Reading notes

AlterNet: John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton:

“I take personal responsibility for everything I say, of course. Absolutely,” declared President Bush during his most recent news conference. And yet weeks of debate and discussion went into parsing a mere sixteen words from Bush’s State of the Union speech in which he falsely claimed to have knowledge that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium in Niger. …

The subtle spin behind all this talk about a mere 16 words was the insinuation that everyone is making a mountain out of a molehill. Why make such a big deal, they implied, over a single sentence in which the president may have misspoken.

The reality is that the Bush administration’s phony claims about Iraq go well beyond those mere 16 words in the State of the Union address. With respect to weapons of mass destruction alone, those falsehoods included the following:

<list of other lies and distortions …>

Bush claims to “take responsibility” for his words, but taking responsibility means facing the consequences, and thus far the Bush administration has suffered no consequences whatsoever. The people who have experienced the consequences of Bush’s many deceptions are the U.S. soldiers who remain targets of daily attack inside Iraq, the Iraqi people themselves, and of course the American taxpayers who are footing the bill for it all. Everyone, it seems, is expected to shoulder some of the burden of responsibility for the President’s words, except for Bush himself.