Liars All

The gums of August are flapping like mad. Hot air from slips to outright lies (with evasions holding the middle) is everywhere. Starting from the top is the Russian cosmonaut marriage flap. Yuri Malenchenko, 41, commander of the current International Space Station mission tied the knot with naturalized American Ekaterina Dmitriev, 27. He was up there, she down at NASA in Houston. The vows took place via the radio.

Their little whopper? They snuck their plans over on NASA and the Ruskies. And both bureacracies seemed, for reasons that are strange at best, to be concerned over security. Thought that was supposed to be the bride’s job. Besides, you'd figure the space program could use a bit of upbeat publicity.

In lieu of best wishes, Russian Space Agency spokesman, Sergei Gorbunov told AP , "He wants it, and he will have it - that's his problem."

And speaking of Houston, there’s Crawford. There, you can move from the little lies of love to the giant whoppers of governance. Cause that’s where the President is hip deep in “donor maintenance,” a medium whopper that means thanking the boys for the $170 million raised for the primaries he won’t use it for (he’s running unopposed).

It’s also a good chance to take a month-long rest where it is 106 degrees after a hard year of lying about Iraq (no WMDs, trailer claims bogus, no nuke deal in Africa, etc.). That means all those SOBs from the White House press corps get to stand around in the heat like fools waiting for the latest spin from the our jet-jockey President.

But Bush can’t rest, as pre-emption in now the rule—in war, writs of habeas corpus, and even attacking your allies, like Colin Powell, who knew better than the rest of those draft dodgers and chicken hawks about how to fight terrorists from day one. So it’s been a quick denial of the obvious, that Powell is on the outs with the ideologues who have mired us in the sand of the Middle East.

True, Bush invited Powell to lunch. But that hardly makes up for the neo-con inspired attacks on Powell that recently surfaced and suggested he was too soft to play on the same team as the ideological, inexperienced warmongers who decide which brave soldiers we put in the harm’s way they assiduously avoided.

The jet-jockey’s brave invitation certainly paled compared to the President’s lavish praise for obvious national security liar Condi Rice.

In fact, Dick Cheney better start worrying about his job. Rice appears destined for an even bigger role: “A testy Bush replied that Rice was ‘an honest person, fabulous and America is lucky to have her service.’” (For her side of the Africa uranium fiasco, courtesy official government mouth-piece FOXNews.com.)

That said, Cheney won’t have to worry too much about life after being VP. It's not like he'll get indicted for Halliburton shenanigans or anything. After all, the three of them (Bush, Rice and the VP) are up to their eyeballs in the earlier Angolagate affair, and we wouldn’t want that popping up…some lies are best forgotten, eh?

And now, speaking of preemption, with the backdrop of the roasted Arizona fire areas behind him, the First Jet-Jockey proposes a preemptive campaign for our wilderness areas. Personally, I am all for whatever works to manage the forests, and there is plenty of room to debate leaving them alone or using more management, controlled burns, etc. to keep them healthy. But to use the devastation as an excuse to let loggers take taxpayers’ trees and not even pay a fair price for them…well that’s just a real hot summertime kind of lying, ain’t it?
¶ 11:07 AM