February 2006 | Hightower Lowdown
Our Lying President
By Jim Hightower
In 1973, Richard Nixon declared: “I had no prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in; I neither took part in nor knew about any of the subsequent coverup activities …. That was and that is the simple truth.”
To the contrary, we now know that Dick was flat-out lying to the American people. Alas, he is not our only lying president. In 2004, George W declared: “A wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so. It’s important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.”
To the contrary, we now know that George was flat-out lying to the American people.
In recent weeks, Bush has been forced to admit that he has unilaterally abrogated one of our people’s most basic constitutional protections: Freedom from unreasonable searches. Since 2002, he has routinely been authorizing federal agents to tap into our phone calls and otherwise spy on us — without bothering to get a court’s OK. He has done this despite the fact that there is a secret court set up specifically to give quick authorization when such covert surveillance might be warranted. Indeed, this court, called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, has considered more than 1,700 requests from the Bushites in the last year alone, approving nearly all of them.
But George W doesn’t want to be bound by the rule of law. Instead of merely being President Bush, he asserts that he has the inherent executive authority to be King George the W, autocratically disposing of any provision of the Constitution that gets in his way.
Far from valuing the Constitution, he is treating it like waste paper. Not only is Bush wrong, but, yet again, he has lied to the American people.
Jim Hightower is the best-selling author of “Let’s Stop Beating Around the Bush,” from Viking Press. For more information, visit jimhightower.com.
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