Available now from a file-sharing service near you, or by sending $14.95 to TruthUncovered.com, or by having attended a MoveOn.org house party last Sunday, is a new documentary titled, “Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War.” I just finished watching it, and it’s powerful stuff.

It isn’t powerful because it makes any blockbuster revelations. It’s powerful because it gathers together, in one telling, a simple, direct summary of the deceptions with which Bush and his handlers led the country to war.

There’s nothing in the video, I’m pretty sure, that hasn’t been reported already. But pulled together like this, it’s just incredibly damning. There’s something truly shocking about watching the footage from before the war, as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and Wolfowitz present a coordinated storyline that simply falls apart in the light of subsequent events.

Let’s be clear about what this is. This is a president being caught red-handed in the act of lying. In that sense it’s reminiscent of Clinton’s lying about Monica Lewinsky. But it’s fundamentally different.

Clinton’s Lewinsky lies were bad. The President abused the power of his office to get blowjobs from an intern (and almost certainly was doing lots more of the same sort of thing — still is, for all I know). Then he lied about it under oath (yes, it was a pretty pathetic witchhunt that cornered him into doing so, but that’s a side issue). He then got in front of the TV cameras and waggled his bent forefinger at the nation and said, “I didn’t have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”

And because she kept a dress stained with presidential semen, we all know exactly what he was doing when he did that. He was lying. Liar, liar, liar. You lied to us, Bill Clinton. You took the power of your office and the trust of the American people and your God-given talent for making people like and believe you and squandered it all on a pathetic effort to cover up a tawdry affair. And got caught.

Among the many people your betrayal harmed was your vice president, who lost his opportunity to succeed you in significant part because of the public’s revulsion at your moral failings. And all the evils of the Bush presidency followed directly from that, which is really quite a lot for you to answer for.

But Bush’s lies are a different sort of animal. Where Clinton’s lies were personal and petty, aimed at getting him some illicit tail while continuing to maintain a fiction of personal morality, Bush’s lies led directly to the death and maiming of thousands of innocent people. This war should never have been fought, and will ultimately achieve nothing good for anyone (with the possible exception of a small cadre of well-connected corporations and their shareholders). It will increase terror, rather than reducing it. It will make our nation more, rather than less, vulnerable. It will ultimately be recognized, as with the Vietnam war before it, as a colossal national tragedy, a waste, a mistake.

Bush went to war casually, disdainfully. His handlers orchestrated a campaign of coordinated lies designed to frighten the American people into going along with the pre-emptive invasion of a country that represented no real threat to them.

This is the source of the anger fueling the Dean campaign. It isn’t the kind of irrational, reflexive hate that gave us Clinton-murdered-Vince-Foster screeds from the right wing. This is justified outrage at real murder on a massive scale, at a systematic, craven, soulless debauching of the principles that underlie everything worthy about this country.

Somewhere out there is a voter who hasn’t decided yet who she is going to vote for. She doesn’t read newspapers, doesn’t watch Sunday talk shows, and doesn’t blog obsessively about politics. But she’s registered, and she takes her civic duty seriously. And sometime between now and next November she’s going to watch some television: some campaign ads, a few convention speeches, and maybe a debate or two. And she’s going to ask herself, which of these two men do I trust to run the country for the next four years?

On TV (and, I’m willing to believe, in person) Howard Dean comes off as an honest man. He sounds tough-minded but fair. He doesn’t waffle; he analyzes the facts of the situation, and speaks his mind. When he makes a mistake, he acknowledges it.

I think a lot of this comes from his professional training as a doctor. Doctors have to make tough decisions based on murky data, and they have to do it all the time. Sometimes those decisions turn out to be wrong; when that happens they have to deal with the consequences. They have to figure out what went wrong, fix it if possible, and move on.

I think it would be really, really hard to succeed as a doctor using a George W. Bush approach. You can’t party your way through a good med school. You can’t get well-connected patrons to bail you out when your professional decision-making proves inadequate. The overhead associated with maintaining a fictional façade of competence is just too high for a doctor. In the end, to succeed as a doctor, you pretty much just have to be competent. And achieving and maintaining that competence requires a fundamental degree of honesty, both with the outside world and with yourself, that George Bush simply doesn’t have.

In this sense, Howard Dean is the anti-Bush. Just as Carter was chosen to correct the perceived failings of Nixon, Reagan to correct the perceived failings of Carter, and Clinton to correct the perceived failings of Bush’s father, Dean will be chosen to correct the perceived failings of Bush.

Those failings of Bush are very much on display in this video.

This entry was posted by jbc on Wednesday, December 10th, 2003 at 1:33 am and is filed under the_usa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.