Security Square

In response to a report card, delivered by former members of the 9/11 commission, on the performance of the White House regarding counterterrorism efforts, the White House fought back, as it always does, with a PR campaign. Indeed, the bipartisan panel of former 9/11 commissioners gave the White House a whole lot of F's and D's on a variety of issues. This was viewed as yet another gut punch on the Hill and the White House scrambled to produce a "fact sheet" to counter the criticisms.

Now, I'm looking at this fact sheet and can find little in the way of anything remotely resembling what most people would call "facts." To be sure, there are a lot of claims on the page, many of which are disputed directly by the panel report itself. I don't mean to harp on the usual empty rhetoric that we usually and often see wending its way along Pennsylvania Avenue, but this first claim really was striking, both for its ostentatious irrelavance in addressing the report's findings and its glaring contradiction with the observed behaviour of Bush:

President Bush's Top Priority Is The Safety And Security Of The American People

Wow. That's ballsy. Because I just can't seem to shake the image of Bush strumming that presidential guitar while waters were rising and bodies were bobbing in the fetid pool that New Orleans had become. You'd think they would shy away from such obvious falsehoods.

Then again, we're dealing with a White House that says it needs to have an open torture policy but that torture just won't happen. We're dealing with an adminstration whose agents say that extraordinary rendition and torture "save lives." In the grander scheme of things, claims about Bush's top priority are fairly innocuous and, for the cynical among us, rather amusing. I just wish the "amusing" contradictions this White House constantly engages itself in weren't so deadly to the rest of the world.