The Death of Trust in the US Government; Truth Bush-Style, when "IS" isn't
by Rob Kall
Clinton parsed the word "IS" to avoid answering questions about his Monica pecadillo.
Bush takes a different tactic to deal with the truth. He twists and distorts the data.
The New York Times article reports that the military is using new means for recruiting. The article quotes recruiters stating that recruitment is down. Yet the Bush administration says it is meeting its goals for recruiting this year. The New York Times Graphic: Joining Up shows that in previous years recruitment for the active army ran to 70-80,000 range and that under Clinton, the reserve targets were around 40,000 or more, with reasonable success at reaching both goals.
Now, the Bushies and their army are claiming that they are meeting current recruitment goals. The strange thing is, according to the charts in the New York Times, they've reduced those goals to about 50,000 for the active army and 12,000 for the reserves.
This is beyond strange. It's downright bizarre, that in a time of war, when the strains upon the military are the most severe that they've been in years, the military has so drastically reduced it's recruitment goals.
It's difficult to avoid thoughts of the WMD lies and the outright fraudulent numbers used by the Republicans to sell the medicare drug program. I've come to mistrust any numbers coming out of the Bush Whitehouse or from any federal agency where the Bush ethics (really, lack of ethics) has influence. When it comes to education statistics, I recall the bogus numbers that were used to inflate the grades and performance reports in the Texas schools-- the numbers that were used to support the appointment of the federal education czar Secretary of Education Rod Paige.
When the job statistics come out, reporting an increase in jobs, I don't believe them.
When the military reports it is meeting its goals, I don't believe them. But wait a minute. Maybe we have a different phenomenon here. Maybe it's not the outright lie or fraud team Bush modus operandi that is in effect here. Maybe it's more the approach they take for naming programs. Call it the opposite of what it does-- as in the Clear Skies program. Whatever you call it, do the opposite.
Here, we have a report that military recruiting is meeting its goals. But the graphs suggest that what they've done is severely, outrageously cut goals so they do not come close to providing the needs for the military. This could be comparable to the Clear skies program, except that there, the result is to make the skies more polluted.
It could be comparable to the lies about the cost of funding the medicare drug program, but that was an underestimate of cost.
Perhaps this is more closely aligned to the approach of right-wing tax cut-guru Grover Norquist, who uttered those famous words about starving government until it was so small it could be fit into a bathtub. Here we have a nice example of starving government-- the army is government. And we're massively shrinking it, right?
Of course this is not a lie, not fraud, not an example of dissembling or of doing the opposite of what is claimed. It's more like ....
Another example of this in recent news talks about the projected social security deficit . This report says that the good news is that the bad news is only very awful, not terribly awful-- that the bank will bust ten years later than predicted. They claim that the office of Budget Management is non-partisan. Yeah right. If we've been burned by the supposedly non-partisan medicare bureaucracy, and by the CIA with it's WMDs, why should we trust the OMB and the partisan appointees who have the ability to taint its reports? Why should we trust reports from the Department of Labor?
Here's an article written by Sean O'Keefe, NASA's administrator. Bush has a bold, clear vision It's a total sell job for Bush. It's further proof that Bush-appointees can't be trusted, except to stay on message for Bush and the Republican party.
The truth is no longer something we can expect to receive from almost any part of the federal government. Even the character, integrity and trustworthiness of one of the most respected and trusted people in America, Colin Powell, have been tarnished and put in doubt.
When you hear reports from Bush-tainted federal agencies treat them with extreme mistrust. If you encounter Bush supporters citing numbers, reply that you don't trust Bush nor the people he's appointed, and cite the reasons why. Treat anyone who blindly trusts the Bush lie team like a naive fool. Make sure they clearly see that you see them as such and get them wondering. One encounter won't cure their blindness, but if enough people get out the message it will wear off the trance of blindness.
Rob Kall rob@opednews.com is publisher of progressive news and opinion website www.opednews.com and organizer of cutting edge meetings that bring together world leaders, such as the Winter Brain Meeting and the StoryCon Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story This article is copyright Rob Kall and originally published by opednews.com but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog or web media so long as this credit paragraph is attached. Over 100 other articles by Rob Kall
