Jan 26, 2008 By Al Owens 5 min read

It’s no longer fun chronicling the misadventures of the Bush Administration. Heck, I even heard Ann Coulter say she’ll be glad when our lame duck president packs up and heads back to Crawford. I saw him give a news conference the other day, and I was surprised to see there were reporters there. A couple even asked questions.

That’s just how anemic the Bush presidency has become. He’s lost the urge to ruffle the feathers of Democrats, and Republicans have grown tired of defending him.

That’s why the latest sharp blow to the administration’s solar plexus will most likely get very little news coverage. So, I feel it’s my duty to bring it up here.

It’s either that or I’d have to figure out some way to defend Ann Coulter’s latest target – John McCain. He’s a Republican. I haven’t completely lost my mind.

So, here now is my last (until next week) finger jab at the president.

There’s this newly released study by an independent group known as The Center for Public Integrity. The center seems to have found very little integrity within the Bush administration’s public relations effort in selling the war in Iraq.

The center stops short of calling the president, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld bald faced liars. It’s just a fraction of an inch short.

The center conducted extensive research, by pouring over the speeches, briefings, interviews and testimony of eight key people connected with the White House between 2001 and 2003.

The results would make Pinocchio appear more trustworthy. They found 935 cases when Bush and Co. told fibs. Not of the borderline, “I did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky,” variety. But the kind of stuff that provides some proof this country is being run by people who should publicly have their mouths washed out with soap.

Some of the falsehoods were succinct, yet spoken with straight-faced certainty. When asked if a tie had existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorists in July of 2002, the obliging former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, replied “Sure.” The Defense Intelligence Agency had already indicated there was no evidence of such a tie. Rumsfeld’s “sure” was a one-word hoax.

Yet, there were times when a one-word answer didn’t fit the game, or should I say the war, plan. The president would then spring into action. He’d hunker himself down behind a microphone during one of his weekly radio addresses to the nation and simply create enemies out of thin air.

Of course the president’s most famous fib came during the January 2003 State of the Union speech, when Bush uttered the 16 words that launched a thousand investigations: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Those words got into that speech, despite the fact that the State Department had already issued an e-mail that said the matter was “probably a hoax.”

Of those 935 false statements found by the center, the president made more than anybody else in the administration – 260 of them. He’s finally come in first at something fair and square.

After the war started, in May of 2003, Bush was still selling the war to Polish TV. He apparently wanted to make sure the people of Poland knew about all of those weapons of mass destruction. “We found biological weapons,” he proclaimed.

The people of Poland, sensing an opportunity to get revenge for decades of Pollack joke abuse, saw an opening.

That’s because those supposed weapons were really labs used for making weather balloons. I can imagine them sitting around Warsaw coffee shops asking each other, “How many American presidents does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not just picking on Bush. Colin Powell shares a lot of the blame, with his 254 public distortions of the truth. He came in second place, while Rumsfeld and ex-White House mouthpiece Ari Fleisher tied for third place at 109 each.

Surprisingly, Dick Cheney made fewer false statements (48) than anybody else in the Bush administration, except ex-White House press secretary Scott McClellan (14), according to the center’s findings.

McClellan, by the way, has already admitted he’d been sent out to face reporters with misinformation about “Scooter” Libby’s involvement in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame that he knew wasn’t true. That admission is not included in the center’s findings. It’s a separate lie.

Although the president’s job approval ratings are somewhere between those of Osama Bin Laden’s and the plague, he still has his supporters. They’ll tell you that the research doesn’t prove anything. That both Democrats and Republicans had echoed the same lies during the run-up to the war.

But those same Bush supporters probably won’t go near the most troubling aspects of the center’s research.

It’s the graph that accompanied the report that shows that the administration’s lies spiked at certain key times.

When a resolution was sent to Congress that would authorize an invasion of Iraq, the administration’s lies peaked.

When the coalition forces began its push toward Baghdad, the administration’s lies peaked again.

But most importantly, when Colin Powell went before the United Nations with what was false information, the lies hit an all time high.

It was then the entire world had been fed the same false propaganda that had – until that point – only shoved down the throats of the American people.

Edward A. Owens of Uniontown is Webmaster of “Red Raider Nation: Where Champions Live.” E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net