Lies, Quantified

One thing that the Bush Administration does very well is lie. We’ve long known, in a sort of mushy intuitive way, that pretty much every single thing they told us on the runup to the war in Iraq was false, but now we have documentary evidence that quantifies the breadth of the deception. A study by the Center for Public Integrity found that Bush and his minions lied to us 935 separate times while they were priming the country for war. Here’s a depressing chart:

You know what all the war apologists are going to say: we went with the information we had at the time; we’re not liars, we’re imbeciles; if loving your country is wrong then I don’t want to be right; and — most of all — all that stuff is in the past, we need to deal with the present. But this is more than an exercise in after-the-fact carping, and it’s more than simple gotcha journalism — it’s a remarkably detailed chronicle of how to go about deceiving an entire populace through the simple expedient of falsehoods constantly repeated and then propagated by a credulous media. A character from Le Carre’s Absolute Friends says it this way:

Every war is worse than the last one, Mr Mundy. But this war is the worst I ever saw if we’re talking about lies, which I am … Makes no difference the Cold War’s over. Makes no difference we’re globalized, multinational or what the hell. Soon as the tom-toms sound and the politicians roll out their lies, it’s bows and arrows and the flag and round-the-clock television for all loyal citizens. It’s three cheers for the big bangs and who gives a fuck about casualties as long as they’re the other guy’s?

What we have here is the Bushies’ playbook, opened for all of us to see, and we ignore it at our peril. These people are the masters, and we need to study their tricks — so that when their next incarnation rolls into town, we’ll be ready for them.