Why do all U.S. Presidents lie? It seems to come with the oath of office. Like President Lyndon Johnson’s promise to the American people in July,1964 —”We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” Eleven months later he sent 100,000 troops to Vietnam and authorized an additional 100,000 in 1966. In all 1.7 million troops were sent to Vietnam. 58,000 of them never came home. Who can ever forget President George W. Bush telling the American people with a straight face that Iraq had a “massive stockpile” of biological weapons. Vice President Cheney followed that whopper up with one of his own —”Simply stated, there’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” A pack of lies but they served their purpose — winning public buy-in for the Iraq war which was the next war on the empire’s to-do list. It doesn’t matter whether presidents are democrats or republicans. War is bipartisan. Even the now venerated human rights activist and ex-president Jimmy Carter deliberately propagated lies that led to America’s favorite pastime: war. His CIA bankrolled Muslim extremist groups (collectively known as the Mujahideen) which later came back to bite the U.S. in the form of terrorists with their sights set on America, including Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, Taliban leader Mullah Omar, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the “Butcher of Fallujah,” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It’s an old story and the fallout is always further bloodshed. Americans are the ultimate losers. As lies become truth and truth goes the way of whalebone corsets, what is left is an empire ludicrously out of touch and out of time. Check out “U.S. Presidents Lying Their Way into Forever Wars.”
