bumbling in as the fall guy, and oh my freaking God do they ever think you are stupid.

* The war on Iraq will be as easy as lancing a boil on Dick Cheney's forehead. Yes! Instant and painless and easy it will be, and it will inflict minimal casualties and we'd be all done in a week and America will be back home and happily watching "The Bachelorette" and the world would love us and see how glorious and righteous we are and everyone will convert to Christianity and join Promise Keepers and The 700 Club and never have sex and we will ban all icky gay people to Canada. Whee!

Or not. Never you mind that thousands of soldiers are to be stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq "indefinitely," for years to come. Or that more than half of the U.S. Army's entire combat force is bogged down in Iraq right now. Or that U.S. soldiers are still dying in Iraq every day, more than 80 so far (33 in hostile fire), with more to come, endless guerrilla warfare possibly requiring even more U.S. troops, months after BushCo declared the war essentially over. Whoops. Gosh. Sorry.

* The Jessica Lynch "rescue" was all-American heroism at its finest. So cute. The "rescue" was actually all-American Pentagon PR bulls** at its finest, a rather embarrassingly staged hoax so full of overblown stunts and dumb machismo and awkward twists that not even Fox News would touch the story after a while, and they'll run anything. No wonder the Pentagon has refused to release the unedited video footage of the "rescue."

* Iraq's oil money will go straight to "liberated" Iraqi people. Seriously now. Did anyone really ever believe this, even in their most drunken and heavily Xanaxed state? The money, of course, is going straight into U.S. and U.K. coffers as "payment" for the Gulf War, with only a fraction going for "rebuilding." But the bottom line is, we control the oil. We control Iraq's billions. We do not care who knows it. Special note from Donny "Beady Eyes" Rumsfeld to all you people who somehow genuinely believed we bombed Iraq for the betterment of the Iraqi people: Tthhppbbbhhhppbb.

* Oh my God look just look at all those scary WMDs. There are no WMDs. There are no WMDs. There are no WMDs. And there never were. Two little words from BushCo, straight to you: Ha-ha, suckers.

The list goes on. This list is nearly endless. The list is growing and expanding and now threatens to split and explode and spread like some sort of giant viscous blob and invade small towns and kill plants and induce women to slap their hands to their faces and scream while it slowly steamrolls innocent children as they innocently stand there in the street playing innocent Frisbee, innocently.

And there are others. There are flagrant lies and cover-ups and misprisions not even related to the war, more about increasingly nauseating domestic issues, major budget crises and unabashed pro-corporate decisions and anti-gay anti-women anti-sex fun for the whole terrified white Christian family.

There is, for example, the recent hacking to death of the EPA's major greenhouse-gas/air-quality study. There was the (failed) attempt to kill the Bureau of Labor Statistics report that tracked factory closings in the U.S. There is the secret $135 mil in budget moneys set aside to cram invidious sexless Christian "abstinence only until marriage" programs down the throats of jaded American teens and desperate budget-reamed schools.

There was, as Slate so effortlessly delineates, the regular and rather sneering deep-sixing of serious economic data and fiscal forecasting -- much of it generated by Bush's own teams -- because it didn't match the GOP's makeshift rosy scenarios.

There is massive unemployment. There is the largest budget deficit in history, now a staggering $455 billion, over $50 billion more than the administration predicted just five months ago.

There are state and local governments broke to the point of having to cut back essential services like police and fire departments, hospitals, public schools, road maintenance and sewers. There is Lynne Cheney. 'Nuff said.

There appears to be no end. There appears to be a limitless supply of lies and half-truths and misinformations BushCo can invent on the spot, and is now a good time to recall how Clinton was savaged and vilified and attacked and impeached because he lied about having big dumb sex with a rather unappealing intern?

And yet here is BushCo, openly and shamelessly lying about leading this nation into a vile and petroleum-drunk war, massacring tens of thousands, killing hundreds of U.S. soldiers (and counting), gutting the budget, favoring the rich with useless tax cuts, hiding and prevaricating and dodging and treated the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution the way a crusty abusive Catholic priest treats an altar boy.

This is where you have to laugh. This is where you applaud. Stand up and cheer, for it has been a masterful performance, a rather unprecedented series of major cover-ups and well-orchestrated PR maneuvers and outright fabrications unmatched in recent history. Hell, the epic scale of BushCo's atrocities make Clinton's little oral-sex fixation seem like a jaywalking violation.

Is now the time? Is this is where we start to notice how it is all coming unraveled, Bush's snide web of lies just too flagrant and too insulting for too long, CIA directors and intelligence experts and military leaders and scientists and the like all coming forward now to refute any number of false BushCo claims, the chinks in the armor now becoming cracks and fissures and flubs and stumbles and ultimate raging implosions?

Is this why impeachment proceedings have yet to begin in earnest against BushCo? Because we're just too stunned, too frozen in disbelief at the mounting mountains of evidence that we have been duped and misled and lied to on a scale we can't really begin to assimilate? Could very well be.

Mark Morford

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Because the tower of lies, oh how it teeters, how it quivers, how it feels oh so ready to fall.
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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.