When Lies Kill

So it was leaked this week that all the time W was selling us The Big Lie – that his war in Iraq was “making us safer at home” – his intelligence agencies were telling him the exact opposite. And with a smarmy, cocksure smirk plastered across his dim-witted visage, he continued to lie to us on a daily basis in high-definition Technicolor.

And not just passively, or when he was caught flat-footed and an untruth slipped out before he could catch it. No, he did a whole series of high-profile speeches and press events just in the last couple weeks whose sole purpose was to sell his Big Lie to us.

Everybody lies sometimes. I myself have said shit in the past to get laid, for instance, that would make Diogenes roll over in his grave.

For that matter, Bill Clinton lied to the country when he was President too, wagging his index finger and swearing he didn’t frolic with the zaftig intern. Here’s why I have a bigger problem with Bush’s five-years-and-counting litany of lies (from WMDs to Heckofajob Brownie to Making Us Safer At Home) than Clinton’s lie: Clinton’s lie did not come with a body-count.

Bush’s lies have cost America the lives of over 2,600 of our young men and women (not to mention the thousands maimed for life), and untold scores of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives, with no end in sight, according to his own generals on the ground in Iraq.

Clinton’s lie cost us… an embarrassing kangaroo court impeachment fiasco.

On the Pinocchio Scale of 1 to 10, the current President’s lies go to eleven. No wonder he’s so anxious to cast aside the restrictions of the Geneva Conventions – any war criminal in his position would be.