Restoring Integrity to the White House

Cynthia Tucker tells it like it is:

As a candidate, President Bush pledged to restore integrity to the White House. Against the backdrop of President Clinton's repeated lies about a sordid adulterous affair, Bush ran on his claims to be a man of strong character -- a politician of plain speaking and straight talk. He wouldn't lie to us.

Yet, this administration has produced more dissembling and distortion, more fabrications and pseudo-facts, than any White House in recent memory -- Richard Nixon's included. They lie brazenly and repeatedly, refusing to back down even when caught in the web of their own contradictions.

The falsehoods aren't limited to Iraq. In domestic policy, Bush administration officials have shaded the truth, spread lies, and even threatened underlings who believed in a moral obligation to honesty.

As just one example, the chief Medicare actuary, Richard S. Foster, has said his supervisor, Thomas Scully (who recently joined an Atlanta-based law firm that lobbies on behalf of hospitals and drug companies), threatened to fire him if Foster revealed to Congress the true costs of the proposed prescription drug benefit for Medicare. While the administration was ramming the costly benefit through Congress -- promising that its price would be no more than $400 billion over 10 years -- Foster had calculated the actual costs at between $500 billion and $600 billion, figures the White House disclosed after the bill passed.

But there is no area that better demonstrates the Orwellian quality of the Bush administration -- its insistence that black is white, up is down, war is peace -- than its deceptions about Iraq. Testimony under oath before the Sept. 11 commission and the Iraq uprising make increasingly clear that the central underpinning of the president's re-election campaign -- that he has conducted a tough-minded war on terror -- stands the truth on its head. . . .

The entire premise of the Bush presidency -- that he is a man of principle, of honor, of candor -- is crumbling. The chaos engulfing Iraq is not just the result of guileless miscalculations. It is the inevitable outcome of a policy built on mendacity.