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The Lies of George W. Bush
“Get ready to get mad. Corn has cut through the spin and crafted an important and powerful challenge to Bush and his crew.” —Molly Ivins
“David Corn’s The Lies of George W. Bush is as hard-hitting an attack as has been leveled against the current president.” —Los Angeles Times
“George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small, directly and by omission. He has mugged the truth–not merely in honest error, but deliberately, consistently, and repeatedly.”
In this scathing indictment of the president and his inner circle, David Corn reveals the deceptions at the heart of the Bush presidency. With wit and style, Corn details how the Bush administration has consistently lied to the American public to advance its own interests, from mischaracterizing intelligence to whip up support for war with Iraq to misrepresenting the possible consequences of his supersized tax cut and offering false claims to push a radical agenda on crucial issues across the board. In this unflinching work of hard-hitting journalism, Corn explains how Bush has managed to get away with it and explores the danger of presidential deceit in a perilous age. This paperback edition also includes an up-to-date analysis of the aftermath of the war with Iraq.
“David Corn’s The Lies of George W. Bush is as hard-hitting an attack as has been leveled against the current president.” —Los Angeles Times
“George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small, directly and by omission. He has mugged the truth–not merely in honest error, but deliberately, consistently, and repeatedly.”
In this scathing indictment of the president and his inner circle, David Corn reveals the deceptions at the heart of the Bush presidency. With wit and style, Corn details how the Bush administration has consistently lied to the American public to advance its own interests, from mischaracterizing intelligence to whip up support for war with Iraq to misrepresenting the possible consequences of his supersized tax cut and offering false claims to push a radical agenda on crucial issues across the board. In this unflinching work of hard-hitting journalism, Corn explains how Bush has managed to get away with it and explores the danger of presidential deceit in a perilous age. This paperback edition also includes an up-to-date analysis of the aftermath of the war with Iraq.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
About the author
David Corn
14 books74 followersDavid Corn is a veteran Washington journalist and political commentator. He is the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones magazine and an analyst for MSNBC. He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers, including Showdown: The Inside Story of How Obama Battled the GOP to Set Up the 2012 Election and Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (co-written with Michael Isikoff). He is also the author of the biography Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA’s Crusades and the novel Deep Background.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 12, 2008
When I was just starting to get political I picked this book up randomly at a Barnes after a huge fight with my republican father.
It's excellent. I learned so much from it. It's incredibly clear, informative, and well-written. He knows how to handle his material so that he doesn't get out of hand with his obvious anger and dissatisfaction with W. No mean feat, I can assure you, If you haven't already had the pleasure of getting red-faced mad with our POTUS. And I know you have....
Anyway, this is explication of government lies without peer. The main worry I had about it as I bought was: is this going to be one of those I-hate-Republican books that is all partisan and one-sided so I'm getting brainwashing here not real journalism or critique?
I hate that stuff so much and I'm hyper aware of it whenever I feel I've crossed its path. Individual writers' opinions are one thing, and totally welcome at that. I just hate having rants disguised as objectivity.
Corn's obviously a lefty but he weighs each piece of data and each statement and act of Bush's he comments on so surely and so precisely that it calms that inner nervousness I always have immediately. I trust him, because while he calls Bush a liar he does it with elegance, taste, and humanity. He recognizes that this isn't Nueremberg. (Not yet, anyway) and the moral victories he is gunning for aren't as clear cut as "Ha ha I gotcha you bastard!" which of course would be more fun and probably more profitable.
Bush tells bald-faced lies, naturally, but he also uses lies of omission and obfuscation which are specifically designed to shut off one's reasoning faculties. As a politician, and a major one at that, he has whole paid-by-the-hour groups to fuck with your brain so that you cannot get a straight message from him, let alone a straight answer.
Example: Why did we go into Iraq?
There is seriously no one reason, and Bush knows that. So he gives ten, with varying degrees of accuracy and depth. So its up to people like David Corn to play the gumshoe and separate this from that, parse it all out. Saddam/Al Queda, Saddam/ 911, social security, the economy, the enviornment, on and on and on.....
It's very eye-opening if you're new at this stuff. And I was then, maybe less so now.
Though on account of the title and the seething partisan paranoia it might seem like a bug-eyed rant is in store, you get nothing of the kind.
Fair, learned, lucid, thorough, and easily readable.
O and did I mention, completely condemnatory?
That makes all of it that much sweeter......
August 21, 2015
With his enviably economical style, Corn manages to dispose of the subject in only 368 pages. Nice work, David.
January 22, 2008
Proves beyond all doubt (if anyone still had any) that G W Bush lies extensively, cynically, deliberately, and repeatedly. But it is a book desperately in need of at least some reflection on the question of why he has been able to get away with it, and what might be done to reduce the likelihood of such a person and such an administration getting into power again.
Read
November 14, 2012"Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions." Machiavelli explaining why Bush got a second term.
October 26, 2008
There are so many it is hard to keep track.
July 18, 2019
Tales of a serial liar
The only thing wrong with this book is that there is no chance that more than a minuscule percentage of the electorate will read it, and most of them will be the already knowledgeable.
Journalist David Corn, who writes for The Nation and other publications in addition to having appeared on many TV and radio news shows, including NPR and Fox News, begins the book with the words, "George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small. He has lied directly and by omission."
Corn obviously had to get that off his chest and out in the open since that is something he and all the other reporters who have followed the career of George W. know only too well; and yet it is something they have seldom felt free to say in so many words.
Corn recalls all the major Bush prevarications, from the weapons of mass destruction that weren't there, to the tax cuts that emptied the treasury for his buds, back to the 1990 Harken Energy (a kind of mini-Enron) insider trading scandal that saved George W. from what would have been another business failure. He was on the board of directors of Harken when he sold off his shares two months before the company's stock took a 20% nose dive after its losses became public. Bush denied trading on inside information. Because the SEC consisted of mostly friends of his father, George W. was given a clean bill of heath. Imagine what would have happened to him if his name had been, say, Martha Stewart.
In the final chapter, "Conclusion: How He Gets Away with It (So Far)" Corn attempts to explain why Bush's lies haven't hurt him. He blames the press for not having the gumption (maybe I should just say "guts") to contradict the president or to print the unvarnished truth themselves. Instead of a mealymouthed "Analysts Discount Attack by Iraq" (as in the Washington Post headline had it) or "CIA Warns That a US Attack May Ignite Terror" (as in the New York Times), Corn wonders why they didn't write, "CIA Suggests Bush Misleads Public on Threat from Iraq." Furthermore, before Bush was "elected" and was still campaigning, "Howell Raines, then the editorial page editor of the New York Times, ordered Paul Krugman...a harsh Bush critic, not to use the word 'lie' when assailing Bush's proposals."
Clearly the print media abdicated its responsibility to inform the public. In some cases the reporters refrained from asking hard questions and from writing candid stories because they were afraid they might not get their name called during the next presidential press conference, or because they were afraid of criticism that would come from Bush's supporter. But in other cases the direction to go easy on Bush came from higher management and ownership. The press, quite frankly, in a de facto sense was not, and is not, free. I think this is one of the big problems in this country today, and it is getting worse.
Even worse is the sad state of television news where the programs are under the watchful eyes of not only Rupert Murdoch funkies but also the sponsors of the programs who will not tolerate the president being called a liar. Even worse the news people not only quote Bush's lies, they broadcast him telling the lies as mini infomercials, often without a word of contradiction or warning that what you are hearing is not the truth.
The question arises, does Bush know he is lying? Maybe he does, but believes it's for a greater good. Or maybe, since no man sees himself as a scoundrel, his hypocrisy is so self-deceptive that he doesn't realize the extent of his mendacity. Corn speculates that Bush is "a binary thinker who views the world in black-and-white terms." (p. 320) Such people inevitably fall into self-deception because the world is not just black and white, and the truth is not, you're either for us or against us. Instead the truth varies according to circumstance and point of view, and there are many shades in-between.
By the way, another even more detailed and forceful book on this exact subject with an almost identical slant is The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)Leads America (2004) by Eric Alterman and Mark Green, which I also highly recommend.
Bottom line: a no-holds-barred look at the mendacious president, a two-faced master of deception and falsification who is doing Machiavelli proud. Our only hope is that the information in this book will somehow trickle down to the larger electorate, and the truth about George W. Bush will become common knowledge so that he may truly be judged on his record come November, 2004.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
The only thing wrong with this book is that there is no chance that more than a minuscule percentage of the electorate will read it, and most of them will be the already knowledgeable.
Journalist David Corn, who writes for The Nation and other publications in addition to having appeared on many TV and radio news shows, including NPR and Fox News, begins the book with the words, "George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small. He has lied directly and by omission."
Corn obviously had to get that off his chest and out in the open since that is something he and all the other reporters who have followed the career of George W. know only too well; and yet it is something they have seldom felt free to say in so many words.
Corn recalls all the major Bush prevarications, from the weapons of mass destruction that weren't there, to the tax cuts that emptied the treasury for his buds, back to the 1990 Harken Energy (a kind of mini-Enron) insider trading scandal that saved George W. from what would have been another business failure. He was on the board of directors of Harken when he sold off his shares two months before the company's stock took a 20% nose dive after its losses became public. Bush denied trading on inside information. Because the SEC consisted of mostly friends of his father, George W. was given a clean bill of heath. Imagine what would have happened to him if his name had been, say, Martha Stewart.
In the final chapter, "Conclusion: How He Gets Away with It (So Far)" Corn attempts to explain why Bush's lies haven't hurt him. He blames the press for not having the gumption (maybe I should just say "guts") to contradict the president or to print the unvarnished truth themselves. Instead of a mealymouthed "Analysts Discount Attack by Iraq" (as in the Washington Post headline had it) or "CIA Warns That a US Attack May Ignite Terror" (as in the New York Times), Corn wonders why they didn't write, "CIA Suggests Bush Misleads Public on Threat from Iraq." Furthermore, before Bush was "elected" and was still campaigning, "Howell Raines, then the editorial page editor of the New York Times, ordered Paul Krugman...a harsh Bush critic, not to use the word 'lie' when assailing Bush's proposals."
Clearly the print media abdicated its responsibility to inform the public. In some cases the reporters refrained from asking hard questions and from writing candid stories because they were afraid they might not get their name called during the next presidential press conference, or because they were afraid of criticism that would come from Bush's supporter. But in other cases the direction to go easy on Bush came from higher management and ownership. The press, quite frankly, in a de facto sense was not, and is not, free. I think this is one of the big problems in this country today, and it is getting worse.
Even worse is the sad state of television news where the programs are under the watchful eyes of not only Rupert Murdoch funkies but also the sponsors of the programs who will not tolerate the president being called a liar. Even worse the news people not only quote Bush's lies, they broadcast him telling the lies as mini infomercials, often without a word of contradiction or warning that what you are hearing is not the truth.
The question arises, does Bush know he is lying? Maybe he does, but believes it's for a greater good. Or maybe, since no man sees himself as a scoundrel, his hypocrisy is so self-deceptive that he doesn't realize the extent of his mendacity. Corn speculates that Bush is "a binary thinker who views the world in black-and-white terms." (p. 320) Such people inevitably fall into self-deception because the world is not just black and white, and the truth is not, you're either for us or against us. Instead the truth varies according to circumstance and point of view, and there are many shades in-between.
By the way, another even more detailed and forceful book on this exact subject with an almost identical slant is The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)Leads America (2004) by Eric Alterman and Mark Green, which I also highly recommend.
Bottom line: a no-holds-barred look at the mendacious president, a two-faced master of deception and falsification who is doing Machiavelli proud. Our only hope is that the information in this book will somehow trickle down to the larger electorate, and the truth about George W. Bush will become common knowledge so that he may truly be judged on his record come November, 2004.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
January 12, 2013
I thought Mr. Corn did a great job of breaking down President Bush's lies and deceptions to the American people. I felt that even though he is a liberal he discussed President Bush's presidency in an objective way. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who would like to know what did President Bush did for our country. It is a little long but he is thinking throughout his book and then answers his questions and makes you think. Bush is a very lucky and smart man who used his lies to get what he wanted and push our country to war without 100% certainty that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He also lied about taxes and how they would affect the different populations of our country. He lied about his time served in the armed forces. He lied about his business decisions and about knowing people in business that he helped out even though the American people got screwed. Bush is a liar. Read this book to find out how Mr. Corn brought a lot of information together to prove it.
Read
May 27, 2010"Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions." Machiavelli explaining why Bush got a second term.
January 21, 2012
I just got sick of reading this - and I really had no reason to keep going. Bush did lie; but so does every politician, really.
February 9, 2013
I thought this book did a good job at exposing the past administration. I hope what Mr. Corn says does not fall and deaf ears, and this does not happen again.
August 21, 2013
about what I thought it would..W is a lucky dumb ass
Read
November 13, 2016Habitual lies as MO
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews