My father believed that teachers didn’t lie. At least that was the position he took whenever one of us tried to tell him something bad about a teacher, such as we had been punished or graded unfairly. His response was always something to this effect, in his Southern dialect, no less: You a lie. Teacher ain’t got to lie. She got her education. You the fool ain’t got no education.
This is akin to my visceral response to the Bush administration branding yet another of its former staffers a liar or, in Bushspeak, a “disgruntled former employee.”
Now, having been a disgruntled former employee on more occasions than I care to share, I can tell you that the tales of Scott McClellan, George Tenet and Richard Clark go way far beyond the last-minute office supply theft and hard drive cleansing characteristic of most disgruntled employees (not that I’m admitting to any of that.) One of them lying, maybe. Two, questionable. Three? Hmmm.
Then again, in my book, the Bush administration lost any vestige of credibility left after the yellowcake/WMD war lie when it put together a video for a National Press Club dinner making fun of the search for WMDs. The video showed Bush searching under his desk, under the presidential limousine – I think they even involved Barney the dog in the video. Not funny when thousands of our men and women were sent to war based on this insidious lie. Not funny at all.
It further lost the possibility of regaining credibility with what now appears to be the organized outing of Valerie Plame coupled with the President commuting Scooter Libby’s sentence (BTW, what grown-ass man goes by the name of “Scooter”?). It wasn’t a statesman-like action in the vein of Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon in order to move the country forward; it smelled – no, reeked – of a reward for taking a judicial bullet intended for Karl Rove and Tricky Dick Cheney.
So when you hear the Bush Administration call another person a liar, like my dad, you have to seriously consider the source.
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