Fritz Ben - All the Presidents Spin: George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth

D espite all that has been written about George W. Bush, something important is missing from conventional portraits of our 43rd president. While debate continues to rage over whether Bush is a liar, few have discussed the way he employs the insidious tools of public relations, which make selling a tax cut as slick and dishonest as the worst of corporate marketing. By using these tactics, Bush has promoted his policies in a remarkably deceptive manner and avoided serious consequences for doing so. This is the untold story of the Bush presidency.

During the 2000 election and subsequent Florida recount, the three of us saw how the national debate had been reduced to an endless barrage of spin. Politicians, pundits, and reporters twisted facts until they bore little relation to reality, compressing the election into a melodrama pitting Bush and his supposed lack of intelligence and gravitas against Vice President Al Gores alleged arrogance and dishonesty. Rather than lifting up political debate, mainstream political institutions were dragging it down.

As a result, we founded Spinsanity (www.spinsanity.com) in early 2001 as a watchdog website dedicated to debunking political spin and fact-checking the media from a nonpartisan perspective. Though we started small, with a readership of only a few friends and family, major news outlets eventually began to take note of our work. Our criticism of commentators such as Michael Moore, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter has attracted national attention; our coverage of politicians and government officials has been cited by partisans of all stripes; and our debunking of falsehoods spreading through the press has helped prevent them from growing into conventional wisdom. Judging by the response we have received, we believe the public is hungry for nonpartisan criticism of a political system that is collapsing under the weight of deception.

All three of us were politically active in liberal or Democratic politics in the past, but our work is scrupulously fair. The citations, accolades, and hate mail we get from across the political spectrum attest to the fact that we effectively challenge the left and the right on a regular basis.

We will continue to hold both sides accountable on our site through the 2004 election and beyond. But after several years of de-spinning politicians and the media, we realized that things have only become worse since the 2000 electionand the man currently doing the most damage to our political debate is the President of the United States, George W. Bush. To fulfill our mission to counter those who spin and deceive, we must start at the top by holding the President accountable for the accuracy of his public statements. That is why we decided to write this book. When the chief executive can wield these tactics with little challenge, it is not surprising that other politicians so frequently mislead and dissemble.

Some readers may ask how we can claim to be nonpartisan if we have written a book that is critical of President Bush. We understand that many people, particularly conservatives, are skeptical of endless assertions from liberals that Bush is an inveterate liar, many of which boil down to little more than ideological disagreement. Unlike those critics, our quarrel is not with Bushs policies or beliefs, but with the manner in which he sells them to the press and the public. The wisdom of his decisions is for others to judge.

Our goal is to show how Bush has attempted to deceive the nation and why he has escaped serious consequences for doing so. In the process, we hope to spur discussion about a political system under siege by the forces of public relations and spin. Bush may be the current leader of the arms race of deception, but his presidency reveals a deeper problem at the heart of American democracy.

D uring the 2000 presidential campaign, then-Governor Bush liked to tell the story of a hypothetical waitress who would benefit from his tax cut plan. Under current tax law, he said, a single waitress supporting two children on an income of $22,000 faces a higher marginal tax rate than a lawyer making $220,000, adding, Under my plan, she will pay no income tax at all.

This wasnt much of a feat. What Bush failed to mention was that his hypothetical waitress probably already paid no federal income tax.

In August 2001, President Bush announced a new policy on the use of stem cells in federally funded medical research. More than sixty genetically diverse stem cell lines already exist, he told the nation in a televised address, concluding, We should allow federal funds to be used for research on these existing stem cell lines.

Researchers eager to obtain access to these existing lines were quickly disappointed, however, when Tommy Thompson, Bushs Secretary of Health and Human Services, admitted that only twenty-four or twenty-five lines were actually fully developed. Although sixty lines did exist, it was uncertain whether many of them would ever become available to researchers.

In late 2001, Bush began pointing back to a statement he claimed to have made during the 2000 campaign. As he put it in May 2002, when I was running for president, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream wed get the trifecta.

It was a good story, but theres no evidence that the President ever made such a statement in Chicago or elsewhere. In fact, Vice President Al Gore was the candidate who had listed the exceptions in 1998 (though Bush advisor Lawrence Lindsey said at the time that they would apply to the Texas governor as well). Was this an innocent mistake? The answer is almost certainly noBush continued to repeat the trifecta story for months after it had been debunked.

Then, in a televised address to the nation in October 2002, Bush declared, We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemythe United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. Weve learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Husseins regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.