Dispelling Myths About George Bush; Thanks in large part to the Internet, the Bush-bashing extremists have launched a global smear campaign that is feeding the masses a steady diet of misinformation

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 1, 2004

Byline: J. Michael Waller, INSIGHT

President George W. Bush was a "deserter" from the U.S. military, claims filmmaker Michael Moore. Worse, says Democrat Party chief Terry McAuliffe: "George Bush never served in our military in our country." And not only that, adds McAuliffe, he went AWOL. Such smears of the president, transparently filled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, are being floated everywhere by his political opponents at the start of what promises to be a vicious campaign.

In another era such rumors and conspiracy theories raised against a sitting president would have been ignored as the raving of cranks. But the Internet has leveled the playing field between editors of reputable media and lone quacks, allowing political hucksters to flood the information market with factoids and distortions that have injected new harshness and cynicism into the presidential re-election campaign. Obsessive liar. Wartime chicken. Heir to a Nazi fortune. Tool of the Jews.

Some of the more bizarre rumors got legs when senior political figures who certainly know better picked up lunatic themes and mainstreamed them for public discourse. Such extreme, vitriolic and false allegations gained political cover last summer when billionaire George Soros and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) accused the president of everything but treason for having invaded Iraq and declared the ousting of Saddam Hussein to have been a fraud. The spores of discontent found fertile ground among angry and near-demoralized liberals and leftists who convinced themselves that Bush stole the 2000 presidential election in criminal collusion with the justices of the Supreme Court and therefore view him as illegitimate and a usurper. This sort of thing gained traction when Soros and other wealthy Bush-haters pumped millions of dollars into febrile Websites and strident TV ads [see "Soros Resolves to Bring Bush Down," Dec. 9-22, 2003]. This extremism pushed the envelope of political discourse from expressing legitimate policy differences to madcap ad hominem attacks aimed at undermining public support for what began as a bipartisan war on terrorism.

Some political scientists are concerned that anti-Bush politicization of the war on terror seems to be based on a deliberate plan to damage the war effort in ways similar to the cultural fragging that dashed the will of U.S. leaders to win the war in Vietnam, making it impossible to wage a coherent long-term effort against terrorists and their sponsors and repeating the Vietnik days of rage with more bombing and terrorism in American streets. Observers are starting to notice that many of those spreading false accusations against Bush began their activist careers in the pro-Hanoi movement of the 1960s [see cover story, p.18].

Thanks to Internet technology, the domestic political campaign being led against Bush by the Democratic extremists has gone global, fueling anti-U.S. groups abroad with a steady, high-carb diet of misinformation and willful disinformation, turbocharging a global electronic echo chamber that analysts say is encouraging hatred of the nation and diminishing U.S. leadership in the war effort by casting doubts on the most innocuous of administration statements and policies. The anti-Bush Websites in the United States have been linked to hundreds of similar sites around the world and form part of a global anti-American network of electronic activists. A French site, www.antibush.fr.fm, links to a set of "anti-U.S.A." Websites, including the "U.S.A. Haters Homepage," a Russian site called "I Hate U.S.A.," and another devoted to what it calls "Anti-U.S.A. News From the World." A German anti-Bush site taking its cues from the Democratic extremists features portals called "Anti-America" and "Anti-U.S.A. Groups" and "F--k U.S.A."

The most persistent allegation is that the president of the United States and the leaders of his national-security team are pathological liars. The central inquisitors appear to be the Soros-funded Website MoveOn.org and editors of The Nation magazine, especially its Washington editor, David Corn, who authored a screed called The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception.

Corn offers up a crib full of complaints against the president, which the White House and Republican National Committee have simply ignored. And never mind that Corn's worst tirades against the president, linked from MoveOn.org, are not "lies" at all, but simply presidential statements that the testy Corn happens not to like. Listing Bush's top-10 most outrageous "lies" from the hundreds he says he has documented, Corn reveals that his modus operandi is to twist every policy disagreement into a falsehood.

Here are some of the president's 10 worst lies, according to Corn:

* Bush's 2000 campaign theme, "It's time to restore honor and integrity to the White House."

* "I'm a uniter, not a divider."

* "My [tax] plan unlocks the door to the middle class of millions of hardworking Americans."

* "We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of September the 11th."