This is important – I can’t begin to emphasize how important it is. Joe Biden, our VP, is a blowhard – I think we can all see that. He gets on a roll, and Lord only knows what follows. So he made up this oval office conversation with George W. Bush that went as follows, on CNN:
… President Bush once told him in the Oval Office, “‘Well, Joe, I’m a leader,” and Biden responded: “Mr. President, turn around and look behind you. No one is following.”
Yeah, that happened. Bush often parried and engaged in repertoire with people he disagreed with, so he likely opened himself up like that to Biden. Righto.
Here’s Karl Rove in response:
“I hate to say this, but he’s a serial exaggerator. If I was being unkind I would say liar. But it is a habit he ought to drop. … You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the Vice President of the United States. There were few presidents who spend hours with somebody in the Oval Office, particularly with a blowhard like Joe Biden was”.
Here’s why this is important: Politicians have to be honest with us. That’s one of the important changes we made last November – no more lying! Now Rove never lied to us when he was Bush’s Brain, and Dick Cheney, as Vice President, certainly set a high bar, and hundreds of thousands of people did not die in part because Karl Rove and Cheney and others orchestrated the official lying that never went on anyway. So he doesn’t have any blood on his hands at all. That’s a given. That’s why he’s a prominent spokesman on FOX. He’s trustable.
And anyway, lying is not important, even if it had happened (it didn’t), when it is only foreigners who would have to pay the price if anyone had lied, which they didn’t.
But this … this is important. Joe Biden might be telling us a lie about a passing conversation involving only personal vanity.
We have our priorities straight. ‘Bout time.
In other minor news notes, Attorney General Eric Holder has decided that while former Senator Ted Stevens, plainly guilty, can walk, former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, maliciously imprisoned by Karl Rove, can rot.
Piece of Mindful 
Don’t let the facts get it the way of the Steven’s case, Mark.
>>A federal judge focused scrutiny yesterday on a small Justice Department unit assigned to root out corruption when he dismissed the conviction of former senator Ted Stevens and appointed an outside lawyer to investigate allegations of misconduct by prosecutors.
The rare move to turn the investigation on the prosecutors themselves puts six federal lawyers, accused of mishandling evidence and witnesses, in the awkward position of becoming potential defendants in a criminal trial. It also creates a challenge for the Obama administration and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who must put a tainted prosecution behind him as he tries to remake the reputation of his department, which has been troubled in recent years.
The Justice Department would usually examine such accusations internally. But U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said yesterday that he has no faith in such an investigation after seeing so much “shocking and disturbing” behavior by the government.
“In 25 years on the bench, I have never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I have seen in this case,” he said.<<
Via Washington Post.
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And how ironic. Wouldn’t your statement about hundreds of thousands of people dieing be a proven lie?
Looks like everyone’s lying.
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You can have Stevens, Swede. He’ll be dead soon anyway, and Alaska has a better senator now than before, so it seems. And – he’s a one-termer, so he can pretty much do the right thing now and then.
Have you followed the Seigelman case?
And “proven lie”, my ass. My f****** ass! Who’s got more to gain by lying about deaths – the US Government, or independent researchers?
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I’m trying to wrap my head around this.
The media lies.
Govt lies.
Independent researchers lie.
Bush lies(both).
Clinton lies.
Obama Lies.
Reagan lies.
Every one who disagrees with you, lies.
So tell me Mark, give your list of truth tellers. Would they include the Blogs you have listed on the right side of the page?
And finally, if all politicians lie, then why the hell is your solution, of giving the liars more power, the best solution?
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Swede – you’re a supposedly worldly man, yet know very little of how it works. It’s not that people want to lie – it’s that lying is easier and more profitable than telling the truth. With the Bush Administration and Iraq, telling the truth would have meant no invasion.
The “government” is a huge apparatus, much of comprised of people doing their jobs and trying to do good by us. But corporate influence undermines much of it, so that FDA can’t say what is true, DOE can’t say what is true – DOD never tells the truth as a matater of policy.
Media is comprised of many good people, but it is constrained by ownership and advertising to give only one side of events. Things that are true often slip by, usually in times of crisis – fir instance, during 9/11 and Katrina, reporting was excellent. But usually not.
Obama – the presidency itself – is a mirror onto which we project our hopes and aspirations. But he is constrained by forces in our society that are very powerful, perhaps more powerful than the government itself. See how he is giving Wall Street everything it wants. But it would be very bad for us to know that he i snot in charge, so we all choose to live the lies.
Reagan never consciously lied, in my opinion. He was a very low-level intelligence, and usually believed the things he read, part of his charm.
You don’t lie. You disagree with me. Are you getting this? People lie because we live lies. You and I don’t have to live lies. If I worked for an oil company now, I’s have to use a pseudonym, or worse yet, submerge my thought processes to the people who signed my paycheck. I’m very lucky. I have no reason to lie.
You?
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Speaking of which, your old boss Tom wrote an interesting letter to the Gaxette. Its in the Sat edition.
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Tom was never my boss. I was a contractor. It’s not a bad article, but he doesn’t understand tax law very well. The depletion allowance and the IDC write-off go hand-in-hand. If depletion was “like depreciation”, as he says, then there would be no IDC write off, and depletion would be used to recover IDC. As it is, there is no underlying cost basis for a well – it’s all been written off, and in addition to that, they still get to write off 15% of their income.
Looks like welfare to me. But Tom doesn’t see it that way, since we’re talking about his pocketbook. Typical.
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