Today’s Washington Post lays out yet another example of how President George W. Bush lied to the American people, detailing a deliberate White House pattern of misinformation on the so-called “biological warfare” trailers captured soon after American troops invaded Iraq.
Turns out the trailers had nothing to do with biological warfare. Intelligence officers in the field knew it. They told the White House. Yet Bush ignored the truth and went before the American people to claim otherwise, trumpeting the trailers as “proof” that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Members of Congress – Republican and Democrat – admit the same thing, shaking their heads in disbelief while talking privately with supporters and political strategists.
“The biggest threat any Republican running for election or re-election this year faces is not from the Democrats but from the President,” says a GOP political consultant who, for obvious reasons, begs for anonymity. “George W. Bush is a major liability to Republicans in the mid-term elections.”
When news broke last week that Bush personally authorized a White House campaign of leaks aimed at discrediting Ambassador Joseph Wilson – a campaign that led to the “outing” of Wilson’s wife, a covert CIA operative – Republicans scrambled for cover. Sunday talk show producers tried without success to find a Republican willing to go on the air and defend the President.
The only Republican who did appear – maverick Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter – didn’t defend Bush’s actions but called instead on both the President and the Vice President to come clean about their roles in the CIA leak debacle.
Polls, however, shows the GOP base dwindling as more and more Republicans realize they’ve been had by the charlatan-in-chief.
Even die-hard Republicans find it harder and harder to defend their morally-bankrupt leader, admitting privately that the Presidency of George W. Bush will go down in history as a monumental failure, surpassing the dark days of Richard M. Nixon.
