Jon Keller has nominated his top five list of all-time political whoppers. Although Dick Cheney makes an appearance, President Bush is strangely absent. To rectify that, the crack staff at Media Nation has been hard at work for the past 12 or 13 minutes, putting together an all-Bush edition.
We think this holds up well even against such classics as “I am not a crook” (Richard Nixon) and “Last night I announced to the American people that the North Vietnamese regime had conducted further deliberate attacks against U.S. naval vessels operating in international waters” (Lyndon Johnson). But we’ll let you be the judge.
Here are our top five Bush whoppers, in chronological order. We realize we could have chosen many, many more.
1. “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” (Jan. 23, 2003)
2. “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.” (May 1, 2003)
3. “There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.” (July 2, 2003)
4. “[W]e are fighting terrorists in Iraq so that we will not have to face them and fight them in the streets of our own cities.” (Oct. 3, 2003)
5. “We do not torture.” (Nov. 7, 2005)