The White House B.S. Interval Is Shrinking

Remember President Bush’s good old days when he could blatantly lie to the American public and no one in the media would even consider challenging him? To question the wisdom of the war in Iraq prior to the invasion could lead to a dismissal if the piece even made it to print. I had two columns for the Portland Tribune several weeks before the war started, questioning what was about to take place, and I was told they led to my getting canned. It would be years before any real challenge to the lies about Iraq was attempted.
The key thing is that every new explanation the White House gave was also bullshit and their propaganda machine would shovel the new pile for as long as they could. “We know where the weapons of mass destruction are”, became “We had bad intelligence” which has finally settled into the truth: “We deliberately lied about the intelligence.”
Lately the interval between the lie and the need for a new lie, has collapsed to near zero. For example, the revelations about keeping phone records to spot terrorist patterns has lasted around a day. It is now reported that the White House was using the phone records to spy on reporters as part of leak investigations. The purpose is chilling: To quell dissent and allow the White House lies to go unchallenged. There will no doubt be a fancy new lie about what they’re doing but at this point they’re running in place and we’re through the Looking Glass. Unfortunately, where we’ve landed is a dictatorship with little or no interest in the rule of law.

The Blotter